This alliance ecosystem partner is building out an open, base layer of identity for interoperability between blockchains and portability of personal data and credentials. Talking to lifeID CMO Joshua Shane here in Seattle, WA about current and future plans for the project.https://medium.com/media/9790f81a42134695649118595776a45c/hrefListen to the new podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/sweetbridge/sweettalk-alliance-lifeid-jshane/s-sj5Qk. Full transcript of the podcast below.Sweetbridge Alliance — SweetTalk podcast with Joshua Shane, lifeID.Jason: I’m Jason English here with the Sweetbridge Alliance, and I’m joined today by Joshua Shane, CMO of lifeID.Joshua: Hey Jason, nice to be here.Jason: Yeah, it’s good to have you. We are both based in sunny Seattle today and we’re here to discuss the connection between identity and global commerce. So there’s a lot of common ground that I think we’ve shared and signing you up as a member of the Sweetbridge Alliance is a great step to see lifeID and some of the things you’re doing in this space right now. So for us, we always think … Commerce really does start with identity. So what is your take on that?Joshua: Well one of the things that we’ve run into as we’ve started to create an identity solution for blockchain and Web 2.0 ecosystems is that, identity is kind of the lynch pin of any kind of trade or commerce, or any kind of transaction. You always have to identify who you are on one side of the transaction, and who you are interacting with, and being assured that you are the person that you say you are, and that you are transacting with the entity that you think you’re transacting is essential, right? Obviously if you are trading with someone and your money or the goods go to the wrong place, that’s really important and that ties in very closely with supply chain and ensuring that that supply chain is robust and has those connections that are necessary for the trade and commerce to go off the way we want it to.Jason: Yeah, I mean for us obviously there’s not much value in a heavy end trading network with anonymous partners, so you definitely need that level of trust. But you also need to know that there’s not any unauthorized information being shared and that’s kind of where this idea of identity crosses with authority. For us we always think about if I’m a member of a company or a trading union, or a professional organization, what are my levels of authority for my personal self within that organization, to make decisions or to make buying decisions? So it’s like there’s two levels of identity in that sense.Joshua: Yeah, it’s challenging in an enterprise context when you’re trying to allow multiple people to have certain kinds of authority and trust rights within a larger entity transaction system. And so one of the things that we’re going to be doing over time is allowing for those kinds of entities to have multiple signatories, and multiple kinds of rights. So there will be various levels where someone who can prove who they are through the app and allow them to have a certain kind of authority to do certain levels of transactions. Whether it’s around the financial level, anything over or under $100000 dollars or whether it’s around a category, you can sign for these kinds of things, but not these kinds of things. So, as you say, there’s a lot of nuance in how we identify especially as entities rather than individuals and how that’s managed largely around trade and commerce.Jason: There’s an interesting element to lifeID where you’re kind of building a base layer for identity. If you look at it, it’s basically something that almost anybody could develop upon and that includes other identity solutions that might have more specialized purposes. Can you kind of explain how that would work?Joshua: Yeah absolutely, the lifeID platform is basically a set of protocols that acts as a layer that sits on top of the blockchain and takes advantage of the capabilities of a blockchain and as a layer to a solution, we provide a platform or a set of protocols that anyone can use via an API. So if anyone wants to have an identity solution, they don’t have to build it themselves, that’s often very challenging. We obviously want to have modular solutions that can plug in and help the ecosystem grow in scale as quickly as possible, so we are specifically designing so that it is open and permissionless so anyone can use it, anyone can build on it.Joshua: It’s an open source set of protocols that will be governed and driven by the users of those sets of protocols and we are additionally making sure that there is portability because we believe that individuals or entities who hold the identity should also own and control all the data that’s associated with that identity. So that means even if someone decides that they want to establish their identity data and their credentials on our platform, if at some point they find another solution and they think that serves their needs better, they’re more than welcome to take that identity data and bring it elsewhere onto another solution, there are other things out there, like Civic, Sovrin, that have different philosophies behind the kind of services that their offering and if it happens to match what they’re doing better, you can take your data and transfer it over.Joshua: Likewise, there are lots of companies that are having very specific kinds of identity solutions that are focused either on an enterprise vertical, or in a particular kind of use case either in the enterprise or in government, or in the military, whatever the case may be, they can also as long as they’re using the standards that the W3C is defining around these kinds of identifiers, as long as they’re using those standards, they can port that information onto our solution as well.Jason: And so what are the token economics behind operating an open source protocol like this and building it, then putting it out in the world? How do the token economics drive the ecosystem for this product? I mean we think of it as trade coins like having a coin like Sweetcoin as a discount token or something like BridgeCoin is a stable trading token, what’s your token dynamic?Joshua: That’s a good question and it’s one of the things that’s different about our solution. A lot of the other solutions are driven by either a set of stewards or by a consortium and so they don’t have general governance and use by a broad set of users. And as a result the approach that we take for tokenization is designed to incent the ecosystem to participate in a way that other environments don’t because they have a set of stewards or they have a set of users in their consortium that they give all the responsibility to. Because we’re really focused on the open source community, we’re focused on community governance, our desire is to create an internal economy that incents users to participate both in the governance and the use of the platform.Joshua: And so, as a result, the way the fees work for the transactions, if you’re making writes to a blockchain that has to do within a verified credential associated with an identity, then there’s a transaction fee. And the bulk of that transaction fee goes to the app developer. So if I’m using the Sweetbridge app and the Sweetbridge app is using the lifeID platform as their identity layer, then some third party that’s using the Sweetbridge that goes through this transaction process, a bunch of that token fee ends up going back to Sweetbridge to continue to incent Sweetbridge to participate in the token economy of the lifeID platform. And then there’s a small bit that goes to paying for gas on the blockchain, on Ethereum of course, it’s called gas. On the RChain platform it’s called Phlogistan or “Phlo” — and so a small amount of that goes to the blockchain and then the last part in our system is a very small part of that transaction fee and that goes to the foundation to keep nodes running, to do marketing and all the usual things that are done to help promote and maintain the platform.Jason: Hm. So Joshua, what’s it been like entering into the marketing process for a decentralized blockchain project? I mean I think I’ve been doing this for about a year and it’s not like anything I’ve ever done in my life. So how is that transition helping you being an expert marketer, leader of marketing teams for a couple decades?Joshua: Yeah, as you say, it is very different and not only is it different because of the decentralized nature of kind of the blockchain ethos, but in particular because what lifeID is focused on is self-sovereign identity, this idea that you control all of your identity data and you want to resist the ability of your identity to be censored for transactions and that you don’t want to share data that you’re trying to keep private. We have this particular challenge about how you do marketing in a decentralized environment where you can’t capture people’s data because that’s against the ethos of the whole process, right? So we are in this funny situation where the last decade plus of the marketing has been how do you capture peoples data and then use it to market to them? Right? So now we’re in this funny situation where, how do you not capture people’s data and then how do you market to them?Joshua: So it’s very much, at least at the beginning we’re obviously in the early adopter phase, right? People who are motivated around blockchain, motivated around particular solutions, or people like the founders of Sweetbridge who have been trying to solve this problem in supply chain forever and have finally found the technology that will help them do that with blockchain. So there’s a set of blockchain die-hards, obviously the Bitcoin maximalists and people who believe in Ethereum and then some of the other blockchains that are coming out now as well, but all of those communities kind of have an overlap with each other that allow us to build an audience of the right kinds of people, not just in blockchain, not just in some of the verticals that are associated with blockchain, but also in privacy and identity and all of these other areas where we are finally making in-roads into the people who really will end up consuming this kind of solution. And not only consuming it, but helping to drive it.Joshua: Helping to govern it and helping us because they’re experts in identity and privacy, telling us the direction it needs to go is part of that. So being able to set something up within a certain set of bounds and then let the community help drive it, is definitely a new experience especially when it has to be as hands-off of private data as possible.Jason: Yeah it basically turns the old advantage of marketing on its head that we knew from traditional days where you’re trying to gather and exploit as much of that data as you can to determine user preferences, do things like personalization. So it has to be done in a new way.Joshua: Yep.Jason: It’s gonna change the way everybody builds everything.Joshua: Yeah. And what often happens is that you have your style of marketing ends up matching the industry you’re in and how that industry behaves. And so in the same way that we have a decentralized infrastructure for blockchain ecosystems, we’re going to end up with decentralized marketing environments as well. I mean, I think Sweetbridge’s done this as well or better than anyone else, you guys have spent the last year traveling the world talking to these kind of independent nodes of blockchain communities and believers about the value of this solution and how blockchain enables this transformation of the way supply chain works. And those kinds of direct one to one, or one to small-N outreaches is essential in this environment, in a way that I haven’t seen it actually in the past.Joshua: There’s a real irony here in that for a system that’s designed to be decentralized with trust, this is one of the most kind of interwoven, trusting groups of people together where there’s the web of trust within the community is more intense and tighter than any environment that I’ve worked in, including Linux open source and a lot of other environments. And so this internal sense of trust that we have within the community is allowing us to create systems and to create platforms that actually create trusted environments that don’t actually require people to trust one to one in the way that we do within the community. So there is a kind of interesting dichotomy there but it’s so far working very effectively.Jason: Yeah it’s a whole new world. So yeah, sometimes I wonder about how that applies to different use cases as we partner with lifeID at Sweetbridge and other projects that have covered different aspects of our development lifecycle as well as working with other companies.Joshua: Yeah, I mean it’s really interesting to see how identity fits into various user workflows, and I’d be really curious how the partners that you’re working with on the supply chain side see friction in the current process for their identity requirements and how adding a seamless blockchain-based identity solution can compare collaboratively with the Sweetbridge solution to meet that user need. What are you hearing from your partners about the need for identity and how that smooths out the process?Jason: Well it’s a big deal. I think the first main question most big companies ask is, where is this data coming from? And how can I trust the source of that data? Because it really is about transparency. Their primary concern is, if I’m getting a data feed, who is that from? What company is it from? And can I trust the source of the data because all decisions are basically made on the basis of knowing what my supply and demand signals are and responding to it quickly and that’s were investments are made. So I think a lot of the concern in identity is we have it at one level, which is the application layer of our own wallet in Sweetbridge economy and those are apps that you would use on your computer or phone, or whatever. Just kind of like you guys would have with lifeID as an application on your phone.Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Jason: And then there’s also the layer of, like you’re talking about, the authorization to do certain things within companies and I would need the ability to attest that yes, I am an authorized officer of the company, yes I have a certified bill of lading here. It’s been approved by the appropriate customs authorities. It’s been inspected by, if it’s a meat inspector or some kind of ethical board.Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Jason: There’s a lot of layers where this is gonna happen, especially in supply chain.Joshua: Yeah, you bring up a really good point around how that trust is developed because we talk about blockchains as a way to kind of establish the truth of some transaction because you can say it was done at this time and then you know that it hasn’t been changed, but there are external sources of trust that we need as well. In the ID community, we talk about kind of three tiered loop, where you have an issuer who verifies a credential. Let’s say here in Seattle the state of Washington issues an ID card, right? That’s usually a drivers license, and then you have the holder, me in this case, I hold this verified credential that’s issued by the state and then you have someone who wants to verify that it’s me. So when I go to the liquor store I pull out my drivers license, I hand it over to them and they say, “Okay yes, I trust the state of Washington and yes in fact you are who you are, you’re over 21.” And then they basically verify that by visually looking at it.Joshua: In our world, we see that as extremely inefficient for a number of reasons. One is, all you’re trying to do is prove as the holder of that verified credential from the state, that you are over 21 but when you hand over your ID, you’re not only just handing over something that says I’m over 21, you’re handing over something that says, “I am this height, I am this weight, my eye color is this.” And for god’s sake you’re giving them your street address, right? That is the kind of information that people want to maintain private and there’s no reason for the person at the liquor to know that about you. So instead, if we just get a verified credential from the state that ends up as a QR code on your phone, you can just show the person at the liquor store a QR code, they can zap it. It verifies that you are over 21 and because you have a phone with biometrics and all this, you can prove that it’s you as well.Joshua: And so, the trust that you’re establishing there is actually trusting the state as the issuer of that claim. So in many, many cases you always are doing that, whether it’s if you want to be an accredited investor, you have a CPA that will issue a credential that says, this person qualifies as an accredited investor between this time and this time. And there’s always going to be external kind of, side ban webs of trust that occur within society that will still continue to make things run, the difference is you can eliminate a lot of those third parties that will often get in the way of transactions that will either extract economic rents or slow down the process, or in some way make trade inefficient.Jason: Yeah, and I think that kind of … That almost bleeds into our last mile model which is not the customer, it’s probably the people who are at the roots of the supply chain, the farmers or minors are people who are working in small factories that have to produce the goods that are often in developing countries where there is identification system. There’s no government ID, they don’t have a way to establish that so when you’re touching on this idea of biometric identification, it’s important for us to help these people with no identity establish something so they can have access to banking like services so they can get small loans or get actually paid in a fungible form they could use in their everyday life, and that’s not as easy as it seems. We think if identity could reach those levels of other countries that the benefits will trickle up to the rest of the global economy and actually help everybody.Joshua: Yeah, I completely agree. When I first started this, one of the things that I really cared about was providing identification for the unbanked, for people who didn’t have other resources in developing countries and I really thought that was going to take three to five years to really start to take root and develop but in the process of beginning this journey, we have run into a number of organizations who are already thinking about this very deeply. Paul Allen’s Vulcan is thinking very deeply about how they can help refugees and other unbanked populations with identities that will allow for portable kinds of information around your healthcare or financial that have no way of maintaining records now. Similarly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation here locally are thinking very deeply about these issues. I know the federal government is as well. A bunch of other NGO’s.Joshua: So I was thinking that we would initially have to establish the value of blockchain and have some kind of developed world implementations before we transition over, but very much like some technologies have kind of skipped a generation, it seems like that’s starting to happen as well. So the example that is always brought up is that developing countries basically skipped landlines and went right to using cellular, and I see a similar thing happening where there is not a set of traditional banks or traditional other institutions that are helping people get identification or banking capabilities but instead it’s going to skip forward and skip a generation to blockchain based solutions.Joshua: Whether it’s identity or different kinds of banking transactions that can be supported by blockchain ecosystems and that’s frankly very exciting to me. It’s one of the big reasons that I got into this area and to see that there is a relatively straight path that’s obviously challenging to get from point A to point B, but there’s a pretty straight path that we can see about how we can provide those services and there are people working on it right now.Jason: Yeah, it’s much harder to corrupt and exploit something like that, especially in those kinds of environments and it certainly is important to us as well. So it should be an interesting collaboration to work together on some of these challenges I think.Joshua: Yeah, we share a lot of values and our goals are beautifully aligned and we’re very much looking forward to working with Sweetbridge both in terms of what we can do on the ground for helping people but also how we can change the conversation and let everyone know what’s possible in these new ecosystems.Jason: Excellent. All right. Thanks Joshua and give my regards to the team here in Seattle. It’s great to see projects like this popping up here that add so much to the scene here that’s going on.Joshua: Well, likewise, thank you Jason. It’s been great working with you over the past year or so, I have enjoyed meeting your team when they’ve visited here in Seattle and we have a lot of great things coming up and I’m looking forward to touring the world with you and solving these problems together.Jason: Cool. All right. Well thanks very much. That concludes our podcast for today!https://medium.com/media/9790f81a42134695649118595776a45c/hrefSweetbridge Alliance Podcast: Joshua Shane of lifeID was originally published in Sweetbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.