In a bear market, projects with real value keep building. One such project is IDNTTY, the decentralized public infrastructure layer that is building the web-of-trust on their own Lisk sidechain by enabling a self-sovereign digital identity. IDNTTY’S decentralized infrastructure, which is initially provide a set of smart contracts to manage and validate the data associated with the user’s digital identity, open for public trial as the network launched its testnet.
The following are interview questions and answers with Dmitry Suhamera, Co-founder of IDNTTY.
What is the definition of IDNTTY?
IDNTTY is an infrastructure platform that uses blockchain technology. IDNTTY recently launched their test network in order to build modern services on its infrastructure and enable third-party developers to create their own services or integrate services into existing applications. In this way, IDNTTY will eventually become a single integration layer for a set of services and applications connected by a single digital identity that can be used by ordinary people.
How will it impact both the IT industry and wider society?
Thank you, this is indeed a very important question. Countries that implement digital ID could unlock value equivalent to 3 to 13 percent of GDP by 2030. We hope that we will contribute to the development and implementation of the technology in order to achieve this result. In general, the whole technology of digital identity, if properly implemented, will give ordinary users a new user experience both online and offline, and those boundaries will be erased. And we're not just talking about the now-fashionable meta-universes, where sooner or later regulation and the need to identify oneself will arrive. It will also transform the classic services that we are already using now - online shopping, financial products, government services (both within the country and in neighboring states that are implementing such solutions).
If you look at IDNTTY in terms of classical IT, there are similar solutions, but they are all centralized and controlled by corporations or government agencies, which leads to the need to compete with each other, and the end users need to have several digital identities for different tasks. If a public, open, decentralized digital identity becomes popular, this will allow end users to use one digital identity for different occasions, and corporations and public sectors will simply integrate it into their services and applications. This is a win-win for each stakeholder.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at IDNTTY.
Our startup is at a very early stage, so our team has no classic corporate "positions" - we have as flat and democratic a structure as possible, which allows us to make decisions quickly and move forward. I am the product owner, the person who conceptualized the idea of creating a decentralized ID, figured out how it should work to be convenient for corporations and end-users, founded the startup, gathered a team and started implementing the idea.
I have more than 15 years of experience in IT building products for the B2C market and implementing enterprise solutions in large enterprises, which gives insights into how to create and, most importantly, implement go-to-market for complex solutions, how to engage first users, how to scale and other practical business moves.
How do data breaches, such as the recent Uber breach, expose the risks associated with traditional data storage systems?
This does not just apply to Uber. Virtually any classic centralized system where user data is available to the company in the open is a potential target for attacks. After all, it's always a race between two competitors - defenders and attackers. As long as the defenders are at least one step ahead, all is well, but if they take a break, all of the data can suddenly become public. The more user data you have consolidated, the more tempting it is for an attacker to gain access to that data. What's more, we're becoming more digital every day – we're putting more and more data into centralized repositories – and that, at times, gives large corporations even more knowledge about us than we know about ourselves.
That's why we want to build our solutions in such a way that we don't have access to users' data at all. No one but yourself, not even the most highly-privileged administrators, should have access to it. Otherwise, you become a target right away.
How do blockchain and digital identity solutions offer a better alternative that puts customer privacy first?
This is directly related to the previous question. The fact is that a large number of companies base their business models precisely on user data. There is a true saying that – “if you do not pay for a product or service, but you use it, then you are the product”. Therefore, in our case, blockchain technology first of all gives us and third-party services of our infrastructure an opportunity to build business models, where users will be able to receive the classic service they are used to, but they will not have to pay for it with their private data.
How does IDNTTY’s infrastructure and digital identity solution address data privacy and identity risks?
IDNTTY does not store any private data, and users use their private key to confirm their actions. Any data that is transferred between users is encrypted using modern asymmetric cryptography.
What are the opportunities and challenges for IDNTTY to break into the mainstream market?
To be honest, the fight against classic centralized services is the main task. Obviously, no one will just give up access to their users' personal data, and we can already see how operators of centralized services talk about the problems of decentralized competitors. Now, governments are skeptical of decentralized identities and they are not ready to integrate with them; they want full control over their citizens' personal data. Users of large corporate services are similarly forced to use corporate identities. Big Internet giants create identities for using their services. For example: to use the services of Apple and Google at the same time, you must have an identity in each of their ecosystems, and the services are not integrated nor do they even compete with each other.
That's why we think the only way for a small startup to compete is to find like-minded people, who are ready to integrate some services and build new ones on the basis of a decentralized infrastructure. Then, the competition will be possible. Otherwise, neither we nor other decentralized professional solutions have any chance to compete with the current players, who already own user data, have ample money for marketing and provide a set of classic convenient services.
Can you tell us about IDNTTY's vision for supporting digital identity innovation in 2022 and beyond? Do you have any exciting announcements to share?
While it’s common in Web3, we don’t want to make loud statements just to attract immediate attention. We want to attract attention with announcements of ready-made solutions and services that users can start using right now.
Speaking about the vision of how we want to see our product this year and next, it's simple: we don't want to focus only on the infrastructure and wait for someone to come and make something useful for users of our infrastructure, like most Web3 startups do. That's why we took the ready and stable protocol Lisk, which has been providing value for many years, and built our infrastructure on it. Next, we want to create services for end users based on our own infrastructure, so we do not depend on the reliability and cost of transactions in other people's infrastructure. Just like Apple creates vertically integrated solutions – from its own hardware to the final applications – we want to create seamlessly integrated solutions based on infrastructure, so that they work as efficiently as possible and provide the right user experience. And, what's more, the openness of the infrastructure and source code of our own solutions allows anyone to create their own projects.
So, on the one hand, we encourage everyone interested in creating their own services based on decentralized identity to try to create them on our infrastructure. We are ready to support such initiatives, and ordinary users can follow the news online or at our social media and become users of the services that will be launched by IDNTTY team.
