Interview with Dominik Beron from Walt.id

This past week, we saw a proposal from walt.id submitted to the tomiDAO. A proposal that would further promote tomi’s decentralized values by creating a privacy-preserving identity wallet for our ecosystem. Unlike standard crypto wallets that allow you to see how many $TOMI tokens or NFTs someone is holding, the SSI wallet will be designed to allow you, the user, to determine what information you release, and to whom you release it to. To learn more, consider DAOwl’s prior articles, the first one, discussing the topic of identity within DAOs, the second one, an in-depth look at the SSI proposal itself.

Walt.id is a tech start-up with a clear mission to pioneer advancements in decentralized identity infrastructure. They envision a future where individuals have total control over their digital identity, managing and releasing personal information at their own discretion. To better understand walt.id and their proposal to the tomiDAO, our very own DAOwl took their time to interview Dominik Beron, the CEO and a co-founder of walt.id. Dominik is a seasoned entrepreneur with a unique blend of business and legal expertise. His depth of knowledge has led him to serve as an identity advisor to the EU Commission and various national governments. In addition to his impressive work at walt.id, he has also contributed to shaping EU identity standards, including EBSI and ESSIF. Join us in this interview as we learn more about walt.id’s work, their past experience, and how they might help to create privacy enhancing infrastructure for tomi.

DAOwl: Tell us a little about how walt.id was formed. How long have you been around? What was the inspiration for creating this company?

Dominik: We — the founders — have been working on Self-Sovereign Identity for a couple of years now, and started walt.id back in 2021. We believe that decentralized identity is fundamentally changing how the digital world works, and we’re building our company to enable developers, governments, and businesses to take advantage of this new paradigm. At the end of the day, our goal is to make every digital interaction seamless and worry-free.

DAOwl: What type of companies have you worked with so far in web3?

Dominik: Over the last year, we’ve partnered with, and built open-source identity infrastructure for most major blockchains/L1. Moreover, we’re working with DAOs, custodians, wallet and financial service providers, among others.

DAOwl: What excites you about the tomi project?

Dominik: Generally, we think it’s an interesting approach to an interesting set of problems. First, we believe it’s important that people experiment with building digital communities like DAOs. Becoming better in these new sorts of things can only be achieved by trying hard in practice. Second, we believe it’s great that the tomiDAO is seeing the importance of digital identity for digital communities. We believe that our project could be an important step towards enabling DAOs worldwide to be more successful.

DAOwl: Can you explain the difference between NFTs and Verifiable Credentials (VCs)? How might that be related to tomi?

Dominik: In short, VCs are designed to model digital identity, whereas NFTs are designed to model property rights. While both these technologies can be used to build identity use cases, they are fundamentally different and should be used for different use cases based on their strengths and weaknesses. We wrote whitepapers and blog posts on these topics, and we’re also happy to discuss it further in an AMA session.

DAOwl: With all the surveillance in place already, do you think it might be too late for people to actually take control of their privacy?

Dominik: First, it’s never too late to change things for the better. Second, new technologies like Self-Sovereign Identity have an impact on policymakers as well as on the way new businesses and applications are being built. We believe it’s the perfect time to enable this shift!

DAOwl: Can you give us some examples of your projects?

Dominik: We shared our slide deck with the tomi community. You can also check out our favorite case studies on the walt.id website.

DAOwl: We understand you also work with governments. How is their approach to identity different from Web3 clients’ approach?

Dominik: Although governments are moving quite fast (relatively speaking, in an almost unprecedented speed), they’re obviously more conservative about implementations to the detriment of user experience and adoption. Web3 companies have the great advantage of being able to make faster decisions and build more seamless onboarding flows and user experiences, particularly as they don’t have to serve the most difficult high trust (“high level of assurance”) use cases.

DAOwl: Do you worry that increasing surveillance and government-issued digital IDs might threaten people’s freedom?

Dominik: We believe that if we get the adoption of decentralized identity right, we will take away one of the biggest attack vectors for centralized control and threats to freedom and democratic systems. Identity and data ownership are really at the core of this problem — similar to money.

DAOwl: Do you run into conflicts of interest among different clients? How do you handle that?

Dominik: Not really. At the end of the day, we enable everyone to leverage decentralized identity. That’s why we made the decision to build an open-source company. We’re an enabler. We don’t take sides, and everybody can use our software without strings attached.

DAOwl: Are there certain types of projects you wouldn’t take because they violate your ideas of what self-sovereign identity should be about?

Dominik: We didn’t encounter any such projects. So far, developers and organizations are using our tools because they want to adopt decentralized and self-sovereign identity. Often, they love the underlying ideas. Moreover, as our open-source tools are based on open standards and enable data portability, we ensure maximum freedom and flexibility for everyone.

DAOwl: How do you think about identity when it comes to DAOs and how people participate in communities?

Dominik: We believe the fact that we haven’t yet “solved” decentralized identity is one of the reasons why DAOs have not yet picked up more. There’s still a lot of friction in the context of onboarding and managing digital communities. Identity is at the core of many challenges such communities face, and when done right, it can be a crucial enabler for DAOs. Digital communities need digital identity. It’s that simple.

Thanks Dominik! We are looking forward to providing solutions that allow tomizens to preserve their privacy. Now, it’s up to all of you Pioneers to decide if this is the right solution for tomi. Read Dominik’s full DAO proposal here, and get to voting, you have until Tuesday the 25th of July to make your decision and possibly impact the future of privacy for the tomi ecosystem.

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