What makes your project better or different? Please elaborate.
Hi Daserpent,
There are substantial differences between SelfKey and Civic:
From what we've seen Civic focuses on authentication, not identity. And certainly, the current identity which civic provides (phone number and email) is not at an international KYC standard, whereas ours is.
At launch in the SelfKey marketplace there will be available more than 250 real products and services, such as residency and citizenship by investment applications, company incorporation, and many more. You can see for yourself at http://alpha.selfkey.org/marketplace
As my colleague mentioned, SelfKey has already established partnerships with both certifiers and relying parties for that including with VIC, an official service provider of Vanuatu government. Many of these relationships with financial service providers, corporate services providers, registered agents, lawyers, consulting firms, notaries, and governments, have been established through Far Horizon Capital Inc (Flag Theory) and KYC-Chain Ltd (founder of SelfKey) over the last 8 years.
SelfKey will have a layer of modular microservices that at launch will include:
eNotary: Notarize the document w/ a real notary. Legally binding & valid.
eSign: Sign a document. Sign with x509 or blockchain keys
Hash Function: Timestamp data or documents in the ethereum public chain
Collector / KYC templates: Collect KYC from anyone, in any country, any time
Remediator: Check against major sanctions lists to avoid onboarding terrorists, drug dealers, human traffickers or politicians,
Company Registry: Check to see if a company exists in a government registry.
Company Laws: Trust, Tax and legal information organized for over 120 countries
KYC Laws: KYC laws in over 80 jurisdictions
This technology has been developed in the last 3 years and has gone through accelerators such as Fintech Innovation Lab, Siam Commercial Bank Digital Ventures, Supercharger Fintech and Cyberport. It has already been successfully tested with companies such as Standard Chartered Bank (https://www.sc.com/BeyondBorders/universal-digital-identity-how-to-get-it-right/).
Furthermore, SelfKey will power the KYC process of Token Sales (which would be accessed instantly from the SelfKey Marketplace). In fact, we have already successfully handled Airswap’s KYC process, and we will do so on Gatcoins token sale that will be held this month.
Another substantial difference is the token economy. Selfkey's token economy is consistent and designed to be feasible in the long term:
A user will pay tokens for the attestation of his identity. In the same way that you go to the notary with your physical document to certify it.
The user will pay tokens to onboard in a product or service. In the same way that you currently pay a registered agent for the incorporation of your company.
The relying parties will allocate a portion of the tokens received to reward certifiers, who have verified the identity of the customer that has been successfully onboarded.
In this way, all parties involved in the SelfKey ecosystem are incentivized using the KEY token. The user can truly control and manage his digital identity and can apply for products and services easily and immediately, avoiding tedious application processes. Certifiers monetize their attestations and relying parties charge tokens for a product or service, get new customers and reduce KYC onboarding costs.
SelfKey is based on Ethereum and its Identity Wallet will be completely open source.
In addition, SelfKey plans to use uPort for key recovery in a completely decentralized way (if you lose the key, you can recover it by delegating this responsibility to a friend).
SelfKey's approach is transparent. The user does not store any data or documents on SelfKey servers or the Blockchain. These are stored on the user's personal device. There is no centralized database.
The user decides what and to whom share it. User has complete control of his digital identity.
SelfKey will also enable data minimization, with attested claims where only the required information (and nothing more) will need to be shared.
For further details check our whitepaper: http://selfkey.org/whitepaper and join our Telegram group: https://t.me/joinchat/ALBChAsAG_uiTaaTwKfCPg
If you have questions or doubts, feel free to ask me