Social encounters

ICONLOOP Chief Communication Officer Josh Choi recently contributed an op-ed to the Korean-language financial news weekly Daehan Financial Newspaper.

In it, he talks about recently taken first steps in the blockchain space to build a digital ID ecosystem.

He notes that Korea is quickly becoming a digital economy society. As this happens, trust between economic entities will by necessity grow ever more important.

Choi says the starting point of building a basis of trust in a digital economy society could be the secure verification of identities between economic entities. He explains that in a digital economy society, a variety of ID certificates besides the official ones recognized by the state will come into use to describe economic entities, including certificates that prove you are an employee of a certain company, or a student at a certain school, or a member of a certain club, or the parent of a certain student or an expatriate living in a certain country.

Accordingly, it will be more important than ever to build a higher level of mutual trust.

Choi says in this context we can understand the recent intense interest in digital IDs and the rush of companies into the ID market. In particular, he hopes that blockchain-based digital ID platforms — such as ICONLOOP’s “MyID” solution — could become an indispensable gateway to the digital economy society by re-interpreting existing ID systems and presenting a new paradigm.

He says that MyID’s greatest strength is that it has secured a basis to quickly expand and be applied to many fields, including the public sector, e-commerce, the Internet, manufacturing, NGOs and overseas entities on the basis of technical strength and trust proven in the financial sector, a sector — with its banks, securities firms and insurance companies — that demands the highest level of ID verification.

Choi says this is possible because the service’s designation by the Financial Supervisory Service as an innovative financial service has provided it a regulatory base, enabling it to be applied across all financial services in a way that rival services cannot match.

On the technological side, he notes that MyID has become the first Korean DID service to be added to the W3C’s DID Method Registry, and that ICONLOOP has launched real services such as DPASS.

Choi says the MyID Alliance, with its roughly 40 companies and bodies, has established a partner network a class apart from competing groups by integrating partners in sectors other than finance. In particular, the alliance has provided a basis for building a network with local and overseas startups in which technology startups — which are expected to play a leading role in the Fourth Industrial Revolution — can take part.

He says that even after the regulatory sandbox comes to an end, he hopes that MyID can quickly expand and be applied to various fields, even overseas, based on its early seizing of the market and on technology and trust proven in the financial sector.

Choi said the government has recently started adding impetus to the mobile ID age, and that an age of limitless competition has begun in the financial sector due to the open banking policy. Within the blockchain-based ID sector, too, intense competition has already begun between the MyID Alliance, the Mobile ID Consortium led by Korea’s big three telecom companies and the Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute’s DID Alliance.

He concludes that in these days of dynamic and dizzying transformation and innovation, he hopes the MyID Alliance will faithfully play its role in building a trustworthy digital ID ecosystem that can substantively resolve the inconveniences and difficulties suffered by users and realize a digital economy society.

The National Assembly subcommittee has finally passed revision, an important turning point towards legalizing crypto.

Your physical ID card could become a thing of the past and ICONLOOP’s MyID Alliance is aiming to make this a reality. ICON is targeting South Korea, a clear well-defined market that is one of the most technologically innovative and crypto-friendly markets in the world.