I have been asked why we started Blockchain HELIX and what is the background that drives us to change the way we deal with our Identity Data.
I am working in the IT business since more than 15 years starting way back then with a project as my master thesis for Deutsche Telekom called InterBOX that should have integrated all the TV audience into a digital communication channel with personalized accounts. At that time, it was an approach that was heavily related to bandwidth and modulation optimization. Those days nobody cared about security and WEB 2.0 was not yet born. I remember discussing with the project manager about using TCP/IP instead of going for teletext/BTX.
The project failed as Germany got united and Deutsche Telekom started a huge infrastructure program in the eastern part of Germany with a fibre network that should be inactive for the next 20 years as consumer broadband internet went for copper. As a former state owned company, Deutsche Telekom had no competitor.
Lesson learned №1: Big companies do not act based on innovation but on political or economic demand.
Later I was implementing a couple of projects about big communities, HR and Awards. Getting business models from different verticals into digital processes was fun and underneath we integrated user accounts as everybody at that time. It was the beginning of WEB 2.0 and users got flooded with user accounts from all the different websites. That lead to hundreds of accounts with personal data and long forgotten passwords and access. The winners in that race are the over the top platforms mainly from US companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (called GAFA) and lately Alibaba from China. The approach is fairly simple and goes back to the nineties with Single-Sign-On (SSO) capability. Beside the SSO technology they introduced a business model about monetizing private user data in exchange to commodity or the social pressure to be part of a worldwide community. That is why we can call this a platform centric design. The user is faced with terms & conditions that are not readable for a common person. Knowing about the sensibility and the importance of privacy and the need for self sovereign data coming from our german modern history I am a true believer that personal data should belong and be controlled by the individual itself. I personally do not believe that Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon are evil, but if they would ask their users in a transparent way about the data that they want to store about them, the awareness would be different. A common claim is “Data is the new oil” and if you think about it a bit longer, it comes to your mind what bad things happened in the rush for oil.
Lesson learned №2: WEB 2.0 was a step into the wrong direction concerning personal data.
A couple of years later I discovered Bitcoin and found it an interesting experiment but did not realized the disruptive power of it. The first drafts of Ethereum changed everything. Working with encryption, P2P technology and server technology for years, it felt like I found the final puzzle piece. I knew from the very beginning, that Digital Identity will be the most disruptive and valuable use case in the future. Since that time I’m on a mission to spread the word. In 2015 I founded Blockchain HELIX to put my vision in action and to develop a Digital Identity Platform.
What sets us apart from other Digital Identity solutions?
First of all, we believe that a Digital Identity should be like a human right as we are already a digital society in a digital economy. This means that the Digital Identity itself should not be the business model.
Furthermore we believe in a User-Centric data model that gives back personal data ownership and still can foster business models as it shifts the connection points closer to the user and integrate the user in the value chain.
Lesson learned №3: Digital Identity is the key for mainstream Blockchain adoption.
Dominik from IOTA called Digital Identity in a private discussion in Dublin as the “holy grail of internet technology”. The biggest need in the financial industry comes from Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and the idea of a trustful and tamper proof storage of once proven personal identity data. As we are faced with a combination of Technology and Law, it is crystal clear that technology needs to follow the given legal framework and not vice versa. There are different talks about the dictatorship of technocrats, and talking about a sensitive topic like your own identity, it feels good to have an independent authority like the European Commission that is taking care of data protection and data privacy. There is still a gap in between the definition of private data and the need for encryption and hashes and the different levels of abstraction. As an essence of this, every provider that want has european customers need to fulfill the GDPR restrictions. So no matter where you want to build a Digital Identity solution in the world, it boils down to the highest level of data protection and this can be found in Germany. By knowing this, there are a lot of clever people predicting a high market opportunity for exporting european compliance and GDPR as a worldwide standard.
Lesson learned №4: Digital Identity solutions need to follow the most restricted requirements.
This article is written by Oliver Naegele, Founder of Blockchain HELIX and Mastermind of HELIX Orange.
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