Road to Mainnet: The strength of Shyft is in the strength of all networks

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Shyft Network

4 min readMay 16, 2019

Laying the foundations for Humanity 2.0 in Web 3.0

The founding members of Shyft aspired to design the technology to help address the various logistical, technological and regulatory hurdles keeping blockchain-based solutions from mass adoption.

With that in mind, they knew that building a team and a network of divergent backgrounds was a necessity. And the question we posed to our early collaborators was: what is the goal that unites us all in one ecosystem?

And we think that building Shyft goes far beyond the technology. Solving a billion-user challenge of reclaiming trust, identity, and credibility on chain requires us to transact and collaborate across borders, across industries, across protocols and across teams to deliver a technology that is first and foremost dedicated push humanity to the next level by leveraging the power of digital connections.

After all, the problems Shyft is looking to solve — digital identity, lack of access to financial services, loss of control over personal data, data and financial insecurity, among many others — affect us all.

For an in-depth understanding of Shyft, we recommend reading our recently updated Whitepaper.

Humans of Shyft

Through our blog series entitled “Humans of Shyft”, you have gotten to meet some of the core members and visionaries of Shyft. We won’t be highlighting them all today, but here’s a quick overview:

The Network’s principal architect, Chris Forrester, got her start on a wide variety of projects (including, but not limited to, iOS and Android apps, gaming, and AI-derived art) before signing on as CTO at Decentral, ultimately building out their signature wallet platform, Jaxx, which brought a new level of unity to the wallet space by offering a previously unseen number of token integrations.

Following her time at Decentral, Chris met Joseph Weinberg, co-founder of Paycase. Joseph established Paycase back in 2014 with the express purpose of bringing usability and accessibility to the crypto space, well before the ICO rush even took place. Joseph also spent this time meeting with regulators and government representatives from around the world to get a sense of what issues needed solving locally.

It was during this time that he developed a keen interest in the ways that legacy services both private and public (and the people they are meant to serve) stood to reap massive benefits from the frictionless and secure communication and collaboration offered by blockchain technology — if only a network existed that could empower them while having the flexibility to conform to international law.

Today, Shyft operates under two entities where they each have a specific mandate. The Network company develops and builds the technology, while the Enterprise company handles business development, solution marketing, and market research headed up by CEO Bruce Silcoff, along with COO Juan Aja Aguinaco (also ex-Decentral), CCO Michelle Beyo, and SVP of Global Partnerships Suzanne Ennis.

Additionally, the PerseiD brings additional partners on board to handle our jurisdictional eID offerings. Shyft has also amassed a tremendous network of advisors, who have provided invaluable feedback, guidance, and specialized expertise.

Our guiding principles

While Shyft is a technology-driven project, its direction and design have always been guided by values and ideology. Where many projects in the space are siloed off from each other and operate in a strictly competitive mode, Shyft has been designed with interoperability and collaboration in mind from the very beginning.

Successful decentralized networks are built on clear, simple and impactful principles. These are ours:

We don’t store sensitive user data on-chain — ever.
Nothing happens without user consent.
Data has value and you deserve to be compensated for sharing it.
Security isn’t just about good defense and damage control.

Who have we collaborated with in the past year?

For a solution like Shyft to fulfill its potential, it has to be designed with maximum utility across not only jurisdictions, but across industries and use cases. That means linking regulators with industry leaders to identify and address gaps or lags in existing services, and forming partnerships built to execute.

White the crypto space arose from a place of distrust in and fear of governments and regulatory bodies, Shyft can only succeed by enabling all parties to find common ground and use it as the basis for a strong, shared foundation.

We’ll be speaking more about the particulars of how our team members collaborate with regulators and the trends we see taking shape for both smaller and larger jurisdictions.

What comes next?

For Shyft Network, our most important milestone to date is coming up in the near future: the Mainnet Alpha launch of the network. This will be accompanied by a number of ways for users and developers to get involved directly in supporting the Network’s growth and functionality.

For Shyft Enterprise, the goal remains to encourage enterprise and jurisdictional adoption, expanding our “Jurisdiction as a Service” reach to new regions and use cases.