We are a trust protocol, not a KYC solution. It's true, among other things, you could use Persona for KYC, indeed. The current KYC process is broken, and we all know it. People are performing KYC using a scissors cut photos overlaid on someone's ID.
What makes us stand out from the crowd when it comes about KYC?
1. The identity of the people is being verified and validated face to face, a process that worked pretty well back in 2001-2004 for Thawte with their Web of Trust.
2. Nobody is maintaining a copy of your documents. Everything is stored encrypted on the blockchain and on the private IPFS instance that runs on top of Persona. The individual decides with whom, what and for how long it shares any of its details. Nobody is checking you against DMV or any other register.
3. We provide the means for the companies that are accepting Persona as a means of identification to potentially have access to the latest version of your details, something that does not happen today with any of the identity solutions running on blockchain or not.
As stated before, Persona is a zero-knowledge trust protocol. After you established your identity, you could start using it on various other instances or applications developed on top of Persona. Have your identity pushed in Ethereum smart-contracts, passporting your identity cross border, sign your emails to prevent phishing attacks or enjoy a privacy-first social network.
Thank you for the detailed answer. How many applications are going to integrate your service? Can you give me some examples?
As I was saying, Persona is a trust protocol, but in order to build the trust, you need an identity (like we are using on BCT our nicknames, they are a projection of a real person. At least hopefully
). While we were working on Persona development we realized that with the minimum mandatory required attributes needed to build that trust we can address also a huge pain (both for customers and companies) which is KYC/CDD. So now, with the launching of
Public Beta we are demonstrating the way Persona Trust works and also we are making available for companies to test their implementations and create their risk templates and test it.
Now, to come back to your question, we are working with some OTC desks (in different geographies so we can mold Persona to fit all regulations in place, especially since by 2020 the 5th AML directive will be in place), some exchanges, we're developing our own applications (for two reasons: to prove what Persona is about and to show developers worldwide that we can deliver the onboarding process for the applications they are developing, so there is no reason for them to think about GDPR, data protection, and such things), a project that is working on a solution for Universal Basic Income, and a crypto friendly bank. All these are discussions and/or in different stages of development. So they can come to fruition or not. Until you can use your identity registered in Persona to use some services of some OTC, you should see it as a "discovery" stage.
We've become so used to the "Register" or handing over copies of our ID's or passports that this is the only way we know of doing business with a third party. Persona represents a new way of doing business for consumers and companies, but there is a "learning curve".