Bringing Identity To Crypto

We partnered with Jumio to offer secure identity verification, which can be linked to a Byteball address and used on demand

To be relevant in the real world, we need more anchors to the real world. One of them is identity.

Starting today, every Byteball user can link his Byteball address to his real world identity. The user’s personal data is verified by Jumio, the leading provider of identity verification services, and stored in the user’s Byteball wallet. At the same time, a hash of the personal data is stored on the public DAG and signed by a trusted attestor. The attestor also serves as a witness, so it is already trusted.

This attestation allows the user to prove to anybody that his Byteball address is linked to a verified person, without disclosing any personal information. It also allows to reveal the private information to individual service providers on demand, and the service provider can easily verify authenticity of this information using the hash stored on the public DAG.

How it works

There is a new bot in the Bot Store: Real name attestation bot.

Verification is a paid service, it is $8.00 per verification attempt (paid in Bytes). If the verification is successful and you verify for the first time, you get a $20.00 reward (in Bytes) from the distribution fund, which is more than the verification fee.

Read the bot’s instructions carefully, have your ID ready, make sure your device has a camera. After paying the verification fee, you are redirected to Jumio for the actual verification.

You’ll need to show your ID in front of the camera and make a selfie. After the photos are taken, Jumio will process them to ensure that the ID was not tampered with and it matches the selfie. Usually this is done automatically and takes just a few minutes, sometimes manual verification is also necessary and it takes more time.

After Jumio has done its work, the bot notifies you about the result. If the verification was successful, the bot posts the attestation record to the DAG (it contains only a hash of the personal information unless you explicitly requested it to be published) and you are prompted to save the personal information in your wallet for future use:

Click the profile to save it:

Now, when you want to reveal the personal data to somebody else or a bot, you just take it out of your wallet like you take your physical ID card out of your physical wallet:

and select the fields you want to share:

This way, you have total control who you share your data with, and what fields.

All real-name attestations are posted from address I2ADHGP4HL6J37NQAD73J7E5SKFIXJOT, which is also a witness.

Non-US attestation

If the attestation bot sees that you are not a US citizen and the IP address you used during verification on the Jumio site is also non-US, it offers to attest the fact that you are not a US citizen or resident.

This attestation can be used by ICOs that want to avoid the US extraterritorial jurisdiction and allow only non-US users to invest into their token. This restriction can be applied even to secondary markets by requiring in the asset definition that the user must be attested by C4O37BFHR46UP6JJ4A5PA5RIZH5IFPZF, which is the address of the attestor who posts the ‘non-US’ attestation.

var asset = {

....

spender_attested: true,

attestors: [" C4O37BFHR46UP6JJ4A5PA5RIZH5IFPZF "]

};

See developer docs about issuing assets.

Use cases

The immediate and most obvious use case where identity verification can be readily applied is ICOs.

The demand is already there, many recent ICOs already require KYC for their investors but have to do it manually or develop ad-hoc solutions. In the near future, the market pressure towards transparency and regulatory pressure towards KYC/AML compliance are going to increase the demand. So, we are launching this product at the right time.

Our ICO bot is already fully functional with its ability to accept investments in Bytes, BTC, and ETH and immediately issue the new tokens. And the option to verify investors will be added soon.

Other applications that can make use of secure identity:

fraud screening for credit card payments;

lending;

age checks for age-restricted services (only the date of birth needs to be revealed, all other personal data may stay private).

And we’ll use identity ourselves to distribute Bytes in a more egalitarian but still abuse-free way. Read the next article about the new distribution methods.