Decentralized Identity Ecosystem for Southeast Asia: A journey from MVP to Production

Survey cannot be the in person. I mean myself, I'm calling in from Northern Cambodia right now, Omar sitting in Helsinki. So what we have on the agenda today is telling a story. It'll be a certain technical part to it, but mainly we wanna share the story of Zada, how we went live and how we've been expanding, building up real production cases in Southeast Asia and especially in Myanma. So as a company, Saada calls itself an identity company working with an identity network and an ecosystem.

So the, the goal for us is to revolutionize how people interact with the world around them, especially in a place like Myanma. So the people here today is me, of course Andreason, I'm Swedish, but been based in Asia for the last 20 years. Made based in Helsinki is that with block architect experience. So we cannot switch place. I went to Asia and went to the Nordex. Okay. As a company, we really believe like all of you of course, that everyone should have access to an identity and be able to prove their who they are and get access to services.

And in Europe of course this is a little bit taken for granted, but in many places in Southeast Asia it's not like something everyone can do. And not everyone have access to services because they cannot through who they are. So we took the name of Zada from this wooden thing that the person in Myanma get when you're born, this traditional zada that states exactly who you are and what time you born and everything. And he used the fortune telling especially, and we decided to focus on Myanma.

Cause I've been here for the last 11 years and it's a big population of 55 million people, a large share of young people, but only less than half has an official id. And if you can even call it official because you can barely trust it and only a small share, about 25% have access to in fact ous banking and micro financing services. So what happened in Myanma that when I came, it was abundance of money. There was money everywhere. People were counting it, they were carrying it in bags.

The you, you had to have a plastic bag or suitcase, they carrying money. But now instead there's Q codes everywhere. And now we talking about five years. In fact I think even in the last three years there are Q codes instead everywhere. And you have to have multiple wallets and multiple bank accounts. You can still transmit money between the banks but you can use many different QR codes. But the thing is that the country's still lacking behind when comes a normal trust. So fraud is very common. People don't trust documents. The national id you can print yourself at home.

Telecom companies say that 70% of their ID is for their phone numbers are fake. So there's a very low trust making it very hard to believe anything you receive in mema. So being Swedish, of course, I thought this is a perfect case, bank id, let's do it. So I 2018 we started to look at it and we worked, worked with so many different technologies from the, from the Europe. But the reality was that not even the banks have good K YC in a place like Myanmar. So there is no one having good K Y C good information, but who a person is.

So technology that that was kind of based on the fact that people, someone knows who you are, didn't really work. So instead what happened was that me and Homer had a discussion and we were bouncing ideas and realized that this with the SSI seems to have some interesting opportunities.

So we, we took the pill and do, went straight into figuring out how we can do this for Southeast Asia and especially a place like Myanma where there's very bad identity systems. And we realized that yes, we need to be able to help people. We need to be able to help people through who they are, anywhere, anytime. So they can effect apply for loans from any part of the country or set up for university. And the timing was interesting cuz the timing was just in the covid.

So it was the spring of 2021 where everyone's working on the passports and we saw that the first case we could do was to help people prove that they were vaccinated cuz the government didn't have anything themselves. So in a few months we created a first app for dmo.

We used, I think this was the intrinsic wallet for the first pilot. And we showcase this is how, how it can be done. And it went quick. So from January to March, I think it was May, we did a pilot, we signed the first hospital and then we went live a little bit later and we decided to go with the basic stack. We went with hyper in the areas and silver and we developed our own app with three months, with the summer we managed to the whole SSI flow, we made it open source. And what we faced was that great, now we have a functioning solution, but how will anyone issue credentials?

So it sounded very good and it might, so we had to go back to the hospital and we had to help them to first register patients. So get people to get vaccination and then manage the vaccinations and then in the end issued the credential. So from doing the first mobile app and the network, we had to build all the supporting softwares and apps to help the hospital.

In fact, usings to me credential. And we went live. So about eight months from Memer decided to push the button. We went live in Yama and we went live in three, three different cities, four different vaccination centers. And we were on the ground supporting people to install the app. And I think this was the key. And we've been for two years, we are still visible on-site supporting hospitals and clinics all over the country and learning every day how it works. Because some of the interesting things that we learned when we went live was in fact that people don't use emails.

And that was a funny thing for Omar, that after one week and the 10,000 wallets created, we realized that our team was creating the email addresses for people to, in order to get the Covid pass. So Omar and the team went down, down in the basement and for another three weeks they removed the email dependency. And so the timeline went, we went aggressive. So in about six months we had the, had the contract. Another three months later we went live 20,000 wallets. By September, October we did the first verifier contract. November we built another few software to support.

And by December we got both Singapore and Thailand as governments to accepts. I do just emphasize a little bit on this one because this is something that was quite unique.

Cause we, we as a private company working with private hospitals, managed to get the, both Singapore and Thailand government to in fact recognize ada. And as you can see there in Myanma, there was no government credential. So there was no certification of anyone from Yma to bring to Singapore. Thailand PAA was the only one. And people could travel across the border and just shows their side wallet and the cure code and they will welcome in. So in 12 months we managed to exchange about a hundred thousand credentials. We've opened up about 7,000, 70,000 wallets.

But the funniest thing was that we did not spend a day on updating our core infrastructure. So that was because the technology worked. What what especially been leading was a very good technology stack. Everything worked, issuance, verification, the wallet did what it should. But what we faced instead was the user experience. And that's where, where the, the tough part was because ssi ssl, when we made it the formal way of the connection, creation, acceptance, it was so far away what people expected. So that's where we struggled most.

And that's where we spent all our time in fact, was to figure out how can we make adoption easier? How can we make people have less pain to do this? So apart from the the core, the side network, the the wallet that made up source, we spent a year to just build different solutions to make people be able to issue and verify credentials online, to make flows of collecting credentials, to log in using credentials, to verify credentials. If you don't have an API access, you can do it online. And then we even have to build the booking apps and restoration apps to get hospitals to issue credentials.

Otherwise they have no, no systems to connect with api. So that's where we spent, in fact most of our time was really to figure out how to make it make it easy, how to make people want to use. And two years in now, it's been exciting and we learned a lot of lessons. We learned that especially in places like Southeast Asia, companies don't really want to change the processes unless they get instructions to do so. From the Ministry of Health or from the Ministry of Telecommunication or center bank.

There, there's a friction, especially on IT departments. There, there always a lot of worries about data security. How does it work? Why is it different? Why is it not good enough? What they already have, they have a QR code that should be enough. And if you don't really care about the technology, honestly they, we talk about SSI and and decentralization, but they, they just wanted to work. They just want to have the paper to show. And especially in Southeast Asia, in GDPR is great, in Europe, in Southeast Asia, it's on extremes.

Either they send you the whole database in Excel sheet of 10,000 customers and employees or they are super scared about let anyone even touch the data because they, they think you just wanna steal it. But what people do care about that we learned is they want to save money or they want to make money. So as long as we can figure out a way to show that sad or identity solves a problem that helps them to either say or make money, you get in there. But the other one is that people are something slash new as SSI is hard because someone making a decision has to make, take a risk.

And this old saying that you never get fired for buying IBM is a bit the same thing. It's much easier to keep using an old solution instead of taking the risk of implementing something new. And in many cases what we are doing here is not evolution, it's real innovation, taking things to a completely different level. So in Mima for example, they're already decentralized in the health sector because they use books. You bring your book to the, the nurse, the nurse fill it in and give it back to you and you bring it to your next doctor.

So paperless, we provide the systems to the clinics, the hospitals, and they provide everything from different vaccination records, lab test results, medical bills, everything completed in this other wallet, no papers involved. And this is live, we work with proof of employments, we work with beneficiary IDs. Also a very exciting thing. Cause when you have migrants, the families usually exposed and cannot prove who they are. They will have access to the same benefits as their husbands, wives or sea forests. Same thing. Sea forests need to prove who they are when they outside border.

How can, how can you create trust in the document And then they bring this out wallet. This fact the lost Wednesday academic qualifications coming up 54 universities. We are cutting the time from three months to get your degree to about I think three seconds plus minus. And this, this is a game changer for students and people who need to prove their degrees to get visas and so on. Medical referrals. Another very exciting case we managed to launch was to help the clinics and hospitals share information between each other also cause they get the kickbacks when they're referring patients.

So all this moved really nicely and fast and we have a lot of new products, not lot of things coming up. We see the business cases, we start having lot of traction now over two years on the market. But then came the other parts of it, the other side. So from pushing usability and different cases, we face some tech challenges and I think this is where this immediate landed on Omar's desk. Thank you very much, Andrea.

It has been an amazing journey taking Zara where it is right now, starting from the MVP we built like a couple of years ago and then now having this fully production grade solution serving thousands of people. And it's, it's, it's, it's amazing to see when, how it helped people.

And it's just a couple of days ago we saw this one note from a, a customer who was stuck in another country and had to prove her covid passed for traveling and, and she was so relieved because the government system wasn't working and they also accepted auto credentials and, and she was able to get the auto credential instantly while one of our applications online just by putting her social security number online and, and proving that who she is.

And then, and moving forward, well, particularly talking about continent, the journey of what just said came, we built this system, but now we have reached a solution, reached a place where we are starting to question some things that, how scalable is it right now?

I mean, it's good if you are doing a couple of thousands of credentials or even a hundred thousand credentials, but what's gonna happen when you hit a million credentials or what's gonna happen when you're gonna have a traffic of issuance of let's say thousands of credentials per minute or a hundred thousand of credentials per minute. And that's what we're gonna look at hopefully in near future when we do those educational credentials.

For example, publishing the results for intermediate, for 12th grade Inmar, that's like a hundred thousand, more than a hundred thousand students who need their, their, like their test reports or result cards or whatnot. Now the challenges that we faced are not new. I guess everybody in the SSI industry probably are facing them, but I thought it would be nice to, to talk about them.

A couple of them which affected us directly recently were, which affected our speed to develop and execute things, which was that the sovereign staging net went from free to paid, which meant, which meant actually they, they closed the staging net and they renamed it the builder net to the test net. And, and we had to move everything upside down to make sure that our test environments and everything just doesn't stop working. Then on the other, on other side, we had inicio and we thought, okay, we could just move to the, in this unit and it's, it's good.

And we did, we did slowly migrate to Inicio testnet for our development purposes. And, and we just heard the news that they were resetting their ledges, which means all the schema and credential definitions and everything we had in the test environment was gonna get, you know, just go away. And that is, that is challenging if you talk about how do you keep moving when, how, how do, how do you keep moving when you have such frictions coming on the way?

So, but luckily our production network is on sovereign main net and it's still working without any hurdles. A couple of more things that came in our way are like some decisions that we're looking at. For example, would it be more feasible to go ledger less because, you know, speeds of credential issuance is a question here. And then dependency on a particular ledger is a question here. And then some other things like framework use. What kind of frameworks should we use? What kind of big methods are gonna be the would would be more acceptable and interoperable in the future?

What kind of communication protocols like DICOM or IDC, O I D C would be much more acceptable in the, in the future. The all these questions are still something that we are trying to figure out and I believe based on the, the, the research that we are researching, the time we're putting into it, I hope we will be able to make a decision soon on these things.

But that being said, I think majority of these decisions are, are, are very difficult to make because it's very difficult to predict where the industry is heading, which kind of adaptability is coming to with kind of ledgers or ledger solutions or, or or protocols we see. And can you move to the next slide please? Hello?

Yes, we can see the next slide. Yeah. Okay. Alright. So some of the things that came to our, like that came to our view was that how people and how, how our customers were actually like perceiving these things. Like on this mention there has been this extremes of data policies that either people want to share everything or they don't want to share anything, which, which brings us to some really crucial questions that who stores what and how.

And we, we've, I think we lost you, Omar. Andreas, can you hear us? I'm in a developing country and he's in Finland. This is strange. Hello? Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear now. Alright, sorry about that. So what I was saying was that one thing that came to our attention was that a lot of people that, that we are working with, a lot of customers that we're working with had this both these extreme ends. Either they wanna share everything or they don't wanna share anything, which means we had to build things from scratch to entertain such pe such customers.

And the questions were like, how do we bring plugable storage to, to a system like Zada where we technically don't become a data holder at all in which we don't store anything and they store everything in their, in their storage. And we are just more like a data processor and are able to just process rather than storing. And on the same lines, the questions were that how the wallet interoperability would affect the more we scale up how people would want to use different kind of wallets.

And these wallets should be able to support the credentials, although we are following certain standards for our credentials, w3c, but for credentials. But still interoperability among wallets has to be based on certain partnerships. And Sorry to interrupt.

Yeah, just 10 seconds left in our session. Okay. So I'll just wrap it up then. Okay.

So, but all in all the, the scope has been that we need to figure out that how do you scale something like this to a point where it can handle millions of, of credentials And we are still in that journey. Omar, Andreas, thank you so much for your presentation. Unfortunately we don't have time to take any questions from the audience, but thank you so much and everyone around applause for the Omar and Andreas this.