JP Bedoya on Civic’s decentralized identity platform

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the crypto coin show we have jp padoya the chief product officer of civic jp welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time today hey thank you ashley thank you for having me you're very welcome a huge part of blockchain and web 3 is totally revolutionizing how we see

0:24identities and hopefully bringing more value to the end users and being able to hold their identities control them determine who we give it to and not have as many hacks from centralized parties that are exposing our personal information and just bringing the the control of what's rightfully ours back to us and that's the discussion i want to have today with you jb about

0:46decentralized identities what civic is working on and how web3 is shaping identities in general i would love to kick off our conversation with just your vision on on identity and and how decentralized identities are taking over what we know and what we used to use uh you know the way that we've been using our identities throughout web 2. yeah there's there's a lot there ashton

1:14as you can imagine so um civic has been working on the decentralized identity problem for for a few years now right um i've been with civic for four and a half years um i joined from from an agriculture tech um company where i was heading up product design and previously i've been doing a different product uh solutions that actually covered identity

1:44too i worked at lifelock for a bit we did identity theft protection and that's kind of where i started thinking about the digital identity problem and how could we tackle it um so now at civic we we are providing a digital uh identity management tool specifically focused on web three so that people as you said you know they need to be able to privately manage and

2:10use their identity not only on launching but across chains and then also we need to be able to enable web3 platforms to take this digital identities so we have two two core products at civic today we have civic paths which is our integrated permission tool that web3 platforms can easily integrate into their

2:38into their stack and a consumer focused one called civic.me where you as a user can start managing that web3 identity and create a presence start thinking about your reputation and then ultimately as you think about how are you going to be able to use your identity it can be through

3:03your irl data and information on who you are and then different pseudonyms as part of that including your nafts because as you think about how nfts have become a core piece of who you are in web 3. it is important to bring all that into one place to then give that ability to have that control across web3 and how you are presenting yourself

3:33in different in in different applications different networks right because there's not going to be just one metaphors right there's going to be multiple ones run by different companies centralized decentralized ones chain one chain two chain three who knows very interesting jp and that that's a a great segue into talking about the metaverse and how decentralized identities and just

3:59identities on the internet in general especially when we move into the metaverse people can really be any avatar that they want and you can understand that cryptocurrency addresses are pseudonominous and people's identities often on on twitter you know they're going by uh an avatar name and not their real name right but from what i understand it's possible to

4:22use a pseudonym and verify your identity for the purposes and then sort of keep that personal information close to say hey you know this is one of my identities um and i can prove that i could tie it to my real identity if i wanted to i feel like right now in sort of the wild west and you know anonymous founders creating projects or people just going under some side name

4:46and there's no real verification uh with that is that something that is applied and can be solved through the civic me as well yeah so with city dot me sorry you'll be able uh the the goal of static.me is to enable that to the nimity while also having a verified identity

5:12supporting it and at its core we use uh the ids decentralized identifiers right um and we are using the the solana based uh dids where the idea doesn't necessarily need to be on chain of course right but the way that we approach it for web3 so that it becomes native to web3 platforms um is by using the salon at the id base so once you have that

5:41base identifier then you can create multiple identities associated with that main identifier and that main identifier can be also uh unique right that's what you want so that then you're not creating multiple um identities that then can enable bad actors either so if you think about how do you create pseudo and animals identities well it

6:09could be as simple as verifying i am a unique individual i'm a real human and then from there creating an identity that you can use on twitter or you can use when you're messaging someone now that you know wallet wallet messaging is starting to become a thing right you want to make sure you're not getting spammed or you're not getting uh a bot that is

6:32communicating with you or trying to also take advantage of a drop or things like that so so that's our our initial attempt to solve that problem in also a decentralized way right we don't want to be a honeypot of identity information right we want to enable the user to have full control of that data now pool control means that you decide what

7:00pieces of information you're going to share with that third party but you also need to be aware that once you share that information that information is now owned in some shape or form by that third party so as consumers we need to realize that the privacy policies of those third parties are also important for us to to reap in some shape or form because i

7:30hear a lot of people say oh yeah you need to control your your identity and once you once it is decentralized and self-sovereign that's gonna solve everything that's one piece of that puzzle because once you share it then they can do anything they want with it so we also need to help stool be good stewards of consumers data definitely that's a great point

7:53in and trying to keep your identity close but once you share it with these partners if they have access to it how what are their policies on storing it and will it end up like our information on on linkedin facebook and twitter that have all been exposed to hacks and and all of a sudden now you're although your information was yours now it's out for the world for

8:14for hackers to take advantage of and i i feel like it one of the most major problems is with all of these social media networks you know it's not just bots on twitter elon musk trying to figure out you know how many fake accounts are there on twitter i've personally experienced fake accounts and impersonators and scams on facebook linkedin instagram and twitter

8:38all of the social medias are totally whacked with verifying identities and being able to prove who someone is you know i've been impersonated on many social medias of people trying to scam others using my name and there's no real solutions for this right now uh in web 2. um so will civic be able to solve those problems with this technology yeah that's uh that's that's that's our

9:05goal um i think when when you when you when you are now enabling um others to use your identity there are also ways where you can do it in a way that you don't share all your information you could just share specific facts that say i am i am a male or i am a human that could be enough for

9:34an application another application would want to know well has this person been verified in some shape or form well maybe i can kyc myself but i don't need to share any of that information as an application you can just be okay just to know that this person has been verified so that's where concepts has verified credentials and um exterior knowledge proofs come into play

9:59where you can also prove that you are over 18 right um and we are also doing this uh as part of civic pass and that's the the next step in using your identity so with civic.me you create that identity you create those personas that you need to interact with different systems and platforms and then civic pass is the

10:26tool that those platforms can they can they use to to verify that you're a real human to verify that you're over 18 to verify that maybe that you are in the us to verify that you're not a bot without getting any pii from you right all they need to do is look for what we call acidic pass which is a non-transferable token that gets issued to that user's wallet

10:56so then you have smart contracts that can interact directly with the wallet knowing that that person behind the wallet is allowed to access that system based on the rules or any kind of rules and the user has the ability to then revoke though that token transfer it to somewhere else because it's also important right that you don't want to have tokens that are just there that you

11:25cannot do anything about it so you have to have control as a consumer too that's a great point and um i i'm curious on that transition to web3 and having the token and being able to revoke it as opposed to in web 2 just having a username and password that doesn't require downloading a wallet or understanding how cryptocurrency and revoking tokens work in web3 i feel

11:54like that's a huge step uh towards mainstream adoption like that's a big barrier of uh there's extra steps involved because they sort of have to when you know when you take control of your funds there's also more responsibility understanding how it works so how do you get by those barriers to ensure it's just as easy as a username and password i think it's uh it's it's a few things

12:18one it starts with um the the user experience and and really thinking about the context and giving the user enough information to make the right decision without overwhelming them with information sometimes we feel that we need to over explain certain certain concepts for people to understand what's happening and we forget that people are actually already getting it and

12:46we are not going to get mass adoption just yet we also need to realize that so also the people that are there have some good idea of crypto already so as as the use cases also start becoming more mainstream the way in which users will onboard will also start to change so they may not need to get a self-custodial wallet right away in order to interact with that

13:15application now you have you know solutions like web3 auth for example or magic.link that are bridging that gap between web 2 and web3 right where you log in with your google credentials facebook credentials or twitter credentials and then behind the scenes you're getting a wallet so now you can start enabling web3 applications to feel a little bit

13:42more web wish for for that next generation of users that are coming in but behind the scenes you're able to take advantage of all the benefits of a web3 platform now they're not just a cryptocurrency uh piece right it's those blockchain rails that now you have where you can start using all these different um technologies uh that that now with

14:10public blockchains and you know marketplaces and trading and buying and selling nfts where they're digital assets at the end of the day does the user really need to know on what chain oh i need to go get a phantom wallet and metamask wallet not necessarily right and then as they start getting comfortable with the tech you can start peeling off all these

14:34different guard rails that we may be adding to the to the initial onboarding and ultimately i think in the next you know a couple years people might will be much more comfortable and who knows how how self-custody is going to evolve yeah great point and i feel like there definitely needs to be that transition period where people start seeing you know log

14:59in with your decentralized identity beside the logging with facebook log in with google it's not just going to be a flip to switch overnight um yes and what i've seen with some of these decentralized identities coming out is that they also double as you know your wallet address personalized name uh maybe domain name they could connect to multiple blockchains

15:25so that you can make it easy for you don't have to copy paste some alphanumeric address that somebody might mistype is that the case with uh civic.me where it there's wallets or domain names or is it just strictly sort of like your driver's license your id card well if that's a great question ashton i think uh wallet address domain names i think they're all

15:52stepping stones to ultimately your identity and and you right um if you're going to connect to a to an application you're never going to enter a wallet address you're just you're going to say connect and that's going to be connected with your wallet which happens to have a public key right that it's an address that public key can ultimately be a domain name right my i have you know i

16:18own juan seoul on eve uh whatever those things are i think those are those are helpful stepping stones in order to find someone else but as the as the owner of the identity it doesn't really matter too much right it's mostly about how you connect to that system and then once that system knows who you are

16:45that's where an identity layer that civic becomes very important because now i pointed to you now i need to know okay who are you can i let you in or not the wallet address an eth domain now they're not going to tell you that all they're going to do is help you point to that public key that public address but then from there what do you do and that's where civic

17:11brings a lot of value to the ecosystem we believe right because we are wallet agnostic we're not we don't want to compete with wallets we want to work with every wallet because those have become that first entry point but as once you peek inside the door you need to know okay is this the place i need to be you know and then you can close the door if that's not the place

17:32so with city got me you'll be able to use your solana domains your eth domain so if you go to city dot me slash your your domain name for example you will be able to see what's in that wallet everything that's public plus some of those those civic passes so you could say okay this person or this the owner of this wallet is a real individual or not because those type but we don't say who

18:01you are and the name of that but you as a user can choose what's the avatar that you have one half there what's a displayed name what's your little bio so starting to create some of those public personas is i think something that will become more and more important as web 3 platforms become widely adopted across use cases okay great and as the platforms become

18:30more widely adopted obviously your team is looking for civic to become the go-to you know decentralized identity for for everyone to start onboarding what are the ways in which your team is growing uh to get more adoption from you know existing crypto users and hopefully new users as well is it through more b2b partnerships and partnering with the wallets and exchanges or other marketing

18:54tactics yeah that's a great question i think uh we are tackling both sides of the equation consumers right we're going direct to consumer with the value of opposition of starting out a really nice curated nft gallery because let's just be realistic nobody loves identity nfds are much more fun right so and they have become part of your identity so a place to bring both

19:20together so we want to create the best place for you to manage all your nfts do things with your nfts and that includes your identity so that's civic.me and we're doing just different marketing initiatives you know advertising viral type of adoption too we're going to be doing some contests so there's that traditional piece and then from a b2b perspective that you bring up is

19:48absolutely right we're working with different platforms out there and daos so what we're trying to do is to integrate into core platforms on different ecosystems so on solana for example we we integrated the the the civic the civic pass into candy machine if you're familiar that is the minting platform on solana

20:15so you could by just clicking two um two buttons say uh i want to make sure that this person is human so require a captcha and that was all done on chain so that was uh an an integration the other interesting one was on on realms which is the dao platform on salvador that enables spl token governance voting so from that perspective right we were hearing that

20:44well you want to make sure that in some cases one human gets only one vote no matter how many nfts or how many tokens they own for other type of votes of course if you have more more tokens your vote might be more um more more weighted to towards you so there's there's that other piece so native integrations into core enabling technologies is one of our our

21:10strategies and of course your traditional b2b sales where we go to different projects we discuss their needs now as regulation is starting to trickle in we are getting much more um interest from platforms right everybody this wild wild west i think it's going to start to um calm down and start getting projects to say you know what now we

21:37need to start paying attention to regulation and regulation be as simple as well in order to access the content you have to be over 18. but just a checkbox is not enough we need to do it in a proper way so why don't we bring civic to take care of that and then it's it's a very simple integration all they need to do is just call our library and we do that all within their own app

22:02so we try to make it as simple as possible also for developers to integrate it right most of us are developers that's cydic and it's basically a super simple uh couple of lines of code integration for for b2b partners to be able to bring in that identity layer into their um web3 platform very cool i'm looking forward to seeing how it all

22:30becomes all official and you know it's it's required that everyone will eventually have their own decentralized identities to to get access to the things that they want and i do like that nft uh twist you said there you know that it's true uh identities aren't you know the most exciting you know no one's raving about uh their identity unless it's super cool and they happen to have

22:52an nft that's super rare that represents their identity and all of a sudden it's way more interesting to to them and others so i love to look into that more and we don't have a lot of time left jp but for the viewers that want to try testing out their decentralized identities and to follow along with the updates uh for the nft part that you were speaking about

23:14what's the best way for them to learn more yeah so civic.com i think it's a great place to start for a developer or a consumer because from there you can just easily go to the different places civic.me is that consumer-facing nft and identity management tool i'd love to for you to try it out we'll put your your wallet addresses there um and start sharing in

23:41in the in the world i would love to to get your thoughts too definitely sounds great would love to do that and i will definitely leave the links for civic.com civic.cme and the social links as well in the description box below for the viewers to take a look thank you so much for for this information i'm really am looking forward to having more verifiable identities on on

24:04web3 and just on the internet in general because it's a bit of a mess for those uh power users that understand you know their identities in 200 different locations and they're all vulnerable on different websites and it's just not looking good so there's definitely a huge need in the market for this technology that civic is bringing uh so i'm wishing you guys all the best on

24:24that and let's definitely follow up in the near future great thank you so much ashton i really appreciate it you