Why is idOS needed?

A chain-agnostic, decentralized storage layer is the missing link for decentralized identity to become a reality in web3.

We need to take back control of our data

Over the last two decades, our day to day lives are increasingly moving 'online'. For a large amount of the wold's population, online commercial interactions are becoming more critical than physical ones, and this trend is just going to accelerate and become automatized with the growth of AI. Whether we like it or not, for many of us our online life is becoming our 'first life', and our interactions are going beyond our national boundaries.

In this new world, the definition of an 'individual' and 'our identity' is becoming blurry. For many years, we have represented our identity through a piece of paper or plastic, given to us by our government and usually presented physically to another human. However, this falls short for today's needs, since proving who we are online is becoming more and more frequent. Centralized databases containing pictures of our ID docs are neither a secure nor scalable solution for this new world, and represent a big data privacy risk. Additionally, according to the World Bank, more than 850m of the world's population lack official identification by their governments, and this number goes up to 40% of the total population in some areas, like Sub-Saharan Africa.

Nevertheless, our identity is much more than what our government says and prints in a document. Our identity is what we believe about ourselves, what we do on a daily basis, and what others that we interact with say about us. However, today we don't have a widely-accepted way to effectively represent this attributes. As we are going through this new technological and social revolution, we want to empower individuals to own and manage their data.

idOS was founded by individuals that have been in the web3 identity space since 2017. Our mission is to create an identity solution that enables decentralized, self-sovereign identity to become a reality, allowing individuals to own and manage their data in a self-custodial way, but at the same time enabling actual usage in today's world, in compliance with regulations. We are not here to compete with other decentralize identity or data privacy solutions, but rather to act like an open-source secure decentralized storage layer where existing solutions can be integrated in a composable way.

Decentralized identity will drive business impact

Beyond the ethical considerations, decentralized identity also enables new opportunities for businesses, with a direct impact on the bottom line.

Fintech companies are increasingly replacing their traditional finance rails by composable DeFi solutions. As DeFi continues to grow, it faces critical challenges in scaling and compliance when it comes to real-world applications. idOS addresses these issues by connecting the decentralized world with traditional financial systems, while enabling users to be in control of their data. Here’s why idOS is essential:

A decentralized storage identity layer can break down ‘walled gardens’ and create an internet-wide user base. The internet is flooded with copies of our identity documents stored in centralized, closed databases. Even in web3, despite early innovations around privacy and identity wallets, identity is still stored in centralized databases or linked to a specific wallet in a specific chain for compliant use cases. idOS is built to abstract identity to the user level: off and on-chain, across chains, across applications and across wallets, where users can manage a single private profile, and give access to their data anywhere, anytime on the internet. Additionally, moving user data to a compliant decentralized storage layer increases security and reduces risks for companies.

idOS improves User Experience (UX) and drastically reduces Customer Acquisition Costs (CACs) for businesses. Empowering users to re-share their (verified) data across applications and services, streamlines onboarding to new services and reduces CACs. Today, the average CAC for a fintech app in the US is above $200, and new users are estimated to have a 68% abandonment rate when asked to provide (again) their KYC information to a new application. Every redundant request for user data is literally money being left on the table.

idOS makes the DeFi stack composable with real-world use cases that require identity verification. Fintech companies are progressively moving their stack onchain. The open-source and composable nature of web3 enables faster innovation cycles for builders (lower Opex & Capex) and up to 10x lower fees for users (crypto-fiat cross-border payments, on-/off-ramps). However, the benefits of these solutions will be unusable if an individual is asked to verify their data multiple times to interact with different services of the same application (e.g. payments, bank account, debit card). idOS abstracts this complexity by allowing users to re-share their data across services with a single wallet signature.