One year ago, we were in the middle of the TGE, and the value proposition of Persona was a better, safer way for individuals to establish trust and to have control over their identity in relation with third parties, all this with the help of blockchain.

Now, almost one year later(after mainnet was launched), we are launching our public beta version.

Persona is a trust protocol, built on top of each and everyone identity, so it was the natural approach to make claiming the identity first available in Persona. We’ve identified the unique attributes that are accepted by third parties as ways to prove identity and added these attributes.

So, by making those attributes available we can not only give people control over their essential identity attributes but at the same time, we can provide KYC/CDD for companies. You could say that from the multitude of the use cases that Persona can be used for, we are now addressing first the Know Your Customer use case.

How is this working?

Registering and claiming identity

Individuals are creating an account(username, email address and password) on the enrollment website and once they confirmed their email address, they can start filling their details: date of birth, home address, SSN and such. For all these attributes, after they are filled, the individual will be able to upload on an isolated IPFS instance, its government-issued documents that prove that whatever details the individual supplied there are the real ones.

Verification and Validation

The verification and validation are done by the community, by the people that when created their account also checked the option to be a notary, a verifier in the community. To the newly created identity, the system will allocate 16 random verifiers or notaries. We do this to prevent the contagious scenario in which someone with 20 friends would push fake details into the system. This doesn’t mean that your friends can’t validate you, is just that only after those 16 verifications and validations you’re trustworthy.

The verification and validation are done face to face after the individual that wants to be verified and validated gets into contact with the notaries and agree on the details of the meeting.

Once face to face, the individual decrypts his claimed details, and its IPFS saved documents and also provides the originals of the documents uploaded. The verifier will check all these three sources and proceed accordingly. If all match he/she will say that X is who claims to be or not. Whatever the individual shared with the verifier is revoked, and the individual can ask for a new verification and validation. If the verification and validation are negative, a red flag is raised. The red flag can be undone by three random picked by the system verifiers. If all three are saying that whatever details are there are true, then the individual can use its identity. If the result is negative, that single individual option is to fill the real information and upload the authentic documents and proceed to a new verification and validation.

Using your identity

It doesn’t make sense to offer people a way to be in control over their identity if there is no entity accepting this as a means of onboarding. We are working to bring companies that allow Persona as a means of identification. There is granularity in Persona, and this means that you can share your phone with your mobile carrier, and your home address and SSN with the bank (due to regulations, you might even have to give them access to the documents uploaded in the IPFS instance. This meaning that you’re encrypting the documents with your key and the banks key the records and they are the only one that has access to that link. Once you decide to end your relationship with the bank you deactivate the connection and issue a notification to the bank that you request to have all your details deleted according to the GDPR).

When an entity is accepting Persona as a means of onboarding, there is a cost associated with this process. The price, in Persona tokens, will be split evenly to all the notaries that verified and validated that specific identity.

To maintain the onboarding even more straightforward, an entity can choose if they accept an identity verified and validated by community only or they can appoint their trust person to perform the verification and validation or both.

Take this scenario: to maintain the customer acquisition costs low to none; a bank can decide that it is comfortable to allow online account opening based only on community validations. Once the individual wants a credit card, the verification and the validation will be conducted by the trusted person the bank designated for that specific geography(town or whatever)

What’s the purpose of this public Beta?

Besides an obvious progress ;) , we needed this public Beta for a couple of reasons:

1. So people can experience what “claiming” your identity means

2. Partners can start working on integrating Persona in their current onboarding process

3. Test blockchain capabilities to handle all these requests and transactions: claiming an identity, verifying and validating, identity attributes expiration

4. Run security and vulnerabilities tests on the current implementation

5. Make available the documentation and the environment on top of which developer can start to develop their applications having Persona handling the identity part of their onboarding process, because no matter about what product we are talking about, as long as it has a “Log-in”, a “Register” or “Make/Create an account”, it needs identity.

What’s next?

We will perform all these tests and fine-tuning as we are looking to migrate everything onto “production” also known as “mainnet” by the end of March or mid-April, but this timeline depends on how many vulnerabilities or bugs we discover.

We will start developing applications on top of Persona as Proof of Concept to prove how Persona as trust protocol will enrich new customers onboarding experience while having them in control over their data.

We are making the full documentation available and also the code, so developers can start “getting their hands dirty” and take Persona delivered identity for a test drive in the applications.

The scope of all the above actions is to test, see how Persona performs under stress and attack, how third-party implementations should be done and what is the right approach and ultimately help us in selling Persona as a better, safer way to handle onboarding to our potential partners.