The Rise of An Identity-Native Web 3.0 World

Thank you. Hello everyone. Good morning to folks in Europe. So I am responsible for ecosystem partnerships at ontology. So ontology is a public protocol that is very much focusing on decentralized identity and decentralized data exchange. So we would be exploring how to implement that in the last couple of years. And we have some learnings about how we can actually bridge the, the needs of web three with solutions of decentralized identity and data exchange.

So this is, this presentation starts with a bit of a summary of what we have learned so far and our observations of how there is actually a rise of a identity and reputation native Webster world. And then I'll be talking a bit about the latest thinking that we're having, how to actually address the needs there and the challenges there.

So, yeah, so let's get started next page please. Yeah. So basically what we have been thinking is that there's, there's rather vague understanding about reputation and how that's used in the, in the web three and associated with that is the identification of people and things. And then how that evolved from very early on faces of history to web three. So we thought it would be interesting to start from some primitive, fundamental concepts of how we understand identification and reputation. Then we can take our journey to see how that, how those concepts are, are being relevant in web three.

So, so in our journey to try to understand how to create the decentralized identification for people and things, we realized that what, what was identification in a very early on like before more identity when people didn't have any ID card or any sort of like registration with city hall or governmental systems, the identification is basically in the town square or in the, in the, a communal space where everyone lived and works, your, your neighbors, your coworkers, your family members, they remember you as who you are with your face, your, your gestures and your entire representation of a human being and your name, right?

So they know like, okay, you are John because you having John, when you were little, like a little, little boy, and that common identification basically lives in everybody's memory. And there is actually also reputation associated with the name, John, and you, that's basically a bunch of behavior track records that you have, like how you behaved and how you grew up and become who you are today and what, what kind of activities and what kind of behaviors you have had in the past.

So those are associated with your identification and people form some sort of like a judgment about who you are, right? So that's basically before modernity. And then when, when we enter industrial age, so we are, we are used to have like some registrated password, or maybe some sort of like a ID card for work.

Then, then with that batch, you can basically enter certain factories and you can start working and then people call your name and check your check, who is who based on your documents. So that's how you, how you are identified, which is different from how it was previously. And you're registered in all kinds of governmental systems as a person, taxpayer a, a driver for a vehicle. And then your reputation becomes very much on paper. You have certain track records of diploma, of your birth certificate of your, you know, ownership of a house or your, your work contract.

And all these type of documents are encapsulating, basically who you are and what kind of person you are. Right. And in a web 1.0 phase, we start to have like a digital twin, like a digital identity song on the internet in a very early stage of the internet. You can still be super free and you basically create all kinds of blog posts.

You, you talk on forums and your different names, and these, these, these blogs and these comments, these interactions basically become associated with your account, your account name, and somehow people or companies can monetize that based on cookies, you have left, right, that specific collection of your data based on your browser. And that becomes more apparent and more articulated in, in what too, when everyone has a smartphone, that's basically you have your, your have your, maybe your mobile number verification for a lot of these apps you're using.

And these apps are also associated with your email addresses that has your exchanges of different information and your geolocation data, your purchasing history, your viewing history on different social media accounts. And these are all kinds of data that is associated with your identification. And that identification basically can track track back to who you are with your, with your identity, registered with officials. And I think what is interesting is that we think reputations are only in web two.

The reputations are only how many followers you have on social media, how many likes you have, but at the broader sense, you actually have created a lot more data on the web, on your mobile devices, on different apps. And every, each of these service providers like an app, they're basically doing service provision to you based on your reputation. And that reputation can be manifested in, in a really simple way, for example, like, okay, you have an account, you have verified certain email address.

Then I can do service provision and you have a verified payment method and you have a verified address for, for purchase delivery. Then I can basically do eCommerce services to you. So these are still kind of some sort of like reputation, but these, these data are stored in centralized servers. This is also a common knowledge now for people who are interested in web street and they can basically base on your data to do different things, you know, making you qualify for different services, making recommendations to you. And we've heard already the problem of ATIC discrimination.

So people realize, okay, if you are logging off from like iOS device and purchasing something, it's more expensive than logging off from like Android voice a device to, to buy the same thing. So that's basically a way to manipulate your, your treatment based on the data or your reputation they have accumulated and defined for you.

So, as we're seeing the, the journey to decentralize the web, our original idea in the previous several years was to bridge authentic and trustworthy data from the, the, the real world we say, or the web three, oh, oh, sorry, or the web two to web three. But we realized that that's, that's a very difficult and time consuming process with a lot of, you know, regulatory and traditional roadblocks lying there. But at the meantime, while we're solving this problem, we're seeing, there are a lot of native data being produced in web three already.

That's reflecting a person's behavior, reflecting their, their, their characters, reflecting their qualifications or skillset with certain track records that really tells who they are and what they're capable of doing and what kind of experiences they had. And these data are becoming more and more every single day. And that is creating a unique native space for reputation. And those reputation are basically associated with a decentralized identifier or, or at least an address.

And, and how, what do we do with that? You know, like how that can be managed in a way that is very drastically different from how those are managed on web two, and that is beneficial and ethical and towards the kind of future we want for web street. Next slide please.

So, yeah, as, as I was just explained these problems like people have no control, no, no ownership over their data. These, these data are blocked in client servers. They're also fragmented across different service providers, and you can have a transparent algorithm and discrimination associated with that. That's even becoming a profit driver for a lot of organizations. And there's also of course, privacy and security concerns. Next slide please. So with the development of DLT, we have already a lot of solutions in place to manage it with decentralized data exchange and identity management.

We can, we can assign data ownership to individuals and authenticate that with decentralized verification. And at this time, meanwhile, they can also be privacy by design technology to preserve the, the privacy for individual, and also removing the middleman, removing the different inter intermediaries can also enable like a peer to peer transformation for, for more valuable data changes. Like for example, you can, as a Uber driver, right?

You can, you can have like a hundred ride with Uber, but when you decided I'm not happy with Uber or I'm moving to a new country, there is grab, or there's another shared, shared riding service provider. I have absolutely no track marker. I can port out from, from Uber to this new platform to demonstrate I have been having 100 plus very safe and satisfactory rights and I a qualified driver to, to do the work. You have to start from scratch. This is just, obviously doesn't make much sense. Right. Next slide please. So was the, was the emergence of massive user data on web three?

Then we can really think of how to have space capture these, these value in the more self-sovereign and more ethical way. So there's a lot of on chain data there's on chain transactions indicating the user behaviors and there's assets balances basically, and all kinds of ownership history, right? So there's not only fundamental tokens can represent, like how many E you have and how, how long have you been trading? What kind of assets did you collaborate in the past and how much have you been on leverage and stuff like that.

But also like with NFTs, you can demonstrate like how you have been be investing in that space and what kind of assets do you have those NFT sometimes even signal, no certain social circles you belong to. Right. So if you're one of those people who had crypto punks early on that, say something about your, your social circles and your knowledge about NFTs, you probably are also like investor in, in the Dell where you participate investment decisions together with others.

And those are also reflecting your balance and ownership history that can say how successful you have been investing in different assets. And of course your asset change volume, that's easy to understand. And your smart contract associations. This is also interesting.

Like, for example, if you are, if you are participating in certain governance behaviors you have been participating in, in, in voting then your historical holdings and your, your history of these type of voting governance related transactions can basically speak of your, your, your ability or your at least your experience participating, participating in, in voting and your credit history. Of course, that's important for any real adoption of decentralized finance in the future. And together with that on chain data, there are also a lot of off change data, which are very valuable as well.

Like your, a lot of these D apps nowadays, they don't, they don't have everything reflected in their transaction, right? It's not a lot of things are valuable, but not worse, invoking a very expensive smart contract transaction, but there are different in-app datas for your collectibles, your, your purchases, your reviews, and ratings, and your user profiles engagement with different social networks and social platforms. These are all very valuable of chain data. I can give some examples in the next slide, please.

So some interesting native scenarios, like the first one is granting entry, right? So when someone wants to participate in a, in a, in a Dow, as a member to do all kinds of different contributions, a lot of these organizations are interested to know if you're a, or you're just a spam creating a hundred different accounts just to claim different candies, right? So they want to do civil resistance at, into verification for you. And so that is very one interesting data that is associated with your identity. There could also be, as I probably mentioned before particular possessions of NFT, right?

Some, some doubts require you to hold their, their token to show that, okay, you have some understanding about their community. You know how this works, and you're interested in also have a skin in the game, and then you can participate in whatever is defined as the main activity of that doubt. So that's something they want to know on this. Sometimes they also want to know your social media verification, where you say, okay, you are someone who have a very active social media engagement.

You, you, you talk about certain topics, but is this Twitter account really belong to you? Right? That's a verification that is interested. And if you are saying like, okay, you are a expert in an Ft investment, or you are a very famous NFT artist or artist in general, and you command a certain fan base and you can also need to prove that for how many floors you have in Instagram, in, in Twitter. And these kind of data are also very interesting that they can be poured into the webstream world and become native data. That basically that's who you are.

And there's also participation, engagement and contribution doubts. Like how many governance proposals have you, have you proposed? And have you worked on a bounty or a, or a early on inception stage discussion of a certain certain activity, have you in contributed to some grants or to some funding of public goods, which is probably the main purpose of bad Dell, or have you signaled any kind of interesting advocation for that community or that Dell? So these are all kinds of data that can demonstrate your, your ability to part participate meaningful in a Dell governance.

And those can be reflected in your reputation data. And there is also influence.

So the, a lot of communities have been talking about what is, what is going to be the ideal case for, for governance? How can you be, how can you be allocated different way to your voting decision?

Should, should it be just one, one token, one vote, or should there be quadratic voting that sort of make sure the people who have the most amount of votes, the tokens do not manipulate entire voting for the decisions, or it should be some sort of like reflecting some sort of meritocracy, right? If you're expert in legal matters, maybe on those type of proposals, your, your, your weight should be reflected.

So, so reputation and influence are also reflecting these data and, and having some sort of reputation built in can also enable a lot more meaningful decision making mechanisms. These are still largely experimental space, but that is something worth, really exploring because as we know, good governance takes into meritocracy takes meritocracy into account. And then last but not the least, we've been talking about the difference between real world finances and crypto native finances. The crypto native finance space is still largely under collateralized landing.

So that means basically you're, collateralizing a hundred dollars to borrow a hundred, sorry, collateralizing $100 to borrow $80. Sometimes doesn't make sense in the real world if you think about it, right? So eventually we'll going, we're heading towards the future. There's going to be under collateralized loans and undergrads borrowing. And that will mean you need some ways to, to account for your trustworthiness or credit worthiness for credit based lending and your history of transaction data and your any data that basically speaks to your response, responsible behavior to repayments.

Those are going to be happening a lot more as we see the space develops. Next slide, please. So based on these thinking, ontology has been conceptualizing together with the community on this idea for a reputation and trust meeting protocol. So we're now calling it orange, and this is still at the early on stage that we're still building the fundamental technology blocks together with community members.

So if we can make this a soft sovereign and privacy protective solution, and that basically embraces all kinds of data in a Webster native world, and it's very user friendly for any protocol or any organization, or even just a developer group, wanting to create their way to maybe some sort of a customized algorithm to determine how they see certain behaviors should be incentivized, should be promoted and celebrated and have that definition to become a reputation.

Then they can enable a lot more interesting engagement with their community users and will make that into configural reporting in the format of fair fiber credentials or NFTs. So, so these can be flexible and meaningful in whatever customized way. Next slide please. So the solution could be served as a self-sovereign reputation management protocol for Webster citizens, so they can browse their DDS and associated on chained data, link their on chain option in-app data to their DDS and manage all kinds of claims and requests to authenticate certain data that consist of a particular reputation.

And they can also program particular reputation output in a format of scores and FTS verify credentials or reports to demonstrate whatever they want to demonstrate can be a on chain record of their work history as a developer, or can be an on chain history of their participation in governance activities, right? So those are something that needs to be portable across different applications, but completely under the control because you basically have to sign all these transactions and claims using your private key. So you have your entire sovereignty over that.

And then the same solution could also be useful as middleware for D app and Dow builders. They can, they can use existing algorithms to configure their own algorithms, or they can use their, their own data together with other data that's available available to them and seamlessly integrate such programmable reputation into their system and trigger customized actions or privileges. So I think these are all very interesting ways that we see can be very beneficial in the future for the fundamental data layer of web three. And next slide please. Yeah.

So this is just a slide talking about ontologies in Denver and how we worked with different ecosystem partners in the past to continue to explore, to become valuable contributor in a space of Webre for decentralized identity and data. So I think I already used that my, my time. So thank you very much. If you have any questions or interesting, what we've been talking about, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or any other social media methods. I'm happy to engage with you and answer your questions and hear your thoughts as well.