The DID current below the surface
Welcome to this week’s edition of the RHIZOME Wire!
The growing DID momentum
This week, mincircle posted a helpful graphic giving an overview of the extent to which ICON has participated in leading forums and councils — led by major government agencies — that focus on distributed identity verification (DID):
Included here are four separate government entities: The Financial Services Commission, the Financial Security Institute, the Ministry of Science and ICT, and the Korea Internet Security Agency.
Of course, your immediate reaction might be to look at the number of agencies interested in DID; while four isn’t necessarily a lot (although it’s not likely limited to only four), it is more than many other governments around the world, who are less engaged in blockchain generally and DID specifically.
However, what I found encouraging is the breadth of entities involved, each of which essentially representing a different sector of the Korean economy: finance, technology, and security.
These industries are all critical to the long-term success and adoption of blockchain, and each carries its own potential use cases; but each can absolutely benefit from DID.
More importantly, industries can’t adopt these technologies — especially those as highly regulated as finance and security — without government buy-in and approval.
That’s why it’s so critical that ICONLOOP, ICON, and the MyID Alliance have been able to penetrate these government entities. To those who have followed ICON, it’s not as if the relationship is only the participation in conferences — it goes far beyond that, including examples such as the regulatory approval from the Financial Services Commission for banks to utilize myID.
While not every day or week can be met with “BIG EXCITING NEWS ANNOUNCEMENTS”, what matters most is that the work of building these relationships with oversight agencies continues. While individual appearances at government led events may not seem impressive, taking a zoomed-out view and realizing that these events are signs of a much deeper, long-lasting relationship will provide a much more genuine — and bullish — understanding of ICON’s relationship with the Korean government and the future they hope to build.
News from ICON World
Scott Smiley shares a potential solution to vote stagnancy
ICX gets featured as “coin of the week” from Huobi
ICON’s meetup with MakerDAO and Chainlink at ICON HQ is finally happening
Balanced releases an updated white paper
ICON will be covered in a virtual meetup
RHIZOME is developing an ICON citizen node cluster behind a cloudfare load balancer
Blockchain Industry News
Twitter Hack: ‘Social Engineering Attack’ on Employee Admin Panels - Cointelegraph
In a series of tweets from Twitter Support on July 15, the help center of the social media platform confirmed that hackers responsible for the massive breach of high-profile figures’ accounts had conducted a “coordinated social engineering attack” to gain “access to internal systems and tools.”
Gemini Crypto Exchange Integrates With Privacy-Focused Brave Browser - CoinDesk
The Gemini Trading Widget is now live in Brave’s Nightly version, the testing and development version of Brave, and will go live in Brave’s general release in the next few weeks, the companies announced on Wednesday.
Cryptocurrencies Have 'No Way' to Comply With US Anti-Encryption Bills - CoinDesk
Privacy advocates and product designers say such legislation would also curtail people’s privacy to a huge degree, fundamentally change existing technology and have an impact on everything from messaging and file sharing to privacy coins.
$1.4 billion in Bitcoin was laundered via unwitting exchanges in 2020 - Decrypt
Singapore-based Huobi was the worst struck by high-risk inflows, with over 40,000 Bitcoin ($364 million) sent to the exchange. Trailing just behind is Binance, with over 25,000 Bitcoin ($227 million) allegedly laundered via the exchange.