How Mastercard Just Unlocked The $1 Trillion Identity Gold Rush with Terence Kwok

Transcript

you as a user gets to connect and own this data so that nobody ever gets to see it without your permission, right? And then the third thing which is interesting is we want to make sure that this is this almost becomes a complete data enrichment platform. These teams either get our data and they're going to try to monetize and profit off of it or we have custody over our own data and we can choose what we do with it. But we're kind of running into a headway here where OpenAI is set to go public [music] at a trillion dollar valuation, $1 trillion IPO. Welcome back to the rollup. This is your home to learn from the biggest guests, the brightest minds at the tip of innovation.

>> Our goal is to help spread the collective knowledge of everyone in our community. >> We are breaking crypto out of its echo chamber and taking it to the real world. >> Sit back, relax, and enjoy it. [music] Alrighty guys, we are live from SmartCon. Welcome back to AI Supercycle. This is episode number nine. We have Terren Quark who is building the human layer for web 3. Again, AI Supercycle is brought to you guys by Near. Check out Near.ai for their private chat product.

And of course again we have Terrence today joining us the co-founder of Humanity Protocol bringing this kind of human centric world to this AI world that we're bringing in today. We're live from New York City. Terrence, good >> so much for calling in Terrence. It's an absolute pleasure. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Wish I were in New York. >> Yeah. Yeah, man. Today was a big day for humanity. Um, you guys have just announced a partnership with Mastercard. I'd like to get into that, but I think before we do, maybe you could just paint this picture of this kind of futuristic a AI agentic world that we're entering in when it comes to payments, when it

comes to identity, and really kind of where humanity protocol fits in and just generally what your thesis is. >> Sure. Uh, so I think, you know, I I'm I'm a consumer of AI. I use strategy PT, I use Grock, I use all this stuff every day. Um I think there there's a a lot of people in tech uh are very excited about the possibilities um for AI uh for AI in the traditional tech world or even in the blockchain space. But I think for us we are trying to create infrastructure that solves some of the problems um that will come out because of AI. Right? If you look at, you know, the last couple years, it's already becoming very

difficult for us to differentiate online what is a human being and what's not. Um, with text, it's it's pretty much impossible. Uh, you know, bot accounts on social media, on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, um, it's already impossible to tell. Um, and then recently with deep fake photos, images, you know, Sora, um, it's it's becoming impossible to, uh, to tell whether essentially something is is a person or not, something is real or not. Um, and so what we're trying to do with humanity protocol is essentially leveraging blockchain uh to create a trust layer for the internet, not just necessarily for web 3, but for the entire, you know, for the entire internet world. Um and the the premise for us is you know fi

starting with figuring out whether somebody is a human being or not. Uh but using that as a basis for verifying many different attributes of a human being. So it might be your education, it might be your employment status, KYC identity, national uh nationality. Um, and then as as Andy mentioned uh just a couple hours ago, we we announced a big partnership with Mastercard where uh they're issuing banking credentials on humanity. So there's the ability for people to even verify their off-chain assets uh you know your credit score, how many shares of Tesla you own in your bro brokerage account. All of this done in a privacy preserving way such that ultimately the

you the data uh own you know is is is owned and controlled by the users themselves. um and they get to share with whoever they want whenever they want uh in a privacy preserving way. Um so that that's that's sort of what we're doing. And the reason why we think this is important is because I don't think enough people think about sort of when AI is everywhere. Uh the the challenges of making sure that uh people are telling the truth, a lot of people are already not telling the truth online. Um it's pretty sorry, give me a second.

It's uh it's pretty trivial. uh to it's pretty trivial to uh to create a social media account, LinkedIn account, put whatever the hell you want on there. So, it's it's already very difficult to verify things, right? Yeah. Um and then beyond beyond that, right, we think when you when you have AI agents roaming around, how do you allow these AI agents, even if you give them permission to access uh some of this data in a in a in a permissioned way? Um, you know, these are all the things that we're trying to solve for.

>> Yeah, >> my camera's a little bit >> No, you're all good. >> You're good, Terrence. Um, so yesterday we had uh Adrien Wall uh who is speaking to the UN about uh digital sovereignty uh and he's been a real big proponent of this and he kind of spoke about taking back control of our data. you know, he he really helped to explain the why why this is important, how big data companies are profiting off of our data, not kicking back anything back to to the people who rightfully own that data, us as the individuals. It it's really you guys at humanity that are doing that are that are solving the how, right? the technology and the infrastructure that is being put into place ultimately to help uh reconfigure the digital

sovereignty of the world and re uh reestablish our data in the rightful owners. Could you talk about how uh h how this partnership with Mastercard ultimately gives people their data back? Um how how do we open up the data flow so that we have custody of our own our own data rather than um you know just opening up permission uh kind of giving giving these companies permission to access our data and then they you know they get a foot in the door and they get access to everything. Is it piece by piece? How do how do we how do we make sure that you know we custody our own data and then what once we have it what what can we do with it? What what does this unlock for the end user?

>> Yeah. So I I I think there there are two two things that we're solving for, right? Uh and I mentioned for humanity where we're doing a bunch of different types of credentials. So we're solving we're solving for two things, right? Number one is how do we ensure that it is uh somebody's telling the truth? If I tell you that I have a million bucks, um you know, how how how can you know that that that's that's uh that's real. Um that's number one. And number two is provided that I do have a million bucks, how do I allow third parties to access this information um in a verifiable way without me oversharing things? Right? I might I might just want you to know that it's a true or false statement that I have a million bucks in the bank account, not necessarily the exact amount that I have

or other pieces of information that comes with, you know, me screenshotting a bank statement of which, you know, back to the whole truth piece. I could easily photoshop that also, right? Right. So what we're creating is essentially uh a network where trusted parties for example Mastercard maybe it's your university maybe it's the company that you work for can act as identity validators to issue credentials so that certain pieces of information are uh verified to be true encrypted stuck onto the blockchain and then ultimately me as the human being uh I get to share this information uh peacemeal with whoever I want and that's

done through APIs, SDKs. We're rolling out smart contracts across a number of different blockchains um for applications to be able to to make use of this, right? And in the web 3 space, right? like you get to you get to be able to prove for example you're not sectioned your KYCed uh maybe it's you know unlocking uh under collateralized loans non personal loans uh without necessarily putting you know uh collateral because I prove that I have x amount of money in in the bank and these credentials we can make sure that it's refreshed uh in real time right or even looking at you know the RWA space looking at stable coin payments a lot of you know countries are looking regul ated uh rails for stable coins, right?

And a lot of the uh a lot of the RD R RWA platforms right now still going through traditional KYC routes, right? What if we could actually have reusable credentials simply saying, "Hey, you know what? Terren is KYC already with JP Morgan. Um and so, you know, we trust that he's not sanctioned and uh you know, if if need be, we can get that information from him uh you know, uh whenever we want, right?" So, so that sort of thing. And this actually also translates into into the web two world, right? Where you know there are many different situations where somebody has to prove uh where they went to school.

Currently the way you do it is you have to have a company and call up your university, ask them to issue graduation uh certificate officially. That takes a couple weeks, couple hundred. What if you know there's a a reusable credential saying that you know Terrence actually went to this university, graduated with this GPA, right? or you know for example maybe it's even asset proofs when you're renting a new apartment you have to prove how much money you have or your income statements right now there are two problems with that number one it's very cumbersome number two you're sh oversharing on a lot of information that you might not want to share or need to share and number three what you're sharing if you're malicious might not even be true because you could just photoshop and create a fake statement right so so we're solving for sort of

the access uh problem we're solving for the uh the convenience problem as well as we're solving for, you know, truth. >> Relay, low fees, lightning speed, and the power of multi-chain at [music] your fingertips. Instant multi-chain payments. Choose any token on any chain. 75 plus network supported. More than 5 million users, 8 billion plus volume processed, 70 million plus transactions. Fast, reliable, everywhere. Start swapping today only on Relay. The wait [music] is over. The Talis test net is live. Be part of the revolution. Join now at testnet.talis.network. [music] Habachi provable. Trade pers with speed

and security. Earn rewards. Visit [music] hibachi.xyz. Trading on fire. And the platform that you guys have to help bolster this truth and bolster this is is human ID, right? This is kind of the core technology piece of humanity protocol uh that you've integrated into Mastercard. Um a little bit more about this partnership. You you guys integrated into um Mastercard's open finance connectivity platform. Could you just describe what the integration process was like? You know, when you were kind of going through the early innings of this partnership with Mastercard? We heard yesterday actually, you know, when some of these institutional partnerships

happen, it's almost like a consulting relationship. you're coming in, you're teaching the company about uh you know what decentralized identity can provide to them. Is that how this started? Do you guys help enable and and help teach Mastercard some of the some of the primitives that are available on chain and then start to show them the technology and show them what's possible? Maybe you could just tell the story and walk us through the steps of closing a massive institutional partnership with Mastercard. >> So, this just took a long time, right? I mean it took uh it took almost like a year of uh of discussions and and and uh integrations and developments. I mean Mastercard historically people know them for their uh credit card business, right? But obviously there's u there

open finance sort of arm of the of the company essentially facilitates data sharing between banks. >> So uh right now uh for the human ID if you actually go to our web app which is app.humanity.org um and sign up for an account. Uh Annie, I think you have an account already. So, if you actually literally go to go to the site, um what you'll see is the ability for you to connect any bank uh starting with the US. We're starting with the US right now and then we're going to be expanding into Europe and then the rest of the world. uh over the coming months, you will already be able to uh connect any through the Mastercard uh data connectivity platform, any bank uh in the US and be able to prove a

number of different things, right? Maybe it's even as simple as proving that you have uh over x amount of dollars in in your account. Um and so what what is happening there is then automatically once you do that uh a credential is being issued on humanity protocol uh and signed by Mastercard to know to verify that this credential is true. Um and then through zero knowledge proofs uh with our SDKs and APIs a third party will be able to ask you for permission to check it to check against that information. And for us, the ambition with the with the human ID is to say down the road, imagine it's not, you know, a Facebook login or a Google, you know, a Facebook connect or Google

login, you know, where uh where you're signing up into websites and applications and whatnot. We ultimately want to build out sort of a human ID. But the difference between a human ID and a Facebook connect is that the information number one is verifiably true because there are you know these are these are credentials being issued by trusted parties. Um number two is that you as a user gets to connect and own this data so that nobody ever gets to see it without your permission. Right? And then the third thing which is interesting is we want to make sure that this is this almost becomes a complete data enrichment platform. Right? So instead of just you know maybe it's a Facebook connect where they get an application might just get your your

email or your name um in this case uh imagine an application that even might say hey you know what uh if you prove that you're a millionaire or if you go prove that you are a Maria Bonboy member uh platinum status uh you get certain discounts um because you've shared this information right so I earlier I was mentioning there's there's sort of fraud prevention preventing scams all that sort of as one of the use cases. But down the road, we see ourselves as actually building a decentralized identity graph where everybody gets to own and control all the data that is verified about them and they get to share it whether it's because they need it for from from regulatory perspective or maybe it's because they're incentivized to share it because they

might get you know uh discounts, deals, etc. etc. >> Yeah. Yeah. And back to back to what you were asking in terms of you know sort of the Mascard thing. I think uh it took took quite a fair while. You know historically they've uh on on on the data on the data side of their uh of their company. They haven't worked with any uh blockchain companies before. Historically it's mainly working with different sort of uh banks for uh for sharing information. uh maybe it's other other other financial institutions um in order for uh for these institutions to be able to check for user data across uh intra banks. Um but you know what we we managed to to convince them is that this unlocks a massive opportunity um not just for sort

of the web 3 space where a lot more finance is coming onchain but also um for you know sort of the web two space uh as we move into an AI world. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and I'd like to get a bit deeper into that because I think you hit two important points that you guys had in mind with this partnership as well as in general just with the philosophy that you guys carry at humanity which one being this user ownership of this identity layer of this human ID um just of the general data that you own and that's a big kind of theme here in this little subshow of our show here that being the kind of number one and and number two being privacy.

When you're thinking about the kind of agentic future when it comes to identity, how do you envision this playing out with regards to this user ownership as well as privacy with regards to identity? Like what is the future of digital identity right now? And are we set up right now to own it? And is it going to be private? I mean like right now right now I think right now it's not set up to I think right now it's not set up for anybody to own it right if you think about who own who owns your identity right now it's that's where your big tech companies right you know you have your Facebooks your Googles um your apples etc etc I mean the government issues you your passport but uh they have far less

information about you uh than your uh your tech companies right um I think this this actually poses a couple different problems problems in in the future. I think number one, as I said, there is the uh the challenge of truth. You know, anybody can create any sort of account uh on any of these platforms in order to pretend to be somebody uh or just feed it with uh with fake information. Um the number two problem is that even if you're feeding it correct information, um all of these tech companies do not actually have an incentive.

um they because they've spent so much money and so much effort uh gathering this information from all of us, they don't really have an incentive to give you back the control over this data and identity, right? And they it is absolutely in their uh interest to try to monetize this. And currently, it's largely being monetized through um it's largely being monetized through uh through advertising and attention, right? essentially selling selling your attention to uh to different companies that want to uh want to reach you, right? But as you can as as you're already seeing, you know, like some of the AI companies are now taking this data, right? You know, all the stuff that you're posting on Reddit um you know, is being used for for trading LLMs on uh on Open AI, right? So I think for

us the the whole idea is that uh you know there needs to be sort of a decentralized solution where people ultimately control all this data and this data needs to be verifi verifiably true. Um and so we we actually think this is you know in fact a a trillion dollar opportunity if you think about the size of you know your Googles and your metas uh currently. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean because right now the amount of funding that the let's call it like the centralized AI world has is probably a thousandx that of this kind of like decentralized AI world it has. And it seems like there's like this kind of altruistic kind of wanting to win for the people

mentality with the decentralized AI folk, whereas the centralized AI, they just want to keep shipping, scaling, get better products, better products, better products. Um, but we're kind of running into a headway here where OpenAI is set to go public at a trillion dollar valuation, one trillion dollar IPO, and Elon Musk and Sam Alman are feuding on the timeline about kind of what the future of AI is. They're going back and forth. Sam Alman's pulling back his Tesla order. Elon's freaking taking away power from Altman. There's just a whole kind of uh Genghask call versus Alexander the Great type of battle happening here. But I I think that is even missing the forest from the trees

which is that if we can't figure out a way to make this kind of future more o more userowned and more private then I think the ramifications for all of us are it gets dystopian quickly. >> It gets I mean it gets dystopian very quickly. I was on an interview uh just two days ago with uh with somebody else and uh you know we we actually think that the challenge is now this sort of AI revolution it's it's getting into a a even worse scenario of where uh all of us are getting these dopamine hits because you know the technology is easier to use. we find it very useful um and historically sort of similar to your iPhones, your your your your Android

phones and you know your social media networks where um it's convenient and so you're sort of willing to share everything with it, right? And then at this point, you know, you're starting to see different sort of applications where people are connecting their they're connecting their Gmail accounts, they're connecting their calendars, they're connecting all their messages, you know, and and just sort of willingly hand that information over. uh to tech companies that are working on on on on supposed solutions uh or AI solutions for uh for for them, right? And so for us uh we we do think in terms of uh in terms of data privacy, in terms of identity, um this is something that absolutely needs to be

uh be solved. >> Blockchain shortcuts, templates and widgets launch without friction for builders by builders. Visit enso.build. Build asset management redefined [music] built on ERC7621. Standardize how you launch, manage, and trade onchain [music] baskets. This is Alvara, the standard for onchain asset management. Th this is this is really a fork in the road because we're at a point now where uh these teams either get our data and they're going to try to monetize and profit off of it or we have custody over our own data and we can choose what we do with it. So I I I'm somewhat concerned of the world where

everyone gets gets a hold of our data, but also the the idea of the world where we each have our own data. It's verifiable and we can choose who to share that with I think is extremely important. Um but we've seen security leaks, hacks, I mean for a long time, uh you know, the reason that a lot of this is still on paper is because people are still somewhat skeptical of the internet and of databases. uh you know because every once in a while we see this huge database leak and so could you just tell us like how do you ensure that you know this is secure walk us through what is it ZK maybe you could just talk to us about the security of the protocol to kind of put our minds at ease uh so that we can make sure that you know when

we're when we're uh giving someone access to our data it only stays accessible by them. >> Yeah. So what we're what we're actually doing is we're not putting the data on chain right you know so what what is actually happening yeah is a little bit similar to how you're most you know at least uh most tech companies where they are doing it correctly uh they never see the uh they never see your password >> uh they never they never they never you know it's it's it's entirely encrypted right so and it's not reversible uh without a key so a little bit similar to that essentially for any sort of data any sort of credential that's being issued uh the data is encrypted uh what we do is we actually store it on decentralized uh storage. Um right now we've uh we've actually migrated. We

also announced a partnership with Walus um which is actually built on Sooie uh like a couple weeks back and so the data is actually encrypted stored on uh stored on Walrus uh and then what is happening is we're issuing credential on chain um that is uh that represents uh some form of encrypted data and then what we're doing is essentially using zero knowledge proofs to allow uh a third party to be able to uh to verify that this credential is valid. uh provided that the user gives permission.

Um so at any point in time uh none of the data is on chain. The user al ultimately gets to control uh the credential. Um and nothing can you know that there's there's no possibility of uh of a data leak. >> Yeah, that makes sense. Um I also think that there's incredible opportunities here. Uh, you know, I was listening to uh the the recent Elon Musk, Joe Rogan podcast, and Elon makes, you know, a a really strong emphasis for ultimate truth seeeking AI, right? And he sort of describes how Gemini Open AI, you know, they have these implicit biases.

They're, you know, treating the founding fathers as these diverse women. And then if AI, you know, is allowed to kind of think uh non-truths, well, there's a really really uh dystopian scenario that results from that. And so we need a truth seeking AI in order to combat those other AIs. Um if we have private AI near has been an incredible partner in this as they have private and userowned AI as well. I think you know we're entering this this world where AI agents are becoming more ingrained into commerce and the and the agentic economy is becoming full force with X42 and MCP and all these all these protocols that link these things together. they're going to get access to our credit cards.

You know, some of the time they're going to need our passport. They're going to need our driver's license. They're going to need our social security numbers. And so, when it comes to AI's sharing data with one another, like how do you how do you see this playing out in the agentic world? Do you see, you know, I give my personal AI access to my data through humanity ID, human ID? Can that AI go and share my data with every every all of the other AIs? like how how do you see our data proliferating through the economy and through the internet as we kind of delve into this agentic world?

>> I think in the agentic world uh you know I I've I've sort of spent most of my time still focusing on sort of building the solutions for the human world. Um but you know we do do the team does think a little bit about how this works and how this potentially could play into the agentic world and and you're right right you know the idea is that ultimately um ultimately you know the user same thing right needs to give permission um needs to give permission to an AI agent in order to make use of that information. I think the the the challenge actually becomes when you know uh somebody uh not fully understanding the the boundaries and the power of that AI agent shares that information and as

you said maybe then that AI agent goes rogue and starts uh blacking that out right um and so one of the the other things that we do think about is that down the road because we've built essentially a blockchain for credentials >> there is an idea that there might even be identity companies uh and credentials being issued to uh to AI agents to sort of uh to sort of force uh some degree of responsibility between whoever created this agent and uh and uh and and the agent itself, right? So saying that, okay, you know what, this AI agent is is running around going rogue uh doing stupid Um but at the very least we can we can we can verify that okay the AI agent is technically created and uh

operated by by Andy and so Andy should be held responsible right so so I think these these are sort of uncharted territories um at least for now but I I I do think you know whether it's us or whether it's somebody else uh you know solutions need to be created pretty soon. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> That makes complete sense. Um, Terrence, do you have any stats? Uh, like how many people have onboarded to the platform so far? What, you know, how many data points have you collected? I I mean, >> I have to this is such an incredible TAM.

>> We we have uh we have around a million and a half people who have verified to be a human being on humanity. We have uh I think just over around 10 million credentials that are being that that have already issued. um as as I mentioned uh the Mastercard uh on on the banking or financial services um uh credentials I don't know what the number is because it's that the product has only gone live I think in the last two hours um but you know uh different sort of credentials in terms of socials and even if you go to our our web app you already have the ability to prove out your uh um a bunch of different things right you know your your travel status your loyalty status uh we're rolling out KYC nationality education all these things very soon.

Humanity >> in the Mastercard partnership. Um it's only been live two hours, right? So it's too early to tell how many users will be onboarded. But Mastercard has millions and millions of users, right? Almost everyone has a Mastercard credit card or is connected to someone that does. >> No. So so so this so this this partnership is not just for anybody who has a Mastercard. this part this partnership to start is actually credential issuance for anybody who is has a US bank account >> right >> so the large so technically it's it's it's all 300 something million people in the US who can be onboarded and the goal for us is to actually allow for these credentials to be used in a wide range of uh applications maybe it's you know you signing up for for crypto exchange

or maybe opening a bank account um or maybe it's uh getting a personal loan onchain or offchain So it's it's many different types of use cases uh that we're enabling. >> Does it onboard these guys by default or does it it just opens up access for them to onboard their banking details? It opens up right now it open right right now it opens up the uh the ability for people to onboard their uh their own backing details and then for us the goal is the goal is to allow uh different sort of companies to also make use of this to onboard uh users right as I mentioned it might be >> yeah it might be you get what I'm saying

right like there might be a fintech that says instead of me going out and KYCing every one of our users uh why don't I just check if this person is already on boarded is KYC with one of the 25,000 US banks. >> Yeah. >> Right. Um >> this is really that's what we we we fundamentally uh enable. >> This is really similar to the agentic use case. It it's enabling second and third order effects of this data right where where banks can now access this data and and then those banks can go maybe you know down the line to issuing loans. The data flow, the pipeline here ultimately starts with human. It starts with the individual, right? But then humanity is the one that sort of opens

up this this landscape in this world of partners that can then leverage and use this data in a very secure way. Absolutely. >> Well, Terren, man, congratulations on the big day. I'm sure you're slammed. We're going to let you go. Thanks for calling in, being a part of this. Uh, >> absolutely. answer. Uh, thanks for thanks for having