Currently, we place an enormous amount of trust in centralised authorities to store and manage our identity. Such organisations entitle us to essential human rights such as financial services, citizenship/passport registration and business licenses. As with all centralised entities they are incredibly prone to hacking resulting from a single point of failure, all user data is stored in one single place. This has too often resulted in our identities being exploited for criminal purposes such as identity fraud, as seen in the Equifax hack where 143 million users identity were stolen from a central database.

Coupled with this inefficient management of sensitive data, the current process of completing mandatory KYC (Know Your Customer) processes for business is cumbersome, costly and repetitive. KYC ensures that client identities are fully assessed before any business relationships are formed to avoid the risk of illegal or fraudulent interactions. They span numerous jurisdictions and are therefore widely used by firms all over the world. Sharing sensitive identity data to numerous centralised databases has it proposed risks, but perhaps more poignant is how much time and energy is spent completing such a process repeatedly.