The Decentralists: Our Battle for Trust
The evolution of identity, and what it means for the crypto space
In many ways, our society revolves around trust, and today, one of the ways we get there is through verifying identity — on a personal level, in business, and on the broader scale of geopolitics. The first thing we want to know is who you are, because it directly relates to how credible you are. In other words, we just want to know, why should we trust you?
In large part, this is human nature — and the crypto space has built an entire ecosystem on the pillar of trust. But when we get right down to it, there is a way to do “trust” better.
This was the impetus behind the formation of Shyft. We wondered if there was a way to build a new system that would distribute risk and create a new standard of trust — we wanted to effectively change the model from centralization of regulatory compliant information to distributed, compliant frameworks. We asked the question: what can be built to solve this?
The only time you really need a blockchain is when you have network participants that both have requirements to compete and to compliment one another. In certain situations or when rule sets are bound to a certain set of parties, this becomes interesting, because if you look at facilitating transactions from an insurance perspective, turns out the bitcoin network itself is basically a big insurance policy. It says, these are the roles for the participants, and we’re all going to adhere to them because we have to; broadly speaking, we basically have regulatory requirements we adhere to and therefore we’re going to all play by a set of rules because it’s disincentivizing to us to violate them.
We’re building the same principles into the Shyft network. We began by looking at new types of federated systems, open and semi-open and permissioned networks and frameworks, and how we can use this wealth of blockchain technology to solve the problems for and beyond the crypto ecosystem. More broadly, this also relates to global issues with data from both regulatory and privacy perspectives.
At Shyft, we choose an approach that focused on uncovering and building means for empowering people. In turn, we took a user-focused perspective when addressing technology challenges.
We’re particularly focusing on some critical core problems that need solutions worldwide, such as:
- Repetitive collection and centralization of data. Organizations increasingly collect broad swaths of personal information for regulatory purposes. This data is stored across departments within these companies, with these siloed databases constantly increasing everyone’s risk profile.
- Existing databases do not enable continuous real-time communication. In fact, no one shares information at all. Why? There’s no direct financial incentive for organizations or government to open that data. Moreover, opening this Pandora’s Box creates yet more risk. The result is attested, valuable information locked in silos in big companies to the extent that the data is worthless and a potential liability.
- Furthermore, you’re now presented with an ecosystem of databases that have not kept pace with upgrades required to protect the data, adding to the problem of compliance. This ever-increasing risk profile creates massive costs, with no end in sight.
But what if you could build a system with economic and political incentives to introduce distribution to data storage? Better yet, we’re talking about trusted data, not just any data. And then you add market-fee structures into that ecosystem, transforming data cost centres into revenue generators? At Shyft, we looked at this model as a new way of unlocking value inside of any type of organization or ecosystem.
Shyft proposes that we enable greater privacy around the most critical and sensitive identity information which could be encrypted or blinded, while allowing information that you attest to a base layer of identity. This information helps inform whether you’re trustworthy.
We coined a term, Creditability, to describe this concept. With it, individuals no longer have to surrender sensitive personal information in order to transact online.
Who are these network participants for Shyft?
- We have data owners — this could be a person, a company, a financial institution, a government agency, or a central bank.
- We also have parties and organizations we call “trust anchors” who hold and attest to the validity of all this data.
- The third parties on the network would be those who require that data for use within an application.
To make our vision a reality, we’ve started by assembling the best team and advisory board, and have already brought together 85 companies, spanning from central banks and securities commissions, and worked with national identity systems, as well as some of the largest bitcoin exchanges in the world. One of our partners alone brings about 1.6 billion identification points and datasets into the network.
We’re currently building middleware applications that permission data out for the creation of use cases.
In other words, Shyft is building a global distributed network that will enable trusted exchange and access to attested data through strong cryptography, with core principles of Bitcoin built into it all.
We will focus on decentralizing what needs decentralization, and work with existing systems where we can to build Shyft as trust network and protocol layer, for everyone.
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Shyft is building the world’s first modern, secure, multi-stakeholder Blockchain-based digital identity solution that enables KYC/AML attested data transfers. Join our Telegram (https://t.me/joinchat/HhrB_hKGQDQKU7mhpzor_g), follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/shyftnetwork), GitHub (https://github.com/ShyftNetwork) and other channels found on https://www.shyft.network/
