Origins of Tykn
Since interest in our work has been increasing by the day now, I thought it was about time we published an article about our origin story! Our passion for innovation, identity and distributed ledger technologies comes with a strong drive for change that is deeply embedded into the history of our company, so please do read on to learn a little bit more about the history of Tykn!
In 2012, Toufic “Tey” Al Rjula discovered that he is, in fact, an “invisible man”. On his Dutch driver’s licence, you will not find that he was born in a city such as “London”, “Berlin”, or “Amsterdam”. Instead, he is declared as being “Unknown”. This is because Tey was born in Kuwait, during the gulf war, when the birth registries were destroyed en masse. As such, he does not have a birth certificate, and even if copies were to exist, neither he, nor the issuing authority could possibly verify it.
In 2014, he started his asylum application in a refugee camp in the Netherlands, where he was forced to move after his work permit of five years was terminated. Here, for two years, he felt the pain of thousands of Syrian refugees unable to verify the authenticity of their documents. On top of this, many of these refugees had lost other important documents such as land titles and academic certificates on the road of refuge. By the end of his stay, he had met more than 1000 invisible men, women, and children.
A third of the refugees in Europe are children, and while they are lucky to get documented, hundreds of thousands in Syrian Refugee camps do not have birth certificates, and newborns in camps are unable to complete the birth registration process, due to economic, geographical and complex administrative barriers. Ultimately, the experiences the refugees shared with Tey in the Dutch refugee camp regarding the hardships they suffered as “invisible people” gave him the inspiration and motivation to found Tykn together with social entrepreneurs Khalid Maliki and Jimmy J.P. Snoek, in order to work on providing self-sovereign identity to all.
The “Tykn” Name
The first ever Dickin Medal was bestowed upon a recipient with the name “Tyke”, serving for Britain’s Royal Air Force. Tyke was a pigeon, in a team consisting of two other pigeons that delivered messages contributing to the rescue of ditched aircrew during WW2. “Inspired by their ability to operate in the hardest conditions and carry valuable information related to life and death, across borders, we named our company “Tykn”.
Post-Inception
Shortly after Tykn’s inception in 2016, we won Startup Weekend Utrecht, an intensive 3-day hackathon powered by Google, where we managed to develop a working prototype to digitally verify and authenticate official documents by leveraging the Bitcoin Blockchain. This victory ultimately led to Tykn being chosen to pitch for Rockstart, a startup accelerator based in Amsterdam, where Tykn was chosen out of 1100+ applicants (alongside 9 other startups) to join the Rockstart Web & Mobile Accelerator.
“We’re giving invisible children a chance to have an incredible life” — Tey Al-Rjula (CEO)
Following our time at Rockstart, Tykn became a proud Founding Steward of the Sovrin Network, and the core team went on to expand two-fold. Shortly after, in October 2017, we won the Spindle Innovation Awards (powered by Partos and Accenture) with our Project ZINC (Zero INvisible Children) initiative, and became a semi-finalist in the Accenture Innovation Awards.
As for our latest exciting developments: only last month, the UN invited Tykn to present at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Ethiopia. Here, COO Khalid Maliki presented Tykn’s application of distributed ledger technology for financial and identity-related inclusion across the nation, which was received with incredible enthusiasm of government officials and NGO representatives alike.
