Ep. 45 - Blockpass on Owning Your Identity

Frontier Tech Radio

Fed up scanning your passport, driving licence and all the rest to prove who you are?

Imagine a world where you only have to input your identity details just once; imagine the time and the hassle that would save.

Imagine not having to drag out your passport and your ID documents every time you want to check out an exchange or investigate an ICO investment.

Imagine finding access to all that verified, trustworthy information about other participating people, and companies - and even devices! – all via one app.

Imagine no more!

Blockpass is already here and operating, linking verified people, companies and things in our ecosystem, forming a trusted connection between them.

In this episode, Director and CMO Hans Lombardo and Guy Davies, Business Development for UK and Europe, explain how Blockpass offers a self-sovereign identity, user-centric and with the data owned entirely by the owner – Blockpass is a verifier of data and retains no user information.

Offering complete confidence that the network of linked platforms and people on its system can be assured of one another’s identity at all times.

Hans was always a tech entrepreneur ever since the beginning of the Internet boom, around 1998, involved with a number of start-ups and business intelligence companies focused mainly on Chinese high-tech. Having been bitten by the Bitcoin bug, he has been involved in many initiatives since, including internet.com and Internet World magazine and events, launching his own news channel, co-founding Chain of Things and working with ith Professor Bill Beaumont on Infinity Blockchain Labs, the incubation hub for disruptive start-ups in the tech space.

Guy came to this space down a very different route – a business development expert, but originally a professional musician, and all-too-aware of the shortfalls in the music rights system and the contentious issue of copyright.

It was while Chain of Things which was trying to create an identity for devices that the team realised there wasn’t a good human identity system - and Blockpass was born, to fill that need.

The Internet is already a perilous universe, especially with the rise of connected devices. So there is a need to put humans first and keep people protected - to give everyone their own impregnable identity. Web 3.0 is going to be this big decentralised web, and the only way to get there is to solve the identity equation. Most identity on the Internet is centralised, controlled by companies and not by the individual.

The only way to get to a fully decentralised web is to start with the people.

Working with compliance lawyers and Infinity Blockchain Labs, the first Blockpass app was released this April and it has been progressively added to and updated ever since. It is now maturing and is being used in various exchanges and ICO platforms to run instant and verified KYC, allowing verified users access to participating merchants via the Blockpass ID QR code they carry at all times on their smartphone.

And what is popular with all those using Blockpass is its decentralised, user-centric nature. Putting people back at the centre of their own data.

Plans for the future include the addition of more functions, such as a security token wallet, and the development of Blockpass for Business, allowing people to do KYC for a company including all the directors’ details and documentation all built into one portal. Ultimately, Blockpass will have a role in IOT systems, in device ownership including transfer of ownership – making it all part of the sharing economy.

If you start to think of spinning this out into finance, you move towards the user becoming fully in control - having a choice. Blockpass aims to stop people having to keep giving their data over (and over again!) to the old world.

We can leave behind the inherent problems of the web 2.0, and start to move towards the new, identity-safe, people-centric world.