Deep dive into ShareRing's digital identity technology with Jonathon Liu, VP of Marketing at ShareRing

“What we’re building is essentially an advanced replica of the existing IRL identity models, so that you can securely exchange your information for value.” Jonathon Liu, VP of Marketing at ShareRing

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In this article we continue our conversation with Jonathon Liu, VP of Marketing at ShareRing about Web3 identity and how it has heavily influenced the development of ShareRing’s ecosystem across the Cosmos.

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“I look at our ecosystem here at ShareRing, and broadly speaking our products are based on the principles of web3 identity.

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We provide the infrastructure through our own Layer 1, ShareLedger. ShareLedger is The Identity Chain that acts as a network and source of reputable data, completely private and reveals no sensitive information. Through ShareLedger, we promote for immutable and zero knowledge on-chain identities, and protocols that are built ontop or alongside our chain can leverage these identity features. The chain lives in Cosmos, is IBC enabled, and we’re currently looking at different mechanisms to facilitate cross chain communication with EVM and non-evm chains.

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Sitting on top of ShareLedger is our identity protocol, the Vault. The Vault is a hybrid on-and-off chain identity system, and through it, individuals can verify, create, manage, and use their reputable data. Your identity is an amalgamation of your reputable data, and ultimately users control which parts of themselves they wish to share and with whom.  A core component of the hybrid nature of identity is that it allows for on-chain reputation to be synchronized with off-chain reputation, effectively bridging your in-real-life (IRL) identity to the world of blockchain, and in a user privacy preserving environment.

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A core USP of the Vault is that the off-chain data is only stored on the local device, and it’s encrypted with the user’s private key (from their ShareLedger wallet). Simply speaking, even if someone were to hack a user’s phone and steal their data, they wouldn’t be able to decrypt it…not unless the user openly broadcasted their seed phrase…which we’ve said time and time again not to do. Not your keys, not your data!

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The on-chain element is actually in the form of a soulbound token, and we currently have 2 types. The first is an immutable identity, where each Vault user has one. This contains hashes of all their off-chain credentials for proof of untampered data, and to determine which credentials are valid or revoked. Our second category is for specific identification, which we call private identities. These are soulbound tokens that contain zero-knowledge information about the user. For instance, the private identity could represent the user as of legal age in Australia. Each Vault can hold an unlimited number of private identities, so the usability is limitless.  

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With identity comes the need to ‘use’ it, and so we created the mechanics to facilitate the movement of sensitive information from the Vault. It’s called ShareRing Link, or simply Link. It’s a platform that enables the retrieval of data from a user’s Vault, which would is done so via a QR code that has the custom request encoded into it. We’ve built this into a web based platform, where QR codes and customer pre-screening set up can be easily generated in a matter of seconds.

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In summary we have 3 main products in our ecosystem. The Layer 1 (ShareLedger), The Identity Protocol (Vault), and The Data Retrieval Mechanism (Link). What’s really special about these 3 products is that they come down to the one element of reputable data. Our identity is essentially a collection of information about ourselves, be it in real life or digitally. It is our information, our trustworthiness, reputation, and our honesty that grants us access to experiences or goods in life. What we’re building is essentially an advanced replica of the existing IRL identity models, so that you can securely exchange your information for value.” 

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