In 2017, leadership from credit company Equifax announced that their worst nightmares were realized: they’d been hacked.

This was not some baby breach where forensics specialists were unable to tell for certain if anyone had stolen data. This was a massive, slow-motion, Niagara Falls-level cascade of personal intel, a gaping data wound that continued to bleed for an astonishing 76 days.

How many people had their most private human information — social security numbers, birthdays, and addresses — released out into the wild? 148 million. That’s just a shade more than the entire population of Russia. Let that sink in.

And while talking heads and analysts were criticizing the company for vulnerabilities, one business decided that it was time to protect digital identities for good.

Hydrogen is that business.

Hydrogen has created a decentralized, secure ecosystem for the financial industry and beyond, by developing a blockchain called “Hydro”. This is an ecosystem that uses cryptography to secure accounts, identities and transactions. Project Hydro is an open source, decentralized, public blockchain platform made up of the Hydro protocols, on which developers and businesses can build decentralized applications (dApps) and commercial projects such as APIs, SaaS, and enterprise platforms.

What we’re really talking about in this partnership is Snowflake.

Snowflake is Hydrogen’s digital identity protocol. It not only protects identity, it saves time. Hydrogen are the first developer to build a solution on top of these protocols, the Hydro API, which allows seamless integration with existing systems.

Let’s use a bank as an example. When a company — or your average Joe — wants to work with a bank by opening an account or making a big purchase or getting a loan, the bank has to verify the applicant.

This is called KYC (Know Your Customer) and it can take time, from days to weeks or even months. After an extensive, anti-fraud verification process, where information is gathered from multiple sources, the applicant or institution is finally verified.

Snowflake stores verification of sensitive customer info on the blockchain so that when a bank or ecommerce seller or any other financial institution needs all that data validated, Snowflake can vouch for the customer. Instantly.

This also has a huge benefit: data safety. A customer no longer has to send their documents to third parties for verification, leaving them stored on servers across multiple companies, many of which will have substandard security. As improved, GDPR compliant privacy solutions come online, Snowflake will move into storing encrypted/private data on-chain, making the system even more secure and giving the user more control of their data.

For a financial organization, such as a bank, to set up their own system to protect customer data, it would cost a fortune in both treasure and man hours. However, Hydrogen APIs — plug right into existing systems. So there’s no need for a massive spend to create security that at the end of the day, may not even work. It’s really that simple.

XYO is very happy to partner with Hydrogen, and help them use Snowflake to protect customer identity. We welcome them into the XYO family and look forward to how Snowflake plays a role in our dual futures!