"Digital Identity for Digital Trust Society"
Welcome to this week’s edition of the RHIZOME Wire!
Note: While we are more than aware of the launch of ICON 2.0, we wanted to take some time to unpack the news and its implications for the ICON network. Accordingly, we’ll be doing a deep dive at some point in the future — perhaps in the next newsletter — so keep an eye out!
A look at Digital Identity
This week, Min Kim (Co-Founder of the ICON Foundation) and Henry Lee (Head of Strategy for ICONLOOP) participated in an online webinar with the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea (AMCHAM) entitled “Digital Identity for Digital Trust Society. What is a Decentralized Identity?”
The webinar is just over an hour long, and I would recommend watching the entire video, as it provides a fairly comprehensive overview of identification, DID, and how ICON/ICONLOOP are integrating the technology into Korea.
For those that don’t have an hour to dedicate to this, however, I will pull out and take a look at some of the key highlights for what is — thus far — ICON’s flagship accomplishment.
First, as an aside, I was intrigued by the very platform of this webinar. Here’s a description of AMCHAM:
The American Chamber of Commerce in Korea (AMCHAM Korea) was founded in 1953, with a board mandate to encourage the development of investment and trade between Korea and the United States. AMCHAM Korea is the largest foreign chamber in Korea with approximately 800 member companies and affiliates with diverse interests and substantial participation in the Korean economy.
In other words, this is an opportunity for two leaders of the ICON community to directly to present to an organization with hundreds of companies who are foreign in nature but have a strong enough interest in the Korean economy to join AMCHAM.
A lot of the time, this sort of “marketing” won’t show up on crypto twitter or cause the price to spike, but it’s critically important when it comes to promoting ICON’s enterprise services to potential clients and adopters. You’ll notice that not once do Min Kim or Henry Lee mention the ICX token — that’s because, generally speaking, this audience doesn’t care about the ICX token; but if they buy into the idea of incorporating DID, it means they’ll eventually be using the ICX token, which means they have to buy the ICX token, which is a much more important long-term goal compared to marketing in a manner that gets retail investors excited.
Now, back to the video itself.
While historically the case for DID has been made from a business perspective, Henry laid out an ideological case for DID:
I think the problem that we're trying to solve and the problem that we're trying to highlight here is how our internet is architected and that architecture is causing so many unintended consequences. So right now all all my activities in the web are stored and the information and the activities are stored on a site-centric manner meaning Facebook knows all about myself, Google knows all about myself, Google has all my information. So it's very site-centric and because they have control over my identity all my activities under that identifier get stored on Facebook and this is actually the architecture we're trying to break by proposing a new paradigm to the whole way of how we create, manage, and store data on the web in general. It's not that you know we dislike what Facebook is doing or what Google is doing, but the architecture of the web have made this problem and this very unintended consequence of the web and we're just simply trying to solve that issue.
This is a vision for DID that is not only hugely ambitious, but obviously significantly disruptive as well. At the core of the DID concept is the idea that you own your own ID, and any associated data that comes with it. Ideally, when you log into sites in the future, you use your DID — and any of your data is contained in that DID, which — of course — you own.
Later on, they pivoted to another practical application for DID. Here is a section where Min discusses how DID could be advantageous to the shared economy:
We're going into the era of mobility, we are in the era of shared economy. So Uber and Lyft — there's a lot of delivery services — we share cars, AirBnb is another big use case, I think, for something like DID.
But you know, we're moving into shared ownership of many different assets and I remember very recently here in the U.S, Airbnb had an incident where one of the homes that was rented out, they had a big party and then you know a few people got murdered — a very unfortunate event — but AirBnb kind of went back and looked through why the problem happened and one of the key reasons is that they couldn't verify the person that they were actually renting out the the unit to because it's not like a hotel where you check in and then you have to show your ID whenever you enter the hotel where they verify you in the check-in process.
With AirBnb a lot of the time, you just have keys that are in a in a box you just take it out and you use it, so you don't really know who exactly is using the house or who is the actual guest of your AirBnb. So I think with this shared economy becoming bigger and bigger and bigger with our lives becoming more mobile as we move forward — I know this whole COVID situation is not allowing us to be mobile at this current time — but when things go back to normal I think DID and this whole shared economy is a huge opportunity going forward.
This is another very practical use case for DID; while it would require the right type of implementation to work correctly, incorporating DID into the sharing economy would of course be hugely bullish for the technology and, of course, ICON.
Prior to the Q&A session, Henry described a fairly grand vision for the DID concept as a whole:
DID is a technological framework. It's not really a specific app, it's not really a platform — it's a technical framework. Obviously a lot of this a lot of the businesses will going to build business out of this framework, but it's important to think of DID not as a as a specific service, but as an opportunity for the future. So I think in the future, we would be able to store any data information about myself on a DID.
And not just the KYC information. It could be your college diploma, a certificate you own, your office key card — which you know grants access to a building or your home — your tickets to a BTS concert, what restaurants you like, what food you enjoy, your payment receipt — you name. So I really urge everyone to join the conversation and I think it's very important for all of us to try to think how we're going to build the next generation digital identity as we live in this digital society.
I think when referring to DID, we need to remember this fact. DID isn’t itself a specific technology or company — it’s a concept that ICON has been able to design, build, and implement in a number of different ways.
Finally was a Q&A that led to some buzz on ICON’s social channels:
Michelle Chu: Hi this is Michelle from PayPal. Different countries may have different requirements and it makes compliance difficult, slow, and costly. Can you tell us what are hurdles and issues in this area and what are the solutions?
Henry Lee: Very good question. We're actually in the process of discussing this exact issue with multiple global banks — actually two — one is a U.S. bank and one is a European bank. What we're trying to do at least at this point is it will be very difficult for them to to receive the KYC credentials that Xinhan issued directly. So Bank of America will have a hard time accepting a credential issue by Xinhan, so what we're trying to do right now is these global banks actually have corporate branches in Korea.
We're working with the corporate branches in Korea and perhaps they'll be able to accept what Xinhan issues and internally within this global bank system they could find a way to work with what this Korean branch has collected and convert that into their global standards in the U.S. or in Europe. So I think providing a solution this to this problem requires different parties to reach a consensus. But I think the the initial approach here is to work with global banks Korea branch and then try to help these Korean branches find a way to abide by their global compliance or standards. I think that's actually what our approach is at this point.
The key portion here is the insinuation (and many believe this was a slip of the tongue from Henry, revealing a potential business prior to a formal announcement) that ICON or ICONLOOP was working with Bank of America. In looking at the quote in the context of the question, it’s hard for me to tell if that’s truly the case, and to what extent it might be the case. For now, I’ll let you make your own judgment.
As mentioned, the entire interview provides a more comprehensive vision for DID; to better understand ICON’s vision, be sure to watch the entire thing.
News from ICON World
ICONLOOP Korea press coverage is at an all time high
DAOlevels transaction count is rising
In case you haven’t tried out the new ICONbet game developed by RHIZOME team member Andrew Burns, be sure to check it out!
ICON Hyperhack gave way to 13 new projects for ICON
ICON announces a strategic partnership with Conflux Network
Over 22M requests have been served since last month through RHIZOME’s citizen node endpoint
Morpheus Labs x ICX_Station partnership update
Binance launches ICX futures
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