We Are Dealing With People’s Money & Identity — We Can’t Just “Move Fast & Break Shit”

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Name: Edmund Lowell

Role: Founder @ KYC-Chain

Location: Hong Kong

Edmund Lowell is a serial entrepreneur who has been living in Asia since 2011. Edmund has built several Fintech and RegTech products during this time, including; Incorporations, KYC-Chain, and SelfKey.

1. Which Industry Are You Implementing The Blockchain?

SelfKey is a non-custodial wallet that allows users to store their Ether (and ERC-20 Tokens) along with their identity data and documents. Users can also access the SelfKey marketplace to compare bank accounts, incorporations, and cryptocurrency exchanges.

Once a user has their cryptocurrencies and data accessible through the wallet, they can sign-up for financial services with just one click. Hence, we consider ourselves to be in the crypto/identity management subsegment of blockchain.

2. How Do You Think Blockchain Will Impact Our Lives?

It has already made a tremendous impact on my life! I believe that blockchain allows for immutable trust-less transactions beyond borders.

This is something that previously was almost impossible. We used to rely on governments or expensive and inaccessible services to the common man.

Blockchain is a great technology to democratize access to financial services.

3. What Kind Of Blockchain Projects Have You Developed?

I’ve made several projects utilizing blockchain technology. There are a lot of applications where blockchain makes sense, and also many that don’t.

I’d really caution people before jumping in head-first to ask the question: do I really need blockchain for this implementation? What am I trying to solve? What job is the user trying to get done? How could they best achieve the result they are looking for?

If several participants don’t trust each other, and a stored state needs to be shared — where a public ledger would assist. Then maybe blockchain is the right technology choice.

4. What Challenge Have You Found Implementing Blockchain?

Programming in Solidity (ETH 1.0) kind of sucks. I mean, it’s incredible that we even have a Turing complete world supercomputer, but the problems and attack vectors are well known.

There have been many hacks — and there are a lot of security vectors to cover, both known and unknown. On an even more basic level — smart contracts often cannot be too complicated, or you often run into gas limitations. And in our project — we are dealing with people’s money or identity — so it’s just paramount that we don’t “move fast and break shit”.

These problems are well known, and ETH 2.0 should solve many of them with WASM, increased scalability, etc. or even with some upgrades to ETH 1.0.

5. Can You Describe A Problem You’ve Faced Working With The Blockchain And What Solution You Found For The Problem?

Upgrading contracts used to be very challenging. In that, you could only have a single version of your code, forever. Now there are advantages to that, particularly as it relates to trust.

If no one can change the contract, then this imbues a certain degree of trust because for a reason I just stated. However, projects often need to evolve or change based on a new environment, different information, business requirements, etc.

A reasonable way to solve this problem was implemented by Zeppelins with proxy/upgradeable contracts. It’s even possible to have certain aspects which are not upgradeable (for trust reasons) and others which are. This makes programming with smart contracts slightly easier.