Privado ID & Quark ID: On-Chain ZK-Powered Unified ID - Diego Fernandez & Evin McMullen. Ep. 580

Transcript

identity data data that describes our addresses or us sometimes representing institutions or even AI agents right now is not terribly standardized and is often optimized for really Niche use cases not composability or interoperability we've essentially created on chain the same silos we have in web 2 but these ones are slower more expensive and less interoperable so pado IP enables unified identity that means you can prove your identity traits about yourself your capabilities preferences qualifications on any chain any device anywhere we realized that it would be actually very valuable to bring to Market a protocol agnostic solution not

bound to any single blockchain our first goal was uh to build the protocal completely open source because we we F we have the the vision that Society should be able of reading and understanding how are we dealing with person information just as there are many identity issuers in the world today nation states so too is it important that we support an open ecosystem where many sources of identity can be used composedly together welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Freda an and today I'm speaking with Evan McMullen who is the co-founder of Privado ID and Diego

Fernandez who is the former Secretary of innovation for the city of Buenos Iris and the co-creator of C ID before I get started with Evan and Diego though these are our sponsors this week if you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence look no further than course one more than 150,000 delegators including institutions like Bido Penta capital and Ledger trust corus one with their assets they support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos ensuring your stake is responsibly managed thanks to the advanced meev research you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards you can stake directly from your preferred wallet set up a white label note restake your assets on

iena or symbiotic or use their SDK for multi-chain staking in your app learn more at chorus1 and start taking today this episode is proudly brought to by nosis a collective dedicated to advancing and decentralized future nosis leads Innovation with circles nosis pay and metry reshaped open Banking and money with hashy and nosis VPN they're building a more resilient privacy focused internet if you're looking for an L1 to launch your project nosis chain offers the same development environment as ethereum with lower transaction fees it's supported by over 200,000 validators making nosis chain a reliable

and Incredibly neutral foundation for your applications nosis Dow drives nosis governance where every voice matters join join the nosis community in the nosis Dow Forum today Deploy on the evm compatible nosis chain or secure the network with just one gno and affordable Hardware start your decentralization journey today at nosis doio hey Evan and Diego it's it's a pleasure to have you both on GM it's great to be here thank you so much so pleas for being here for the see super nice maybe let's get started with a little bit of background

on both of you and I'd start with Evans so ladies Fest Evan um tell us about uh your journey up to and into web 3 so thank you so much for having us here today fredrica it's wonderful wonderful to be here big fan of the fenter podcast um so very proud to be able to share more of our work right now my journey on chain began a little over 10 years ago as a student I had the privilege of one of the you know world's best professors who introduced me to decentralized Technologies in Bitcoin um several years later I started working at a company called consensus building out the ethereum ecosystem and introducing decentralized Technologies to

governments institutions and Brands around the world after spending a few years building in the decentralized space I realized that we did not have enough data on chain to coordinate more than the defi that we know and love today and that's what led me to the identity space to bring the world's largest real world asset onchain verifiable data in service of our identities I I remember meeting you for the first time kind of when you had just started disco um which was then kind of acquired by um by the polygon um ID which is now Privado ID making you co-founder of that um so tell me about starting disco because kind of like at

the time um it it was a slightly different time than it is now so kind of uh yeah tell tell us about that and kind of like how um uh how the environment has changed when I started a project called disco a couple years ago um there was no way for you to use your existing crypto wallet to manage data written about you that didn't live on the chain that there was no way to use your existing wallet to selectively share parts of yourselves in in a verifiable way and so the way that you know the way that we approached identity was from a very different manner than many had before um you know the the sort of friendly language that

we used noting that you are the multifaceted center of the party just like a disco ball I think helped many of our most technical colleagues think about identity in a different way in the years since we've seen the concept of identity verifiable data credentials and centralized identifiers go from being the weird thing that Diego and Evan were talking about and no one else was talking about to something that is a common topic amongst investors Founders and Builders everywhere so I definitely think 2025 will be the year of identity but part of that is due to the long runup of our efforts proceeding so so tell us about the the acquisition um through polygon ID so

kind of obviously kind of identity is um is very much a vertical that kind of tends towards um uh consolidation um just because there's no no real value add in having several competing um identity Solutions so kind of tell us how the acquisition came about and kind of like what your considerations were going into it so fora first I'm gonna politely push back a little bit on the the need for or the reality that multiple identity systems exist just as there are many identity issuers in the world today nation states so too is it important that we support

an open ecosystem where many sources of identity can be used composedly together and actually that's one of the challenges I see in many um you know potential other Solutions or offerings that have been presented they are monopolistic and cannot be used together but we live in a reality where there are multiple institutions multiple sources of reputation multiple apps multiple nation states and so that's why I think that the open ecosystem you know in which Diego and I build together offers the only viable Way Forward um and in service of that open ecosystem actually that's what first led me to meet my now co-founders um who uh who are then working in the polygon ecosystem uh for those who might not be familiar polygon

ID is the identity system initially optimized for the polygon blockchain but its roots run much further back than that um starting in 2017 a group of very capable researchers and Builders here in Barcelona Spain invented what are libraries that are you know are now used prevalently across the world including circom and snark JS um these uh these cryptographic capabilities then formed the roots of the Hermes blockchain uh which then led to today's polygon ZK evm so our colleagues you know deeply steeped in ZK capabilities and identity specific to one chain then realized we now live in a multi-chain world so earlier this year when we sat down

together to discuss integration between disco and then polygon ID we realized that it would be actually very valuable to bring to Market a protocol agnostic solution not bound to any single blockchain because of course human beings agents and institutions are likely to interact with multiple protocols throughout their day not just one and so your identity on chain needs to be interoperable all the places in the connected world that you go not just one protocol at a time like a silo unto itself so through the course of discussing technical integration we actually realized that our Stacks complemented one another pretty well from uh disco's protocol agnostic approach and strong focus on developer

experience and deep ZK expertise in R&D from um the gigachad engineering team over at then polygon now privato ID uh so joining hands with my co-founders um s deep nald Jordy Bina um David Z and Anthony Martin uh we now lead a team unified together under the focus of bringing identity to the world its agents its institutions and most importantly its Deens super nice yeah so we dive into kind of how it works um under the hood in just a bit but Diego super nice to have you here too so um you have a you have walked a very different path to

kind of Evan so kind of you were also kind of an IT entrepreneur but then you kind of entered um public service right um so kind of what motivated you kind of to to this transition from the private sector to the to you know to Public Service I was an I have been an entrepreneur for all my life I was I started my first company like 30 years ago so I had the this entrepreneurship entrepreneurship uh experience and I got the chance of getting into into government by by coincidence to be honest and in my first thought was I want to stay here just a couple of years

and then I fell in love with the the immense power of transformation that you have when dealing with the PIV with the public sector of course there's this downside which is public sector is this big fat elephant to move it around I mean you need to push really hard I did a six-year term uh in a big slam upgrading project that I helped Define and fundra with the institutional Banks as World Bank and idb in the biggest slam in Argentina and then I became the Secretary of innovation of the city of Buenos AIS I started getting involved in first in cryptocurrencies from a financial perspective and short months afterwards I fell in love with the

bigcoin white paper and then after that I fell in love with the of the community and and I think that that is kind of a p that once you take you're in you can live anyway and how I got involved in identity is a funny story actually because in 2019 I started the process of getting my Italian passport because my family past Generations Came From Italy and I went through all this so cumbersome process of getting of course the birth certificate of my great-grandmother I expected that to be a hard one because it was in Italy in 1800s and that of course should be

difficult but the the funny story is that getting the birth certificate from my father and from myself digitally because I had a digitally signed document had to go through all of this nightmare of signatures and and physical signatures in in the argentin Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Asia Council you say say this cannot be true this is not even 20th century this is 19th century and that is the reality that we live by and it was such a difficult process it took me nearly six months dedicating regular time on a week on a weekly basis but I started to investigate and say hey come on and we need to change

this and that's that's how I got involved in cor when I was offered the post as Secretary of innovation and said hey okay I'm going to take this I condition this is the thing that I want to do this is my this is the project I would like to lead and I got y from from my former boss in Tian the major of the city of Bonos Aris and uh suffing like one year afterwards that in 2021 I mean we started getting to know with E when we were just perhaps the only two guys speaking in crypto events about ID and everybody looked us hey you're not doing defi you're not doing m coins you're not doing nfts what where you talking about but fortunately since we always share

together today uh identity had take has taken a very different role in the space and everybody's looking at identity in a different Manner and I am convinced that the we need to get a world on chain and I'm convinced that the the way of of achieving that goal is through identity and then of course with theway for financial usage will come but the main onboarding tool will be idenity you make a lot of super interesting points and I think kind of like this um uh talking about kind of like this connection between um govern governments and identity and decentralized identity systems kind of we'll spend a long time talking about this but we before we Dive

Right In I have a pure C curiosity question so kind of you you said that you um spent a couple of years upgrading the biggest slum in Argentina and kind of the way that you got there was a little bit by coincidence I mean tell us about that coincidence so kind of like how do you go from being a tech entrepreneur to kind of trying to kind of um you know embark on this Urban transformation of an entire um City uh part of the city well my first job in government actually was and that's a coincidence a friend of mine was going through a very difficult process which is was the former Secretary of sorry former minister of

Education of the city of cus which unfortunately he was diagnosed uh the English word for that is Ams I don't know this de generating illness which is very bad he got the the the job as Ministry of Education and he said you know what I need your help you you have experience managing companies and and managing new projects I'mma Be My Chief of Staff say Okay I want to try that by the time I had decided to take an ABS leave of two years and say I'm going to try this new thing I got involved in that and and again the power of transformation is so amazing it's very difficult because I always like to think that in

the private world you have a two Dimension I mean you have someone who which reports to you and when you ask put an objective and and set up a task in general the task gets done or Consequences arrive in the state that's kind of different because the people that work for you most of the time you cannot I mean they are just there and you cannot move them and you have this kind of threedimensional gaming which perhaps the guy reporting to you his political boss has more power than your boss so I mean you get inate way of world things that you need to tackle and this slaming buos syus was a is a huge

or was a huge slam something like 50,000 inhabitants in the middle of of the city in perhaps the most expensive part of the city and he has been there for more than 100 years so they asked me to say hey why didn't you set up a team and design study what what has happened here and what has been done all around the world and come up with a project to deal with that so I spent something like one year with the team studying and and designing that solution but it came up to be a pretty expensive solution something like $300 million so say let's get the money so I started sort of uh this was the first Tim sort

of fundraising in the public sector and that means speaking to the World Bank speaking to the inter American Development Bank in order to get the credits for doing this and we did it and to be honest uh I love doing new things but it's hard to get a project that is so so emotional and and impactful in your life at that one because you dealing with real people changing real people's life uh and it was a huge project and we relocated 1,000 families to just to blocks away to new houses that were living under a highway in a in a place which was devasta and and we basically built all the infrastructure sewage drainage

electricity uh roads they were mostly dirt roads and whenever you come to wus aan or Frederick You' be we go and take a look look around what's what's been done there because it's amazing and then it came back to technology then I would absolutely love that because I think kind of the part of me that just loves fixing stuff um I I think kind of like the the problem solving part it sounds like um like it's like an incredibly rewarding kind of project to embark on because kind of it's so real kind of it's so um yeah for me the most difficult part is is is actually not the the doing the building the constructing

houses the fixing roads or or building rage the the biggest and most difficult part is gaining Trust of a big Community uh because those communities have been neglected for so many years and when they see a public officer they instantly distrust you say you know what this another time they're gonna do nothing and we're gonna keep on suffering so gaining that trust takes time and it's by far the most difficult task yeah I I I think this goes for Builders worldwide uh onchain and offchain so uh yeah 100% maybe let's kind of segue into Privado and then kind

of we can we can make our way back uh to meba uh the uh the Buenos buenos Iris um identity system um so um Evan um tell us about kind of pre and kind of um what what parts it's made up um from and kind of how how these kind of play together so pado I think enables unified identity that means you can prove your identity traits about yourself your capabilities preferences qualifications on any chain any device anywhere um the reason for this uh this solution is that we currently live in a very fragmented World on chain identity

data data that describes our addresses or us sometimes representing institutions or even AI agents right now is not terribly standardized and is often optimized for really Niche use cases not composability or interoperability we've essentially created on chain the same silos we have in web 2 but these ones are slower more expensive and less interoperable however we see a unique opportunity to leverage zero knowledge proofs for interoperability and to take the headache out of identity and many kinds of compliance for Builders from a technical level provado ID starts with a few smart contracts um a registry of issuers of reputation these are proven authorities in their subject matter such

as kyc compliance um however there are a variety of different types of identity data that can describe you for example your chess.com score can now be taken out of the application and to safely to the chain through our infrastructure as well um so this registry authorities of reputation can then issue verifiable credentials to uh recipients individuals institutions agents um these credentials are kind of like diplomas statements written about you signed by another party encrypted against your keys secure so that only you can decide to disclose them then provado ID makes it really cheap fast and easy to create a client

side proof on your mobile device um and then to publish evidence of that proof on chain such that you can um initiate or or disclose to any application or service that you indeed embody those proven traits provado ID's network of our Oracle Network then enables this data to be syndicated or called upon in other chain environments so that you can prove a trait about yourself in one chain or one application or one service and reuse that data again and again and again for this reason we are often referred to as middleware infrastructure sitting in between blockchains and applications making it easy to reuse and build on top of data from multiple sources a few fun capabilities that

provado ID has introduced to the world include ZK revocation of credentials so that for example if your kyc status changes those credentials can be revoked and their their shared private State can emanate across chains um additionally we also allow the ability to refresh these credentials so for example if you have a proof of how much eth you have in one wallet that you want to be able to prove in another and that balance changes you can actually refresh that proof without interrupting any of the uh of the outside processes that might rely upon it so in this way we enable shared private state of identity data across chains um and make that really simple from a ZK perspective abstracting away a

lot of that complexity from developers if you're interested in interacting with or building on provado ID I would probably first direct you to our friendly JS SDK and embedded wallet make it really easy um to be able to plug in Access Control based on certain traits or capabilities for example age verification has become a popular Topic in recent weeks as pump. fun recently had their live streaming taken down for lack of age verification with pado ID we make it easy to prove and reuse uh proofs of age so that apps can build adults only experiences that are safe for their users similarly Access Control based on kyc status location um and other essential traits allows us to

bootstrap on top of trust that has already been built or can be asserted in the IRL or web 2 world and to bring that valuable rwa of our real world data onchain so um when you say there's different um entities that can attest to things um does that mean that kind of there's different kyc providers kind of integrated into this or kind of like chess SC providers or a kind of like like whatever kind of attestation kind of you're looking for right so is is is there like an entire host and kind of who picks who I kind of who I authenticate against that is a great question so yes exactly as we were

discussing earlier in our conversation there are many sources of reputation in the world already kyc providers nation states companies that it may attest that you work there or even peers who know you and can say things about you um so any address is able to make statements about others but based on how they present themselves how they set up what qualifications or capabilities they provide um of course those can be presented differently the provide ID Marketplace of reputation issuers is broadly diverse and growing by the day including multiple kyc providers okay um and say kind of like now um let's look at this kind of um

from the user side of things so say um I want to enter a web 3 application um that is age 18 and up um what do I do so it depends on how that application wants to request that proof of age if they're interested in doing so in a privacy preserving way they can uh visit our um query Builder without having to deal with any of the complex zero knowledge proofs instead they can use a friendly interface click a few buttons to decide they would like for their users to be over the age of 18 let's say and then they can select from multiple sources of reputation multiple

providers or issuers of reputation um whose data might indicate that you're over the age of 18 for example if you've passed kyc that means that you are likely over the age of 18 additionally if you have a national identity uh document that indicates your age that could be used as well and so this is an example where as a verifier or the party verifying the data to allow you into my space I may want to accept multiple different types of inputs to indicate your age to me this is consistent with the way that age proofs work in a variety of different instances where you might be able to for example use a utility bill or a credit card in web 2 so we want to make sure that flexibility is just as available for builders in web

3 um from a user perspective what that looks like in your um in your actual application experience would probably be something to the tune of connecting your wallet as you would normally to a web 3 dap inside of that wallet being presented um with a request for age proof you could click a button to elect to disclose that you are above that age um and so then this would validate your uh s qualifying trait on chain um but would not disclose the underlying data uh such as your actual date of birth um and then just like that in a few seconds you'd be able to enter your application and proceed happily on chain super nice if I kind of think about this from the other point of view

kind of that of um the dev developer um how do I make sure that the source that's um that's kind of emitting this attestation is actually a good source for that so kind of like if kind of like when I integrate um a kyc provider for instance say I use Sams Up or On or something I I mean they are usually kind of like regulated in some way kind of I know things about them set the same is is the same true for kind of interacting with them on your platform I think that is a really important thing to point out that just because an address has signed a statement doesn't mean they are an authority on the subject for example um

if I evan. eth decide to sign a credential that says Diego has passed kyc I don't know that Fredo would recognize Evan as a legitimate kyc provider in accordance with government policy and that's why the issuer registry is important furthermore for legally binding um you know uh or account legally accountable situations where kyc AML needs to be followed in accordance with certain Regional laws there can also be additional commitments between issuers and verifiers made to guarantee um for example the retention of data um or its reusability in in some jurisdictions and I know this because kind of we have we have encountered this problem before um kind of in principle kind of having this

attestation um sounds fantastic and obviously it's kind of like a much better solution than kind of like having and tons of people's passports somewhere on your s right but in many jurisdictions you actually need more than the attestation you actually need to save the clear text somewhere do you think that's changing um or do you think that's here to say so I absolutely think that there are many places in which the old school form of kyc requirements will remain in place but there are a variety of new technologies and new laws that are evolving this standard for example recently pass a passporting regime has um has entered the scene in the EU and

places like um the Mina region so for example if we are all European banks that we can all um rely on one another as obligated entities we can pass data between each other without needing to recheck it sort of called a passporting regime um similarly um we now have awesome decentralized Storage Solutions such as our colleagues over at idos that enable um sort of proof of existence uh of this data uh and enable access to the clear text Data of K behind kyc checks um based on certain you know certain requirements such as legislative or uh legal inquiry however that decentralized storage can also permit the user to

request deletion um of their data that can then be reflected across the network so as we're seeing more um you know Progressive regulation and more Nimble technology in the ZK space I'm really looking forward to this process becoming a lot easier when we think about kyc often we have one kyc issuer and they have sort of one client or recipient for whom they're performing that process and that's it so that by the time you may you know uh enter into a second or third kyc process it's like your first day on the internet and you have to begin from zero we're starting to see this premise of reusable kyc or um reusable credentials um being offered as a as a solution to to have kind of an interim

step to a totally open ecosystem we sometimes call this um one to one kyc is kind of the old school way and one to many kyc is one kyc provider and many verifiers of that of that data um so this sort of on to many premise I think is the intermediary step um where we're starting to see the kind of most Progressive practices um and I think that's kind of what's going what the ecosystem is going to look like in the next call it two years to come yeah let's hope so um so let's loop back to kind of the city of bros Iris because so far we've kind of talked about web 3 and web 3 and web 3 so let's kind of bring the citizens of Argentina into this how does um the Buenos Iris dig digital

identity system operate um on a technical level well we developed I mean not we alone but we and the local Regional Community in the crypto space we develop quar ID which is self Sovereign identity protocol based on the W standards of the ID and verifi credentials as PR ID and and many others are using out there today were anchored in the ckn era chain but the protocol is by definition multi-chain as a matter of fact we started and we anchored it in in roock which is a layer two running on top of Bitcoin we anchored it on polygon as well we anchored it in etherum layer one we anchored it in stet and finally we

decided to go through with the with C Inc but uh we we have today in the gab the protocol is open source and and is has been declared digital public good by the digital public good alliance anyone can take the code and anchor it is not that hard of a job in any in any type of in any type of blockchain how do we how do we do this okay our first call was uh to build a protocal completely open source because we we find we have the the vision that Society should be able of reading and understanding how are we dealing with personal information even if we're using blockchains because putting personal

information in blockchain is for me a no goal you can put claims or whatever but not Pi because that's that's extremely dangerous in in the case of quk ID information is only store own device so of course the government or the isure has the information but there's no Central database of information anywhere what we do as a CV is let's me speak as how we were operating before and how are we operating now before we have basically two doors open the first door was the door that our web two application used in which it you had your application you have your login and password you had to go through a

biometric process in order to verify your to kyc yourself and once you had that each time you open the application the application sort of pull for this API and got this kind of electronic documents digitally sign electronic documents into your application that was the first door open the second second door was the verifying door so when someone wanted to verify whichever ver certificate or thing you presented to another third party there was a verifying door in which authorized verifiers got access for an API for API keys in order to be en aable of verifying citizens and that basically presents two big problems the first one

being we have open doors with personal information to the internet although we have firewalls and security procedures and and and credentials and so on one things get hacked every day and for me it's not a matter of if but if but when are you going to be just to give you an idea last year the city ofos Cirus 2024 the city ofos Cirus received over 30 million attacks per month because people and people love to hack government so you're always a big big Target today those two those two doors are basically closed because the the first door the issuing door gets only opened one time to issue the credentials and then the

credentials res on your phone and you don't need to have a permanent door open for people downloading credentials each time they open their app you open the door me the credentials close the door and it's a temporary door and the second thing is you don't need a verifying API in order to check the validity of a credential because within the credential and following the W resistance you have a location of an of another array of bits which the issuer can change from one to zero for each credential to determine if that credential is is valid or not let let me give you a real world example today we're meaning driver's licenses on the

the Quark ID protocol using the miala wallet app maybe my driver's license expires in December 2026 but maybe I don't know the day before for yesterday I was stopped by a for a control and I G positive for driving and drinking or driving Under the Influence hence the police house has the authority of revoking or doing a temporary revocation of my license and that is a is a lot existing BOS if they catch you drinking you get your license reot you need to go through a c certain courses and things and pay fines and whatever because of course you you may not drive under the influence police has the authority of re that license without touching your wallet and without

touching your credential because they just put a flag on on the specific location in which your in which the bit corresponded to your wallet is and they put that from zero from one to zero so the level of security and the level of privacy that the city of oniris now has and is able of man how is able of managing personal information is an order of magnitude better than it was before okay so there's a lot to unpack here so maybe kind of let's let's kind of go back to kind of the technical underlying so kind of like you have the qu ID chain and that's kind of anchored in a number of different blockchains but kind of who

has who has the authority to kind of write to that chain because kind of it can't be everyone right because I mean the police officer should be able to kind of invalidate your driving license at least temporarily but I I very much shouldn't right so kind of how do how do you manage the access here oh qu is not a chain Okay this not a chain we anchored we just anchored the dids which is basically a hash identifying your wallet in the chain that's the only thing we put on chain each issue each issuer decides where their validity is stored that may me a what a what to access that maybe even store on chain

that maybe a postgress service with an appy that is a that is a decision which is made by each verifier by by each issu sorry so you as an insurer when you me your credential you you put a lot of information but basically two informations regarding credential validity first the first one is which where is the array of validation located and second which is the position of that credential within that array so that verifiers don't need to contact the isser each time they validate somewh because they just download that Arrow locally as a verifier and they check it locally they don't need to contact the verifier so the only one able of altering the validity of a credential is

the issuer because they they have the complete control over that bit of rice that determine the valid the valid the validity of each C so in this example kind of the issuer is um the the uh DMV the department of motor vehicles um it's it's not me right kind of I don't issue be is it me kind of like if I do I issue my own no no it's a driving license no right the DMV right yeah I mean it's yeah it's the equivalent to the DMV to for the ciris that's right okay and then kind of like for each one of these documents there's a different um there can be a different

Authority that kind of can alter the record right each issu has complete control over the over how they issue their credentials and and this is important as the issue has no way of altering the credentials that you have in your wallet because they are under your control this validity this validity strategy is precisely so as not because you can touch you can modify any issue credential because they already issue under under the control of users you can specify if the credential is still valid that was the example of as Kevin

mentioned before hey something in my kyc is altered the kyc issu needs to be enabl of saying hey this has changed this is no longer valid you need to reissue your document and here there's a combination between uh an interesting combination between technical the technical side and the regulation side let me give an example example I don't think that there's a document which has a greater stability as a bir certificate you're only B once but anyway that document may change because I don't know maybe you change your name for example so that document May exceptionally change and the amount the percentage amount of birth certificates that get changed is so so so so small

but anyway it's not zero so for example today there's kind of an international regulation that when presented your certificate it needs to it needs to be issued within a 30 days window of being presented which is pretty absurd but I mean that's the only way that sort of governments and verifiers are able of saying okay I I would use the risk of this birth certificate being modified and I accept a 30 days window maybe I changed my name I don't know 29 days ago and that ver certificate is invalid and this is the interesting combination between regulations and Technology because of previous technology of digitally s documents you had no way of perhaps verifying that the document is

still valid with this type of Technologies you can do that perfectly well without even contacting the issuer I think now I kind of understand the first or that kind of you you spoke about kind of like door going in um let's talk about kind of like the second door right so um I'm now kind of I now have something in my wallet and tell me what exactly I can do with it so kind of like say kind of you're in the position that kind of you need um your own birth certificate or kind of your father's birth certificate how does how does um having um quba um how does how does it help you just to give you a real world example today the main two we have 65

different credentials being issued from the Govern just from the government and we have several private parties meeting credentials and and maybe we can then touch on that because private parties can me credential without any type of control or even I mean the government doesn't even is not even able of knowing technically who is meting credentials and that is a decision me you decide who you trust any we have 65 different type of documents today the main two use cases are bir certificate and driver's license free and citizens credential when you go through the kyc in process that which can which can be do be can be done in two different ways you can either do it digitally using the mea app

or you can do it physically when whenever you go to renew your driver's license or you take an appointment in the in the he the public health system or whatever then you get sort of kyc and you g are you given the the right to is to mean your credentials first use case is presenting your birth certificate whenever the birth certificate is required as for example when you are in Argentina now we have a requirement that you need to present your birth certificate because you need to give your underage children a permit to travel off offshore so if if your underage children is going to another country you need you need to have a a a permit sign by both parents and when you do that you need to present

the birth certificate of both parents y today we haven't done yet the beare credential of the of the travel permit but that will be done in the future so that is a is a real word use case second real world use case in the city of w you have three to five million registered users and almost two and a half million monthly logins in our websites so today you can log in your website just scanning a QR code and exce and not exceeding but a presenting to the website to the website systems the the citizens credential so you scan a QR code no username and password and you get into the website and you can do

whatever thing you need to do with the government and the third use case which is probably the most popular is the driver's license so today if you have a driver's license issued by the ciris and we have a lot of driver's license we issue something like 50,000k per month a policeman stops you shows you a QR code you scan the QR code and the policeman has approv that you have a viid driver's license and and that is just that is just starting now because our strategy here and I think and we have discussed long lengthy this with I the critical part here is adoption is how do we get people on boarded how do we get people to start using the

technology and for me the first required thing for doing that is people don't need to know I mean they shouldn't know that they they're using blockchain Technologies you need to have a pretty straightforward app and pretty easy to use app that has no difference at all with what to of course if you are web free Savvy user and you know your stuff you can do whatever you want you can download whichever wallet and redeem your credentials but I always mention the same case my 85 year old mother W sign transactions with metamask won't even understand what metamask is so she needs a pretty straight forward web to app

that she can use to to have her driver's license or whatever thing she wants so that is that is something which is required and in my perspective governments have a big power to do a reverse adoption life cycle because have governments have something which is very bad but can be used in a good way which are the services that they provide are usually Monopoly so if you want a driver's license from the city of you have nowhere else to go you need to you get to driver's license here so that's a really big opportunity in order to perhaps go for some friction but after that all of the all of the community has the ability of benefiting from people

being out board on the system and being on chain talk about the friction about the user experience problems that kind of you had to overcome or that are still there for the users of the system we took a big decision I would say the starts of 2024 February 24 which just when we started we wanted to go full Cipher Frank so we say you know what this going to be everything open source the wallet is open source self custodial and that required us basically to have an open source wallet with no government application at all hence you need to do something which

is basically like kyc or sign or sign in in the government wallet to then be en aable of downloading your credentials in the quk ID open source wallet we did some testing and and basically regular users we have something like 25% of the population over 60 in in Buenos Iris it was pretty hard I mean people didn't get it they having two applications and so on then we decided to take this big approach and say hey you know what we're going to do two flavors if you want to go full full self custodial you can do it you can download the coret the wallet and get your credentials there but if you're not that much

into technology and and you want you don't want to mess things up we just change the architecture of a what to app embedded the Quark ID rails inside it and it's a gorial app and of course you have the two Alternatives you can choose to go south custodial you can you choose to go custodial I use the POR wallet my mother uses the mea wallet and we're fine with that I mean it's a user it's a user choice so from from my users perspective to dat the friction is not that much because by pursuing this strategy basically one day users realized that their mea application got updated we changed the logo and the

first time they open the application they had to go through this onboarding process if they didn't had a kyc they need to do it if they had a kyc they just did to log in and then you you had this kind of a one or two minutes process in which the the ID got created the credential got maintenance so on afterwards the second time you open the wallet is instant because the credential are store locally okay yeah super interesting and I think also kind of like this dual path um I think that makes a lot of sense because uh yeah uh I I think kind of like finding um a solution that fits all um kind of greatly reduces the space in which you're moving kind of design wise sorry just to give you one number uh we

launched October the 21st the the mea app in beded with Quark ID and as of today we awarded 250k in 45 days and we onward to two to 3K users per month per day sorry that that those are crazy numbers in crypto land let's talk about kind of like the ZK aspect of of um what Evan talked about earlier so kind of say I'm stopped by the police because I seem to be driving erratically um and they kind of they they look at my license um do they see everything that's on there so kind of like say I'm licensed to kind of um drive a car and drive a truck and

drive a motorcycle but I'm in a in a car so is there a way for me to kind of restrict them from seeing whether kind of I'm also allowed to drive a truck or it's kind of maybe maybe it's more more relevant kind of in terms of birth certificate so kind of like when I sign um when I sign um the transaction saying that my kids are allowed to travel abroad um is is um uh is the person who kind of um sees that signature can they see they kind of like I've been married and divorced three times and I have eight kids and kind of like uh I I have changed my name 10 times or something um is is that all embedded or do they just

see okay she she's she's the mother and she signed this and it's good this is a very interesting question because again technology and regulations travel travels at different speed so technically today we are able of just showing that you are able of driving and the police should be okay with that but regulations don't allow that regulations require the policeman to see every aspect of your priv license which is completely crazy because they don't need to know where you live for example and it's something stupid but I mean from a technological point of view we can do a selected disclosure of for example your age when when my

daughter goes into a bar and that's okay the bar has no regulation that to determine they just need to be sure that someone is over 18 and we can do that but from a driver's license perspective to their regulation requires that the policeman sees the driver's license and that leads to change and today we have the technology for that to change but again regulations and Technology trouble at different PES and regulation eventually will catch up yeah let's let's hope so so do you see any societal impact um since kind of you've launched um the meba and qu ID app 45 days or so ago um so is there is there something that kind of that kind

of clicks for people or is it just another kind of piece of software they they use as you know a good citizen I hope this is just another piece of software because if it changes too much we don't want to disrupt Society we just say hey you know what this is cool I have a driver's license and can show it scanning a QR code and that's it it's a piece of software what happens under under the hood it's just I mean it's lovely but it's still for nerds and Society doesn't care about it the greatest impact that we we are seeing is private companies and institutions getting on board because they say hey you know what this is amazing we we can sort of get rid of several aspects of personal

informational security that we used to deal with and now we have a much better way of doing it hey just and this is a real work scenario again fintech and we are modifying the regulation in order to achieve that fch say Hey you know what if I get presented the credential of the city of wos Aris then I could get rid of the kyc in part of doing going which to what Ian was saying about reusable kyc can I get rid of the kyc and the onboarding process which is costing me basically 50% drop off rate in my onb boarding process oh yes you can again technically you can we need to come up

with certain regulations in order for you to do so and the great ability that it provides uh for example universities or Banks or whatever of minting credentials on their own at a zero cost because we already paid for the creation of the dad and they they can me credentials at zero cost so we have the second biggest university in Argentina starting to mean credentials for the students because the students have this uh sort of benefit in certain jobs and commer in in one of that they can buy with disc scount because their students okay you present the credential of a student of this University and you get a discount the same thing happens with banks uh the second largest R Bank

in Argentina integrated this technology within their wallet because they offer this possibility to subnational States in argena say okay you know what we give you this wallet with our banks services and you can put your government documentation inside the wallet so all of these different applications that institutions private institutions are and I mention big institutions there are two big uh electri or sorry gas companies which are starting to Mint the utility bills ver credential so people can show that as a proof of address and even much smaller much more companies or startups as for example we have a crypto have

here which is called cimento and they're doing popup cities once every three to four months which is called Alf and a left passport credential is minted on top of qu ID and for them it's pretty easy they just download the issue or start meaning credentials and people can either use qu ID or they can use the same wallet of ciris that's super interesting kind of hear how how it works in practice um I kind of I I now have a question for you again Evan and I think I'll have the same question for you Diego so pay attention to what Evan says um so what ethical considerations kind of arise

with blockchainbased digital identity systems or maybe kind of to to to reframe that um what's the unhappy case what could go wrong as Diego was noting earlier the practice of publishing data on a public Ledger can get dicey when we start talking about data that describes human beings you know I I often think of blockchains as the most public and permanent form of Express that human beings have ever had in our existence as a species and so you know certainly um exposing private data especially data that can be used to marginalize or harm people in such a public and permanent form can have devastating effects uh we've already

seen that the exposure of potentially harmful personal data has you know has exacted all kinds of uh of havoc on individuals around the world from hacks or even malicious publication of personal data not to mention the you know the many different laws that prohibit the disclosure of personally identifiable information in a form that cannot be deleted um and cannot be protected of cannot abide by law the bare case for you know for poorly built monopolistic doxing Technologies is that we fail to take advantage of the unique tools and capabilities of zero knowledge proof scaling Solutions and block CH for

their security and instead make short-term compromises um that that add to the fragmentation of our ecosystem and endanger the individuals that we would hope that they serve um you know the United Nations is actually named as one of their sustainable development goals I think 16.9 that by the year 2030 the objective is that all people in the world will have legal identities um and I think that it is unlikely that these sort of more Niche monopolistic solutions could possibly reach that goal there are 850 million people in the world right now that do not have you know provable identity documentation um

and so as we start to consider a global implementation of this Tech we need to consider it truly globally in the places where um the you know privilege and Technical literacy that we enjoy here on chain it is not necessarily equal to all and so that that's why I think privacy preserving Technologies legally compliant Technologies and you know optimal user experience for everyone from our dents to their 85-year-old mothers like you know our forensic park ideer building are so essential to avoiding that bease yeah that's uh that's SE several interesting uh points you're making there Evan Diego from kind of the practitioners perspective um what what

are you afraid could happen I wouldn't say what I'm afraid could happen but I'm afraid of what is happening and we see it every day early 2024 the national people registry in Argentina got hacked and 65 million identities was stolen so you got personal information pouring all over the place something like four months ago the national driver Mo the drive the national driver's license institution got hacked and you had a telegram group in in which you put the someone's ID number and you get a photo

of the driver's license that terrible as crazy as it sounds so so people started entering the into that telegram Channel and they put the ID numbers of famous people the president the ministry of security or whatever and they got you started having on Twitter the the driver license of famous people boring all over the place so last week two of the main hospitals in in the three of the Mino hospitals in Argentina got hacked and all of their medical records got obliterated and and run some word and they asked 150 BTC to go get those record back so people and I have a couple of friends working there were forced to for example instead of

when you do a whichever study BL or whatever instead of using their systems they were forced to print out the study and carry the papers all around so that is what is happening today and the type of solutions that Privado and and Evan's team is working on that we are working on is kind of getting us out of that reality in which instead of having our database and information open to the internet and instead of even worse creating this sort of concentrated databas is full of different sources of information which is the perhaps the biggest risk building this monopolistic and and centralized vision and hey Let's

do let's give users a a beautiful experience Gathering all of the data into this big big warehouse and say that is gonna get hacked man so I think that that's that's a huge that's a huge risk that that the things that we are building definitely is avoiding that's that's a very valuable reality check when you think about Prado ID and uh uh buenos Iris kind of in the blockchain space What are the developments that are currently underway so are there new features Integrations regions of focus um because kind of right now it's it's only in Buenos AOS right today's use in Buenos AIS uh we

have partner with a with a gotech a Lo Mexican gotech company and we are implementing it has been implemented in no Leon which is a state in Mexico this this Monday just for companies uh that's for starters and we we're hoping to Evol into driver's license in the next couple of months we're doing the same with monter and with three different provinces in Argentina and speaking with several governments both Municipal subnational and National around the r in the world cool um and kind of going Beyond kind of identity um what role do you

both kind of see blockchain playing in other aspects of governance and Society I can I can hop in with some thoughts there I think you know from our unique vantage point in the identity space we get to see a lot of the diverse use cases that are not purely Financial come to Market because they require more than token data Alone um I think from a global regulatory discussion um you know are we're starting to see really Progressive laws such as ma come into effect here in the European Union where zero knowledge proofs will be permissible methods of of um legally proving data uh this is um I

think a you know a dramatic difference from a few years ago when few people even in the Crypt space could explain what a zero knowledge proof was I think what this means essentially is that um governments are starting to recognize the diversity of not only identity but compliance age verification business identity and even in the upcoming um EU AI bill that will go into effect in 2026 AI agent identity um so the um the sort of range of these different capabilities then asks us the question what will the impact of blockchain trans actions be for these different capabilities um at Privado ID you know two sort of camps

where we receive a lot of requests for support one are in the agent identity space enabling agents to transact on chain and develop reputation um such that they can um coordinate with one one another more easily um and then also in the institutional space there's over two trillion dollars of capital trapped offchain because it cannot enter the permissionless offshore casino and co-mingle fun with unknown parties so bringing permissioned liquidity into defi um through institutional development I think is also a meaningful way that we can move value on chain leveraging these more U maturing maturing identity Technologies um and also bringing space forward as a

whole super nice so um if others be it governments businesses individuals kind of want to get involved in shaping the future of digital identity um how how can they how can they do that and um how do they find what you guys are doing in my case you could just go to Quark id.org and and check our website there or you can contact me at uh at Fernandez which my main Twitter fantastic what about you Evan for all seun civilians and Builders alike that are interested in the identity space we always welcome you at pr.

or Prado ID on Twitter in terms of activities that you can try right now you can of course um explore our libraries our embedded wallet Marketplace um schema Builder query Builder and many other tools and capabilities um so we have a lot documented for those who want to build at many layers of the stack from the protocol all the way up to Applications um and certainly I would encourage everyone if you are feeling in a mood to uh to move um or to physically go somewhere uh Diego mentioned earlier the popup cities of Alf which I have heard are really outstanding way to you know touch and experience a lot of these new things we're talking about in person um so I personally look forward to joining one of those and definitely would

include that in my recommendations I mean thanks so much for that uh we have a run in Popa City right now but it's ending up in one week so you're kind of late but we'll do another one in March so you're more than invited to come I hope you to have you here so in that case you heard that dear listeners please join us in March fredrica if your schedule allows I'm sure that we would love to see you there too perfect thank you both for coming on um what a fun topic to discuss thank you so much for weon it was an absolute Delight thank you guys so much and we will see you on chain