Unique Digital Identity for KYC

Many of the decentralised exchanges such as Binance are facing increasing regulatory pressure. In fact, Binance is slowly pivoting towards centralised practices such as users are required to undergo KYC in order to access the full suite of services. Currently, the KYC process requires users to submit a picture of their government IDs and the process could take up to 20 days. This is inefficient and will raise many privacy concerns. While the blockchain is pseudonymous in nature, regulatory for financial services might result in more blockchain services needing to comply to KYC rules in the near future. 

A digital identity solution that complies to the KYC rules will most probably have to be a unique ID system, meaning each person could only own one such ID. To achieve this, we need government to be the identity issuers. Each identity is stored in a digital wallet owned by the identity owner, while the identity claim is recorded in a smart contract on the Cardano blockchain. This timeline is in line with the Alonzo rollout plan. The concept is similar to self sovereign identity (SSI), however to ease integration into existing systems of decentralised exchanges, we plan to implement a set of APIs that could be called for identity verification and authentication. 

To provide a clearer picture of how it works, we will be building a platform portal, where identity issuers will issue identity credentials through this portal to identity owner's digital wallet. The portal will automatically record the identity claim in the smart contract. When the identity owner is required to perform KYC in decentralised exchanges, the identity owner will present the identity credentials to the verifier (the exchange). The verifier will then verify the authenticity of the credential through our portal, by calling the verification APIs, which essentially is a verification call to the smart contract, however abstracted away from the end users. 

Roadmap: First 4 months will be focusing on implementing the infrastructure, which includes identity issuance, storage and verification. We plan to leverage on existing open-source digital wallets for identity storage, and customise it to suit our needs. The subsequent 2 months will be focusing on community onboarding, which includes starting with onboarding a local / municipal government to be our pilot identity issuer, onboarding at least 100 users as our pilot identity owner, and onboarding 2 decentralised exchanges as our pilot identity verifiers for KYC purposes. 

Success metrics: 3 months - done with basic implementation of the digital identity infrastructure, starting on security auditing and QA testing. 6 months - Pilot identity issuers, identity owners and identity verifiers onboarded as users. Identify features for improvements. 12 months - Iteratively improve on features based on users feedback, manage to onboard a national government as an identity issuer, thereby increasing user base exponentially

Budget: 15000 USD for development cost in the first four months, which include hiring a full stack developer. 5000 USD for marketing cost, which includes online publicity, and cost for a part-time growth hacker. 

Expected public launch date: February 1st 2022.