Episode 30 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
Alex Ortiz believes that technology should be used as a tool to teach, to heal, and to create personal freedom—in short, it should be used for good to make the world a better place. He has spent the last 11 months doing a deep dive into the blockchain space, working to build a community that can learn together and develop use cases for the technology that will improve our lives. So, what exactly is the blockchain? And how might it be used to incentivize positive behavior change?
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: The world's first carbon removal marketplace. Welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I'm Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gambill. We are very happy to have a blockchain episode for you today. We talked a lot about the environment and climate science, but we wanted to talk about cryptocurrency and blockchain applications. And when most people think about it, they think about money. And Andreas Antonopoulos, one of the luminaries of the space, has a line about how money is just the first application of blockchain, but there's a lot of other things that are going on that are really quite interesting, ways you can incentivize new behaviors and platforms that have not existed heretofore. We're going to talk about some of the ways you might not expect blockchain to be used, but are now being used. Indeed, sitting across from us is Alex Ortiz. Alex is the chief blockchain evangelist of lifeID, which is a blockchain company here in sweet Seattle.
Christophe Jospe: I had the pleasure of getting a request on LinkedIn from Alex on December 1st, 2017. "Hey, Christophe, see you're also into blockchain. Would be nice to connect. Also, I started a blockchain Seattle Slack group to help build up our community and foster relationships. Would you like me to invite you?" Say no. Anyone who knows me, I would be like, hell yes. Been looking for this thing, like, finally. And I'm pretty sure, I don't know, I mean, maybe there are other blockchain Seattle Slack groups, but now this is the one, the only, probably the best place for anyone in Seattle who's looking to really connect and have meaningful relationships with people who are not just trying to crypto speculate but, like, actually use this technology to change the world.
A note about Alex. Once I added him on LinkedIn I noticed he was doing this thing which is super cool, he was meeting people and then sharing what he was learning on LinkedIn, tagging those people and sharing those learnings. And I was like, wow, he's onto something, he knows. There's a long journey ahead and he has put himself on it. So... And he's blushing very deeply now. So without any further ado, Alex, we like to start with everyone's story and we want you to be able to tell your own. So how did this all get going?
Alex Ortiz: Awesome. Well, Christophe and Ross, so happy to be here. Thanks for having me on your show, inviting me to share a little bit of my journey and my story and also allow me to connect to the mission that Nori has. Pretty exciting stuff.
So, August 22nd. That's my genesis block [unclear] my learning journey. I read this article in Forbes. It was about Hyperledger Fabric being used by Walmart and a bunch of others to track mango. What is... What is this word? What is this blockchain thing? I read the article and I fired off an email to a bunch of employees at the company I was at at the time and said, "Have any of you heard about this blockchain thing? We have to talk." And in a few weeks, I just entered this period of learning, listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast with Nick Szabo and Naval Ravikant.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it's so good. I've recommended that one before.
Alex Ortiz: Because I was at the inception of my journey, I'd have to stop every 10 minutes because it was brain overload. What is this blockchain thing? What are they talking about? The more I got into it, the more I realized I have to connect to this space. So I went to a few meetups around town. We realized, okay, investing and the crypto side of this isn't going to be my entry point. Find other people like me throughout Seattle that just want to exchange ideas, and that's when I started this Slack group and I started feverishly looking for others throughout the city through LinkedIn, Meetup and elsewhere that had anything about blockchain on their profiles. And I would send them a message like this and invite them and say, "Hey, introduce yourself in the introductions channel. What about blockchain are you interested in? Let me try to connect you with others." And that group grew to several hundred people.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] what you do with the Carbon Removal Seattle, Paul? You're just like, I need to find everyone I can who cares about it.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. It was just a way to plant a flag and say like, here I am, come join me and let's talk about this thing. And let's make a thing that doesn't exist before and make it now.
Christophe Jospe: That's pretty much how you went about your learning here, Alex.
Alex Ortiz: Absolutely. Well, notice that blockchain is incredibly community driven effort, right? And you guys are on the side of decarbonizing the atmosphere. My team's on the side of making it easier for people to send private information securely and prove facts about themselves in a very data minimized way, which opens up a lot of cool scenarios we'll get into later. But in all of our little rabbit holes, community is king, right? You cannot build an ecosystem without community.
I would say that the whole reaching out to others in the Seattle ecosystem almost like taught me a really valuable lesson that I'm now employing in my approach with the lifeID team, which is building an ecosystem requires a lot of players, a lot of contributors, a lot of collaborators, a ton of community. That Slack was fantastic. And then I got laid off. It's now mid-December. I got laid off from the company I was working at and I took about a week to get really clear. What is my why? Simon Sinek, start with why.
Ross Kenyon: How many times did this come up on this podcast?
Paul Gambill: That's literally how I got involved in carbon removal and how Nori came about is because of that Simon Sinek TED Talk.
Alex Ortiz: So what happened?
Paul Gambill: I had a small business that I had been working on. It was a subscription box of fun things to do when you're high. And I realized I was putting stuff in a box and sending that to people, and that wasn't really fulfilling. Process of selling it, someone reached out to me and said, "Hey man, you got to watch this TED talk because you need to figure out what it is that you're going to do next." And I watched it and started thinking about it and realizing that I want to work on something big, but mostly I want to work on something that's going to attract a lot of other really talented and smart people to work on it. Well, it seems like climate change is sort of an obvious choice for that. And that's how everything that we're doing with Nori came about.
Alex Ortiz: That's amazing. Are you also one of the original members and co-founders?
Paul Gambill: Yeah.
Alex Ortiz: Awesome. So I think it's so interesting to hear people's origin stories and how taking that time to get really clear on what your purpose is. And I don't know if you guys are driven by legacy, if you guys are driven by, I don't want to say compensation, but just doing good while you're also doing well for yourselves or what. But I think we're here to leave the world a little better than we found it. Fundamentally technology is just a tool. It's a tool to teach, tool to heal, and it's a tool to free. In your case, it's quite literally. How do we free the atmosphere of carbon, right? And in the case of the lifeID team, it's how do we free people from this? Like to access online services, I have to give up my privacy. It shouldn't have to be all or none.
For me, you know, blockchain represents like personal freedom because I'm learning about how technologies that are emerging work. I'm learning how those technologies can actually be employed for good. And I don't know, having taken the time to get really clear on my why and using tech for good enabled me then to do what I did next, or just have a lot of coffee with a lot of people and do a ton of learning through the eyes of others and eventually find there was a team here in Seattle that was working on a really cool project where I wanted to plant my flag.
Ross Kenyon: When can we meet them?
Alex Ortiz: Tomorrow.
Ross Kenyon: I thought you were setting up Nori there. I got greedy for the compliment. I was like, uh-huh, uh-huh. Who is it?
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. So before we go into lifeID, which is an awesome project and we're looking forward to learning more about that on the podcast. Most of our listeners come from the climate space and they found this podcast because it's reversing climate change. Hopefully they made it this far on this podcast.
Ross Kenyon: I hope they made it this far and I hope they understand what blockchain is.
Christophe Jospe: But for those who don't, in as simple terms as possible, no jargon.
Ross Kenyon: And we'll call you out on jargon. Okay, what is blockchain?
Alex Ortiz: I was thinking about this. It's my dad's birthday on the 4th, actually. It reminded me of my grandma who's thankfully still around. Sometimes people say, "How would you explain this to your uncle? How would you explain blockchain to your uncle or your sister, your brother, your grandma?" And I thought, "Well, my grandmother lives in Dominican Republic." I said this to her. I'd say, I'm using computers to send you money, phone, so that you can then go buy groceries without stopping at the bank first. That might be one way that I would begin. The behind the scenes of how all that would be possible almost undoubtedly would require some sort of blockchain technology. Did you get the coherent little definition that you wanted for the crew here listening? Let me keep pushing, so we can move data and money more efficiently on the internet. You want to talk about trust?
Christophe Jospe: Absolutely, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Let's get into that. Take us there. 'Cause I was about to say, like, why should I care? Why is this such a big deal? Why is the hype around blockchain really happening? What gets people so excited?
Alex Ortiz: So let's say like I've met you a few times. I trust you. I don't trust you completely, right? Because I haven't told you everything about my life and myself, right? The longer I interact with you, the more trust I place in you, maybe the more I disclose about myself to you, right? We can come back to later how self-sovereign identity technologies kind of enable this sort of data minimize selective disclosure privacy by design flow to how we engage others. But trust is really critical to how we do business, how we interact, our bank accounts. And I feel like one way to explain blockchain is to say we have grown potentially overly reliant on trusting certain institutions and organizations to be referees, centralized referees if you will. How do we use computers in a way that enables us to have transparent records about things like financial transactions or identity transactions or other types of transactions, a transparency that we can all rely on as the source of trust? And so you think about amber, you think about a fly trapped in amber. I think this is something I heard in that...
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know.
Alex Ortiz: Yeah. You heard this?
Ross Kenyon: I've heard this, I think probably from Andreas Antonopoulos or someone else. I've heard this one before.
Alex Ortiz: Like layers of amber, layers of trust. But I think you have a transaction that's trapped in amber for all time for all to see. That's what a blockchain-based system enables if used the right way. And if you've got that and if all of us in the room can see the same fly, trapped in amber and none of us can touch that fly for all time. That frees us up to just do business in new ways. You're not relying on a central bank or a Visa.
Ross Kenyon: How many of these organizations get hacked every year too? I think every few months there's some big hack that exposes a bunch of private data and this is something that you don't have a centralized point of hacking for blockchains. It's that distributed. Would you say that's one of the main advantages here?
Alex Ortiz: Yeah. So I guess in the world that the lifeID team is playing in, we're trying to build a platform where let's say you're Google, you're Facebook, and you're LinkedIn. And currently I have three different accounts, one for each of you. And I have to prove that I'm me with the username and password each time I log in or even, you know, with the app, it remembers it's me and all that stuff. But imagine if I had a two-way [unclear] channel that only worked, you and a separate channel that only worked with you and a separate channel that only worked with you, right? And so, one way of considering how do you do trust or how do you enable username and passwordless interaction, if that makes much sense.
Christophe Jospe: That does, and I wanna talk more about lifeID, but I also wanna pull both lifeID and Nori out of it for a second because you've been going around the world learning about blockchain, learning about blockchain use cases, and I think use cases are a really good way for people to grok. What is this technology? How is it going to apply in our everyday lives? Besides money too, right?
Alex Ortiz: Besides money. Yes.
Christophe Jospe: So give us some of your favorite use cases or a favorite.
Alex Ortiz: Yeah. Okay. So professionally, you know, somewhat selfishly. Professionally, I hear that MIT and certainly Brigham Young University, they've started to offer their students the option of getting their proof of graduation with a self-sovereign identity-based tech, right? And so instead of getting this paper diploma, you can get this on the blockchain if you will.
Ross Kenyon: The University of Nicosia does that too.
Alex Ortiz: Do they?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I did their like free MOOC, Introduction to Digital Currencies, and I have a hash I can direct people to and they can verify that this like diploma is the exact same thing, every pixel is the same.
Alex Ortiz: That's right.
Ross Kenyon: So I don't know if they're doing it differently over at BYU or whatever, but that's great.
Alex Ortiz: Yeah, and the back end of how that all works might be different depending on the self-sovereign identity network they're using. I think that that's cool, right? Because I want us to get to a world where I can prove I'm over 21 without showing you my date of birth, right? Or you can prove that you have a business in active standing with the state. Or if you're renting an apartment and they say, "Well, we need to see your salary in order to pre-qualify you because you need to make 3X or more over the monthly rent," then you don't have to show them a W2 with all the other info that's on there, right? So I love the use of self-sovereign identity tech and blockchain and cryptography for proving credentials about yourself.
Personally, I love what the United Nations has been doing using an Ethereum private network to enable refugees in some of their camps to buy groceries on site using their iris scans and using their own internal United Nations payment network. It's awesome because that's reducing their costs and it's enabling them to more easily disperse these funds, right, to individuals that need them. And then the inner geek in me looks forward to a time when we have our devices being able to manage their own private keys and actually maybe send money. Like I can say to my phone, "Send this much money in this denomination to my grandma," or "Send Christophe and Ross this email." Phone itself can act on my behalf. And there are probably some good reasons why you'd want to use blockchain for those use cases. How about all of you? What use cases are most getting used to?
Ross Kenyon: You want to plug one of our house favorites?
Paul Gambill: This doesn't sound anywhere near as [unclear] to the human race or towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, Ross and I and Christophe too, he's come along, are big fans of a company called FunFair that is enabling provably fair casino gaming on the blockchain. Their token is used for placing bets and they were the first company to publish working state channels. Period. And it's provably fair. So right now in casinos, you have state regulators. Like if you're talking about like a Las Vegas casino, you have state regulators that go inspect every single slot machine and video poker machine and so on to ensure that it's actually operating the code that's been approved by the regulators so that when players play on there, they're getting payouts proportionate to the amount that they're supposed to. And then FunFair makes that possible to prove in an open source way so that anyone can see that the game that they played paid out the way that it should have. And then there's not some rake that the casino's taking.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, some of these more vice-y activities often lead tech development. But there's other projects too. One of my friends, I actually reconnected with her recently, started a project called Bitnation. Do you know them? They also work in the self-sovereign identity. Do you know about Estonia's e-residency program?
Alex Ortiz: I've heard a little bit about it.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. I did that last year. I have not seen any of the benefit from it, but I wanted to support it because basically you can digitally sign documents and receive everything through some version. I think it's some sort of cryptography that's very similar. I'm not a very good advocate for it.
Paul Gambill: All I know is Ross made me and Christophe go to the Estonian consulate with him in New York and sit in a waiting room with beautiful pictures of Estonia while he answered some weird questions.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it is a way of being able to manage an online persona anywhere in the world securely, especially if you're not an EU resident, you're able to quasi incorporate over there. So if you had a business in the States, but you want to do business in the EU, you use their services to like quasi become a Estonia for that purpose. So I really liked them, but yeah, Bitnation is basically trying to out mode the nation state as a way of a future governance by people controlling their own identities and by agreements being voluntarily entered into, etc. So that one's pretty far out.
I really like Sweetbridge as well. Sweetbridge is sort of hard to describe because they're trying to put literally the entire global economy on the blockchain. Think about it like if you are a corporation and you need to get financing for some new line of business that you want to pursue, you have a few options. You can get investors, you can use your own revenues, you could go to the capital markets, you can borrow and so on, but you are restricted by size and the lenders that you're able to work with. It depends on the current state of the capital markets. Are you borrowing at a high rate or at a low rate? And Sweetbridge is trying to make it possible to securitize every single asset on earth so that if you are a smaller organization and you don't have access to these crazy financial tools, you could borrow against yourself because you have assets that you can put on the blockchain and prove in that way that these are collateral against your own loan, even like accounts receivable could like.
Alex Ortiz: Yeah, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We're talking like massive amounts of new possibilities for derivatives and so on that can really enable a lot more economic value and growth creation.
Alex Ortiz: Fascinating.
Ross Kenyon: You have one for us too. We see all the easy ones.
Christophe Jospe: I had two that were going through my mind. One of them, better or worse, CryptoKitties. You know, I think showing that you have the provenance of art that then propagates and moves out into the world, I think is kind of fascinating. And while it's kind of like Beanie Babies and you're like, man, this is useless. Beanie Babies showed a number of great innovations. It showed that people care about collectibles. And now here we have digital collectibles. And I think the way that CryptoKitties has opened the door for more digital provenance is going to be pretty exciting.
Paul Gambill: I spent an entire summer in Phoenix one year as a kid driving around to different McDonald's restaurants with my mom so that we could get happy meals with the little mini Beanie Babies that they would provide.
Alex Ortiz: Wow.
Paul Gambill: We were big on the Beanie Babies, my family.
Ross Kenyon: Paul's a serial obsessive, so whatever he's into, there's no break on it.
So Alex, you've been attending many conferences. We were right before you came on the show kind of joking that a week in the world is like a year and it's just happening so quickly. Whole space is evolving incredibly quickly and you have had a really interesting seat to view it all, even though it's only been since August. How have you seen this space evolve? Since August, you're a seasoned veteran at this point.
Alex Ortiz: Oh, come on. I was at a conference recently and someone described it as we're all trying to find the light switch. Right. And I thought that's a nice metaphor, right? Because there are no experts yet in this space. We're all learning as we're going. Some of this technology hasn't existed yet or all the pieces that were needed to bring about some of these ideas now are becoming available in whole.
So in the last year, a couple of things. One, I feel like there's more community. So here in Seattle alone, there's over 30 blockchain-based projects that either have a founder here or have a C-level exec here, have some connection to Seattle. Although I don't know what the number would have been exactly 12 months ago, it's certainly a number that I am excited to see going up. So you've got obviously you guys, Nori here, the lifeID team, Stabley Labs, Blockcelerate, Cryptoslade, I mean these are just...
Paul Gambill: Bittrex is here, Bittrex is here.
Ross Kenyon: Wasn't MakerDAO here for, right?
Paul Gambill: No. They're all distributed.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, but one of them was here. [unclear] generous producer of all time. One of their former community manager, former is here.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, we're probably gonna have some of the MetaMask team are here.
Alex Ortiz: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Gambill: The founder of MetaMask is here, Kumavis.
Alex Ortiz: So it's awesome to see the community from the standpoint of blockchain based projects growing and also its community in terms of events, right? There are now days when you can't go to all the blockchain based meetups or events.
Ross Kenyon: In Seattle?
Alex Ortiz: In Seattle. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: How come we don't get more of these? We gotta get these invites.
Alex Ortiz: Ross, you just moved here like two weeks ago, man. And you were invited to one that you did not go to.
Ross Kenyon: I'm bad. I got scolded.
Alex Ortiz: I thought you guys were just working so hard that, you know, you got your heads stuck.
Ross Kenyon: Also that. Yeah, that was my excuse.
Alex Ortiz: So in terms of conferences, for example, on August 9th, there's Token Forum, that's Jonathan Blanco's effort. And in September, there's a Seattle Blockchain Conference by Chris Jones and the Dragonchain team. And so, you know, more community in the last year.
The second thing I'll say is, I feel like there are better resources for newcomers in blockchain, right? So I remember when I started in August learning about this stuff, it was like, okay, which podcast do I listen to? Are there any books around this? Is there any sort of certification out there? IBM has this two-hour blockchain essentials thing that I went through and it started to give me the beginnings of a tree trunk for understanding traceability and provenance and immutability and the value props of blockchains. Now, there's Blockchain Training Alliance and a new book just hit Amazon called Hands-On Blockchain Development with Hyperledger and got some good reviews. So, more resources.
And the third thing I'd say is just more specialization. I feel like there are 100 rabbit holes that one can go down. I'm in the self sovereign identity one and there's all these companies working in this space. There are standards bodies. There's enough to sink your teeth into year round identity based conferences. What's it like for all of you in the ecosystem you play? Do you feel like it's a similarly deep rabbit hole?
Christophe Jospe: For the environmental space, yeah. There's no way you could go to everything and you get to prioritize pretty hard.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] talking about self sovereign identity and I'm sure people are like, what does that mean? What is lifeID? And I also want to know, I read, was browsing around on the website and I think I have a good idea but I'll play dumb for you.
Alex Ortiz: All right. So over the last 25 years of internet use, I saw something that in '95, the percentage of Americans that were using the internet was something like six. And so '95, were we in high school at the time?
Ross Kenyon: I was in first grade.
Alex Ortiz: Yeah. So I would have been, I think in middle school by that point, right? America Online had just hit the streets or not the streets, the computers. Google wasn't a thing, right? Facebook wasn't a thing by '05. When Gmail was a thing and Facebook was a thing, I think the percentage I read was 66% of... And now by 2015, that number had climbed to almost 90%.
So the last 25 years of internet-based identity, I think we've also gotten used to usernames, passwords, given companies' information about ourselves. You go sign up for a new Gmail account, for instance, and it asks you first name, last name, your desired username and password. If you're male, if you're female. I believe, all this stuff. And we've, I think, just gotten used to that, right? It's like to access internet services, we give up private information about ourselves. And the platform we're building that's a self-sovereign identity technology, I think will enable the best of both worlds. You still gain access to online-based services, but you get to disclose a lot less about yourself, just a bare minimum. And as trust builds over time, you're able to decide, like we do in the analog world, what we share about ourselves.
In the internet world, over time, selective disclosure will be possible. Data minimization, being able to say, "I can prove to you that I'm over 21, and that's all you need to know." Here's this credential coming from the DMV that attests to that fact. "I can prove that I make over a certain amount of money, and here's a credential by my employer that I can show a landlord without disclosing my salary." I can prove that I'm an MIT graduate or University of Miami graduate and that I have a degree in neuroscience without giving you anything else. I'm a newly licensed doctor and I want to start working right away, not having to wait 90 days for the process of verification. Being able to get that down to one because I'm using a self-sovereign identity technology that enables me to transfer this cryptographically verifiable and secure credential issued by a trusted third party to whomever is verifying that information. These are the sorts of use cases that self-sovereign identity technology enable and we're really excited.
Christophe Jospe: My turn to play dumb. What if I get locked out of my account or like it's so secure that I can't even access it or there's some part where someone can steal my identity and pretend to be me and use a self sovereign identity platform to become Christophe Jospe, but like, no, I'm Christophe. They've somehow hacked me and all the digital footprint. What protection do we have?
Alex Ortiz: Yeah, I mean, I would answer that by saying that I think the way identity is done online now creates like that in a way that won't be possible in the future. So if I have a two-way cryptographically secure channel between myself and say my email provider and that channel or that pipeline only works for me, only from my laptop, or only from my iPhone and their service. If someone hacks into that channel even if they could, and remember now there's not a username or password being used to authenticate.
And we're moving in a direction where all my private information that currently kind of resides on those company's servers in the future, that might not be the case. Like I have my device, I have these credentials, I'm over 21 credential, I make over a certain amount of credential, my proof of graduation credential, and they're stored locally on my device. And all I'm using that to a channel for is to transfer that kind of info. And even if someone were able to impersonate me or get into that channel, they wouldn't be able to steal my data and they wouldn't be able to use any of that in any other channel with any other online provider or company that I do business with. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think it'll take some time to really think through the UX of all this stuff and then to be able to answer your question about why that won't even be possible down the road.
Ross Kenyon: That's user experience.
Christophe Jospe: I just got a glimpse of hope that it's so easy to steal my social security number. I'm sure a whole bunch of...
Paul Gambill: Already done it.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: You stole his social security number.
Paul Gambill: You can probably find it for like five dollars in about 10 minutes.
Christophe Jospe: So is the way that self-sovereign identity gonna play out where over time social security numbers become...
Alex Ortiz: Oh, I can't answer that, right? We're moving towards a world where you still need trusted third parties who issue credentials of some sort. You're born, you get a birth certificate. In the world of the future, you're still going to get a birth certificate. It'll just be cryptographically secured, signed presumably by your parents and the hospital staff and all that, that being a public record, for example, in that case. There's something anchored to a blockchain somewhere that enables looking up that, "Oh, this birth certificate was really issued by a real entity, is legit from a data integrity standpoint, is valid," and so forth. I don't know enough about the world of numbers like Social Security numbers, but I presume you would just have like Department of State issues, these cryptographically verifiable credentials that you are indeed a citizen, right? Yeah, I don't know what scenarios we would...
Christophe Jospe: It's all good, it's just a thought. So let me take it in a slightly different direction. Nori's building a blockchain application. lifeID's building a blockchain application.
Ross Kenyon: Water balloon fight.
Paul Gambill: Water balloon fight. Nerf guns.
Christophe Jospe: There's an ecosystem here that needs to emerge. What are the touch points of where you think an ecosystem like this could be most effective?
Alex Ortiz: Yeah, so we think of ecosystems in terms of holders of credentials, right? So, I'm over 21 credential or I'm Nori employee credential or I'm a lifeID team member credential or whatnot. And then you've got the issuers of those credentials and then you've got verifier, right? So, let's say you want to prove you're a doctor, you're medically licensed. So, the issuer would be the medical licensing board. You are the holder of that credential, you're the doctor, and you have it on your phone, and if I could present this, and the verifier would be like the hospital.
Actually, I was thinking over the weekend, let's say we're in a pre-television world and we want to jump ahead to a world of Netflix. You would need a television. You would need internet service. You would need a media player to download Netflix on. You would need content producers, so there's programming on there. You would need a distributor like Netflix. And you would need viewers who would actually watch the programming. And so the ecosystem becomes all the manufacturers of TVs, content providers, companies like Netflix, internet service providers, and so forth.
And so from an ecosystem standpoint, I could see, let's say, Nori's using a self-sovereign identity platform. Your users are using it as well to log into Nori's website without usernames and passwords. They could be part of that ecosystem. You're a business, right? So if you need to prove that your business is an active standing, right? So you need entities that can vouch for that. If you're trying to open up a bank account, right, as Nori, Inc., right, being able to reuse maybe KYC from some previous account you've opened.
Ross Kenyon: Know your customer.
Alex Ortiz: Know your customer. And so we're still trying to figure out [unclear] a minimum viable ecosystem for a particular use case.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] to learn more about you guys' team to pitch us on it on the air. That KYC oftentimes freaks people out a little bit in this space because philosophically there's a strong tendency going back to the early like cypherpunk days too of yeah, you control your data and everything is at least pseudonymous if not fully anonymous. So this idea of identifying yourself to third parties like banks and governments really spooks people. But I guess if you could somehow share a digital signature or something that proves that you are who you say you are without handing it over to this. I mean, there's lots of crypto vendors offering KYC, AML, know your customer anti-money laundering services. Sure, some of them will be hacked because people want to know who holds a lot of cryptocurrency. That's a valuable piece of information. So wouldn't you rather just like give them a little signature like off of lifeID? If you do like five token launches, five different vendors, you have your information. That's a lot of risk spread around there. Would you rather just do it your way? Is that something that you guys are looking into?
Alex Ortiz: Well, so keep in mind the lifeID platform, it's like infrastructure. It's like plumbing. It's enabling the transfer of cryptographically secure, verifiable information that users get to choose to disclose to others, to verifiers. And so presumably, the KYC software vendor of the future that wants to leverage value of self-sovereign identity tech could come along and build their offering on top of platform and then potentially users could reuse KYC checks that are known to be valid and all that kind of stuff. I want to distinguish we're not a product company, we're a platform company and we're building an open source platform for identity.
Christophe Jospe: Do you have any applications that are being built currently? Are you far along? Where are you in the building right now?
Alex Ortiz: Fairly early. So we are building a variety of components that will enable all this. So that means like our open ID connectors to bridge to the way that a lot of authentication happens in the modern world. We're building out contracts going to be releasing on our chain, but we also want to make sure that regardless of which underlying blockchain a user is using for certain services, their lifeID will work on there. So that means building out smart contracts for any open public permissionless ledger is going to be key. We do have several partnerships already that I've been announced with Digital Town, with Resonate, and others, and that list will grow over time.
Christophe Jospe: What are they building? I'm not familiar at the top of my head. Are they partnering to build products on top of your platform?
Alex Ortiz: So initially, it'll be to leverage the lifeID platform as a way to either onboard their users or enable their users to authenticate into their services. But over time, we're going to actually build out the infrastructure of zero knowledge proofs as a way for individuals to prove things about themselves like, "I'm over 21 without showing you my date of birth," and so forth. But Resonate is a co-op for artists and listeners to be connected more directly with fewer intermediaries. And the Digital Town team is building out a local peer-to-peer. I've heard it described as sort of like Amazon for a city, if you will. And so connecting merchants and residents and visitors to cities more directly.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was on a friend of mine's podcast there in the band, "Congos." I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They were talking about all the intermediaries that they have to go through to get paid. And oftentimes it takes like a year and everyone takes their cut and it's like, I wrote this song. I ended up, it was in the studio. Saw like a nickel off of it. And you're like, so that's cool. I'm happy to hear people are working on that. That's a good disintermediation as they say, application there.
Podcasts, Alex, have given us so much information for any of the listeners who are trying to not get overwhelmed all at once to start learning about the blockchain. What advice would you give to them or any closing thoughts?
Alex Ortiz: Yeah, I mean, I would say blockchain is the space that definitely rewards curiosity, community and collaboration, right? And so having something that you're passionate about as you're entering your learning journey around blockchain as a focusing lens. Whether that's identity or that's the environment or that's education or that's particular cause you care about finding use cases around blockchain in that space, I think makes it easier to learn about this. Finding a community local to you is going to be really important. I said before, blockchain is a community driven effort. Leveraging those of us that have an active presence like all of us do on LinkedIn. [Twitter plug cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio.] We're on LinkedIn. We have obviously the website. Honestly, we're in a time in blockchain where there's a lot of openness. And so you can reach out to a stranger and say, "I see you're pretty active in this space. Where do I begin?" And more often than not, they're going to respond, right? So don't be afraid to reach out to any of us. We're happy to help.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] The thing that gets me excited about it, and maybe we can close, let me add a little addendum here, is that for Nori, the thing that gets us excited is that you're able to pay someone for a new type of behavior that wasn't already being done, and there's lots of projects like that. In fact, I saw a supplement or a replacement for a government issued universal basic income. This is probably not enough money coming off of this, but it was like a step in the right direction, perhaps called Sweatcoin. Did you see that?
Alex Ortiz: No.
Ross Kenyon: It connects to your GPS or your Apple health or whatever, and however many steps you get, you end up getting paid a certain number of coins for distances walk. That's a way of monetizing this and getting people to be healthy in this public health kind of way. The point obviously has no inherent value because no money has any inherent value, but these things will ultimately end up trading and some people will perceive value and you'll be able to have this feel like a new form of value that was created out of nothing. That's one of the things that gets us excited about it. It's very important for your token to focus on incentives and making sure people feel incentivized to do things that you're creating a new system for them to work through. How are you leveraging those incentives? How are you getting people to do something that they wouldn't otherwise do, or do not need to rely on that as much?
Alex Ortiz: No, actually it's really important. We are the modern world and we need to transition to that next one. In our case, how do we incentivize developers to build our open source platform, to build out new applications that leverage self-sovereign identity technology? How do we also enable users of the platform to have a say in the governance of this platform and so tokens become really important for both of those? Are there ways to enable a certain percentage of transactions leveraging, say, the ID token to go towards developers who use the platform to build on, right? How do you bootstrap an environment? How do users actually vote on the evolution of the platform over time so that the governance isn't centralized and so that for self-sovereign identity to be self-sovereign, you need self-governance and for self-governance, you need to enable and incentivization mechanism until tokens become important. I'm not super familiar on your model and what Nori tokens will accomplish. For us, we see it as a central part living up to the promise of self-sovereign identity technology.
Ross Kenyon: That's great. One of our favorite examples is there's this town in Brazil that when people would pick up garbage, they would be paid an alternative currency for it. This town was very broke, so merchants started accepting it. And all of a sudden, this broke town becoming like, actually, they just created wealth out of nowhere, became like a new currency instead of the Brazilian Real, out of nowhere. That gets us really excited, but we should close it up. This is the time to do so. Would you agree with that? As you look at me intensely.
Paul Gambill: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. OK, well, thanks for being with us here, Alex. We should hang out some more and we should come to some of these events you're telling us about. And I would encourage anyone in the audience to do the same.
Alex Ortiz: Awesome. Thanks for having me, you guys. Take care.
