Diego Fernández – Driving Decentralized Identity in Buenos Aires with QuarkID

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to The Future of Identity, a show that highlights the world’s most innovative digital identity ecosystems and the people behind them. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we are the first identity acceptance network, helping businesses verify their users 10 times faster through close partnerships with dozens of digital identity wallets. Today, I sat down with Diego Fernández, co-founder of QuarkID and co-founder of Sovra. QuarkID has received a lot of international interest for being a decentralized identity solution rolled out by the city of Buenos Aires. As one of the co-creators of this system, Diego shared the origin story of the project, how it evolved over time, and how it is being adopted today. Of particular interest to me, when they launched in February with a self-custodial identity wallet app, adoption was a challenge. And he shared that when they rolled the technology out into the existing government mobile app only 40 days ago, since then they’ve had 200,000 people onboard, and that rate of onboarding is growing at an increasing rate.

Riley Hughes: Diego is not only an expert in digital ID in Latin America, but you can tell from the conversation that Diego is a visionary. He sees how lacking current identity systems are and how much better they could be. And most importantly, he closes the loop on this vision by consistently harking back to how better identity systems lead to prosperity and empowerment. So I hope you enjoy the conversation with Diego as much as I did. Let’s jump in. Diego, welcome to the show.

Diego Fernández: Thank you so much, Riley, for inviting me. It’s a pleasure being here.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to you because, you know, around the world we see governments doing different kinds of digital ID initiatives, but not very many of these initiatives are really full-blown, self-sovereign identity. And I think QuarkID and what you’ve created there in Argentina are sort of leading the way on government-driven, fully self-sovereign, decentralized identity implementations. So I guess I want to just start by asking you to share the origin story of the project. You know, how did it come about? What were its original goals, and where did it end up?

Diego Fernández: Well, it’s a very funny story. I got involved in the identity arena in something like 2019. I was starting to get interested in blockchain technology and crypto technologies, and I got this personal experience because I needed to get my Italian passport. I’m Argentine native, but my family comes from Italy. And I went through this incredibly cumbersome process of getting paper official documents and getting those papers sort of sanctioned and signed by different entities all across the world, in Europe and in Argentina. And it was so crazy, so crazy that today, in this digital world that we live in, that process was so—not even, I would say, 20th century, but even 19th century. It was crazy. So I started investigating and saying, hey, it’s absurd. This is one of the possibly the only arenas left in which technology has not transformed the process at all. And two years later, I got offered the job of being Secretary of Innovation of the City of Buenos Aires, and when my former boss offered me the job, I said, hey, you know what?

Diego Fernández: I have been in the technology space since I was 20 years old. He said, you know what? I will deal with all my job responsibilities, but I’m getting involved in this because I want to do this project. He said, okay, let’s move on with it. And in these years since we started, I think we learned quite a lot of things till final deployment of the solution, something like October the 20th. It was a long journey, almost a three-year journey.

Riley Hughes: Wow. So, Diego, what happened on October 20th this year?

Diego Fernández: Well, when we started, I was pretty adamant regarding that government—I mean, everyone should use open source software always if possible. And when we started in August 2021, I made this open call to the local tech community and blockchain and crypto industry here and said, hey guys… We want to develop this. We want to do this product, to do this protocol. Help us. And we were lucky enough that many of—we in Argentina have a very strong technology and crypto industry. Many of the companies, the entrepreneurs, the tech guys in Argentina got involved, either by just advising or eventually by putting resources to work for the project. We spent almost no money in this. And when we started, we had this kind of more cyberpunk view in which we would only have an open source wallet. The government application will only be used in order to validate your identity biometrically, because that’s a sort of regulations requirement that we have. But your credentials will be stored just on your self-custodial wallet. We had that ready, I would say, in February this year, February 2024.

Diego Fernández: But we realized that gaining adoption by using that strategy would be very difficult. Why? Because, and I always quote this case, my question was, would my 85-year-old mother, which she has an iPhone, each time she needs to download an application for whatever reason, she calls me and she says, Hey son, is this application safe? I always repeat the same thing: Mom, if it’s in the App Store, it’s safe, don’t worry. Phishing emails are dangerous, applications in the App Store are not. But I mean, would my mother be able of downloading two applications, going from one application to do biometrics and then to the other application to get herself logged in? That won’t happen. And that will provide users with a much worse experience than the one they used to have, which is basically a centralized Web2 wallet, which worked perfectly well, but connecting online to our central database, to the central databases of the government, and downloading online documentation to their phones. So we took six months more in order to get the QuarkID protocol within our custodial Web2 application.

Diego Fernández: So today you have as a user the two options. You can have the open source QuarkID wallet, and you can have your credentials there. Or you can use the government application, which has something like 3.5 million users. It’s used by almost 2.5… 3 million people to log in the government websites per month. So in August 21st, we released that renewed application from a user’s perspective, and that’s for me is crucial. It’s really something very streamlined because all the GUI is application updated with the icon change and the UX and UI change. But from their perspective, the first time they onboarded took kind of a longer process because they need to create the DID and then mint the verifiable credentials. But once you get from that onboarding first step, it’s like opening any application. It’s even much better because credentials are stored locally on device. When you open your application, the credentials are there. There’s no need to download anything from anywhere.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s really interesting. You started with the vision of this fully self-sovereign, self-custody wallet, open source technology, et cetera. And then you’ve ended up with kind of two options, right? People can go that full route, and then they can also go a more custodial route with their credentials in their government application, right? Which is interesting because most governments just go to the second one, right? They start with the centralized government app or something, right? Like a state in the United States may have a wallet app with a mobile driver’s license in it or something, or an eID app in Europe. And the idea, for example, with eIDAS 2.0 is that eventually those will become more self-sovereign. But you sort of started on the more decentralized side first and have inched a little bit closer to the convenience side. So I guess what do you think explains that difference?

Diego Fernández: Well, basically how to drive for adoption. For me, now speaking more on the blockchain slash crypto industry, I think that blockchain technology will change the world dramatically. It has just started. And the big question everyone in the industry asks is, how do we get the next billion people on board? And honestly speaking, in my view, that’s not going to happen for DeFi. Why? Because DeFi is a complex thing to handle. Regular users actually don’t care about whatever DeFi application. They just want to see numbers on their screen, which represents dollars or whatever currency, and to be able of transferring that to any other given party. And they actually don’t care what’s behind. People which are more sort of connected to the decentralized, and so on, of course, we do take the necessary steps in order to achieve self-custody or don’t rely on intermediaries. Eventually we will migrate to that. But I started, or we started, with this vision, saying, Hey, we should push forward this because we believe in this.

Diego Fernández: And they realized that the first step was to get people on board using a Web2 application, giving them the option of going full decentralized, and that’s something of their choosing, and leave the rest of the market. Leave the regular guys, the guys that are not into technology, that are not yet familiarized with this type of things, as decentralization technology sort of intends to achieve. And migration will start happening. Honestly, see that in the near future, I don’t know, it’s three, five years, we will have something in the digital world quite similar to what we have in the physical world, in which we buy whichever wallet we want, we use whichever wallet we want, and we store whichever credential in whichever wallet. And maybe we have two or three different wallets, one for going to the gym and one when we travel and so on. Today technology is ready, but consumers are not yet.

Diego Fernández: I think that as people start getting on board, these new realities will start to emerge, and maybe we will have, I don’t know, a wallet specifically tailored for architects, which certain use cases and certain features that architects value the most, and another one for lawyers and another one, I don’t know. I think that we will start seeing that type of things in the future. We’re not there yet. I do think that the governments have a great role to play because governments can provide a reverse adoption like that, and they are the only ones positioned to achieve that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I think it’s interesting because, you know, in my last comment, I mentioned a lot of governments will have a little more of a centralized approach initially. And at the same time, I guess what I’m really saying is a lot of the governments who have successfully launched products will have their own wallet or their own eID app or something like that, right? But there are dozens of governments around the world who ostensibly would prefer to use verifiable credentials, right? And I know this because for four years, Trinsic had a verifiable credential platform, and, you know, we had government customers. We had, you know, we saw all the governments, there are governments in, you know, Canada and in various countries in Europe and so forth who spend a lot of money on maintaining and developing open-source verifiable credential-based stuff. And yet those don’t ever really end up launching.

Riley Hughes: Like so many of the government RFPs that I’ve seen over the last five years that call out verifiable credentials and interoperable technology and DIDs never really go anywhere, versus the mobile driver’s licenses, which are a little more straightforward and less open, but they tend to launch and do pretty well. So I guess I wonder, why were you able to succeed in Buenos Aires with a verifiable credential-based solution where so many other places have struggled so much to get a product out?

Diego Fernández: Well, maybe because we started kind of a semester, maybe a year later, so we were able of learning from other experiences. Second, because I think that we as a team, not as a government, but we as an innovation and technology team within the government, we were successful in selling because tech teams, CTOs in governments, they are not decision makers. You are decision maker, and decision making in which technology you use and how you use it. At the end of the day, you always have a boss, which is a decision maker, which use case you’re going to apply technology to. So one of the big things I’ve learned is that decision makers don’t buy technology; they buy use cases. And at the end of the day, they don’t care that much about which technology you’re using. Hey, I’m going to have these amazing products that make life easier for my sales. citizens.

Riley Hughes: Yeah,

Diego Fernández: you will. Okay, I want that. And then you maybe sell the beautiful specs and things that technology provides, but the decision maker will only focus, or 95% of its focus will be in the use case. And we were pretty successful in explaining basically two main use cases, or two main types of use cases, which we are positive that will bring a lot of prosperity into Buenos Aires, into Argentina, into the region, which is first case in our city. You have this national app where you need to download the driver’s license from the central database. Sometimes it’s offline because basically it’s an application to a central database. Policeman has no way of credibly verifying that app, and eventually someday they provide the functionality that will leave a digital footprint in whichever ones is verifying that credential, the central authority will know in which place you use it. So even if we had that opportunity, it will have serious comebacks. So the first use case is, you know what?

Diego Fernández: Birth certificate, vaccination certificate, high school degrees, driver’s licenses, all of those things could be verified not by the government, by anyone using a generic verifier, a progressive web app, which is downloaded for free, extremely easy. Even a grocery store could verify some information, and that’s a very powerful use case. And the second powerful use case is that by, again going back to reverse adoption life cycle, if you as a government you do that, you have this huge driving force option. And it’s kind of complex to say that, but the government is monopolic, so it has a— Given monopoly on that people’s lives. So if you want to get a driver’s license from the Buenos Aires City, okay, you need to go to the Buenos Aires City government. No other party able to issue that license. So we, or the government, is able to pay an extra amount of friction in order to onboard citizens that start up a private company, which suffers customer acquisition costs and operating onboarding processes.

Diego Fernández: And the government basically doesn’t suffer because people, if they want to renew their driver’s license, they will go through whichever process we require them to do. Of course, we need to do those processes seamlessly as possible. But once we paid for that friction, if using open, non-permission blockchains, a whole ecosystem of collaboration may arise. And that’s starting to be proven right because, for example, we have two universities implementing QuarkID technology within their universities for issuing credentials, and we have several private companies. We have one bank adopting this technology within their bank’s wallet in order to provide Argentine subnational states with the bank’s technology and the ability to issue verifiable credentials. So if you do this in an open, permissionless manner, everyone will take benefits from the onboarding process that the Buenos Aires City did. And as the ecosystem starts to grow, everyone will have this sort of mesh of collaboration and sort of this virtuous circle being generated. And we have studies that support that idea.

Diego Fernández: Now, there’s a thing, it’s a McKinsey or WEF study, which states that global GDP may have something between a 3 to 14 percent growth by streamlining the process of digital identity.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot I want to dig in on there, but probably the most interesting thing I think maybe that we could touch on is you brought up this concept of reverse adoption. Could you speak to that when you speak about this reverse adoption lifecycle? Could you kind of expand on that?

Diego Fernández: Oh yeah. I mean, so you as a company don’t need to go and start using your marketing techniques or your onboarding techniques to get people adopting your product, but you have a big institution as a government which provides that adoption on which you can build. So that, in our view, in the next, I don’t know, 12 months, there will be a lot of startups and established companies that say, Hey, we have onboarded something like 200K citizens in 40 days. As I mentioned, we have 3 to 5 million people as active users in the city’s government platform. So when we reach the 1 million users milestone, and even before that, because fintech companies, banks are saying, Hey guys, so if you have 300,000 customers, 400,000 customers, I could just request the credential of the Buenos Aires city and take that as a valid KYC. Well, you could. I mean, there’s some regulations that need to change, but it’s perfectly possible.

Diego Fernández: Today, any given fintech company in Argentina has something like a 50% drop rate in their onboarding process, and that is basically tons of dollars spent in doing this crazy thing, which honestly, today we’re speaking about, this is so funny for me, we’re speaking about if AGI is going to rule the world or how we’re going to contain AGI. We’re seeing Elon Musk speaking about interplanetary expanding consciousness and grabbing rockets out of thin air, and when we need to KYC on the internet, we take out a piece of plastic, we take a picture, and we start doing like this on the camera. That’s so crazy. That’s so, so crazy. I mean, it’s a place where we need to evolve. We’re so, so behind in that arena. And I think that governments, of course you know this, they issue the most valuable credentials to citizens.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Diego Fernández: Because they have your ID, your certificate, your driver licenses, and so on. So they have a huge power. And quoting the Spider-Man, with great power comes a great responsibility.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Diego Fernández: Better be used in the right way.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Well, you’re speaking my language with all the amazing things we’re doing in technology. Why are we still photographing plastic cards? You’re also speaking my language when you talk about Marvel and… Spider-Man, so it’s great. We’re very much on the same wavelength here. You mentioned 200,000 citizens in 40 days obtaining a… that have been onboarded. And my understanding, based on what you said at the beginning of the conversation about the way that the technology is distributed to consumers is through this existing app where there are 3.5 million people who’ve already downloaded it. So should I picture in my head like I’m citizen of Buenos Aires, I have this app, there’s a new button, you know, in the app, and I sort of push this new button, and then I create my DID or something through this new button, and then I get my existing government credentials preloaded into this app? Or what does the onboarding process look like for those 200,000 people?

Diego Fernández: It’s a very good question. Well, those people had an app. The most common thing you do with government, except that you are a profession, for example, an architect which deals with working permits for building buildings, or whichever profession that you need to come back constantly with the government. Regular citizens, the most common thing that they do with government is either they get a, if they use public health services, they get an appointment or whatever in the public health system. And by far the most common thing that they do with the government is either issuing or renewing their driver’s license. We issue something like 40 to 50K driver’s licenses per month. So in order to do that, you need to download the app. You need to use the app. And if you had the… If you have the prior version of the app, you need a username and a password, logged into the website, and then you got the services the app provided. When we upgraded the app, and that was happening today, the UX changed, and you see you had this sort of wizard.

Diego Fernández: Step by step, we say, hey, please enter your username and password. There you are facing two options. One, we have already validated you biometrics, either physically or digitally. Two, you hadn’t. If you hadn’t, you went through taking a photo of your ID and doing the camera stuff in order to get a biometric validation. But if you had already gone for that, we just started creating your ID and issuing your credentials. But from a user perspective, and I’m pretty strong about this, from a user perspective, they have no way of knowing that is coming from a central database, being a verifiable credential on a private network, being a verifiable credential on an open permissionless network. Of course, there’s all the documentation open source available for anyone to check. But our idea is, you as a regular user, as a common citizen, you don’t need to get involved with messy tech stuff. You’re just using a regular app. And of course, if you, Mr. Riley, an expert in ID, or I, Mr.

Diego Fernández: Fernandez, an expert in ID, we want to go into, of course, we will download the open source wallet and try and download the other one.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Diego Fernández: We are 1% of the people. 99%, we just download the app and use it. And today, for example, sorry, when you go to the Buenos Aires City website, you can use your username and password, or you can touch a button that said, log you with MiBA, which is the name of the app. You scan the QR code and you get in, because what you’re doing is you’re presenting your citizens’ credential.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, great. Awesome. So that was the first thing I wanted to kind of double click on, is just how do these citizens obtain their credentials? Given that this is a decentralized identity, right? This is using verifiable credentials and DIDs and that sort of thing. Are these going onto a public blockchain? Is there a way to track publicly, like through an explorer or some other way, to track adoption rates over time, either of users or of credentials or things like that?

Diego Fernández: Yeah, there is. You should go to explorer.quarkid.org, or just go to www.quarkid.org and go to the explorer part in documentation. And you will see basically how many transactions were released on blockchain, how many DIDs were created. Of course, and this is very important, there’s no personal information whatsoever on the blockchain. The only thing you have there are the DIDs. There’s no PI there. The DID documents are stored in IPFS for the time being, and that will be changed as well because of GDPR compliance.

Riley Hughes: Makes sense. Okay, so then the other thing that you mentioned that I think would be interesting to explore is I’ve always felt like self-sovereign identity has this bit of a paradox where, from a consumer’s perspective, of course they want one wallet that has their driver’s license, their university diploma, their banking credentials, their health insurance card, you know, all this stuff. They just want one place to manage their data, right? And yet nobody wants to download a general-purpose generic wallet app, like you say, from the App Store with some open-source wallet app or something to do that. Maybe 1% of people do. So the vast majority of people end up obtaining wallets and credentials through some existing app, like the app that they already use for their government or university or bank or so forth. And so I guess, how do you see this converging, right? If everybody obtains credentials and wallets using different DIDs, different wallets… Potentially even different technology stacks in all these different apps embedded in their existing experiences.

Riley Hughes: It makes it easy to onboard users. But then how does this scale? Do users end up having 15 different wallets, you know, in five years?

Diego Fernández: Well, I think that we do have today one wallet for each institution that we have a relationship with. So I have two wallets for one of the two banks that I deal with. I have one wallet for the city of Buenos Aires, one wallet for Argentina, for Argentinean government, one wallet for my soccer team, River Plate. So each institution today provides you with a wallet, a centralized wallet acting against a centralized database. So if those institutions start migrating to verifiable credentials, self-sovereign identity, decentralized identity models, we are… one step better. We’re not in where we want to be, but we’re one step better. As I mentioned before, I think that those things will start converging because, let me give you a small example. QuarkID was implemented in Luján de Cuyo. Luján de Cuyo is a small municipality, small compared to Buenos Aires, something like, I don’t know, 30,000 or 60,000 people. In Buenos Aires, we have 3 to 5 million. This is small.

Diego Fernández: And when the CTO of Luján de Cuyo showcased in the launch their government platform issuing verifiable credentials using QuarkID protocol, of course he did it in the first time using their white-label wallet of the Luján de Cuyo city. But then he used the QuarkID open-source wallet, and then he used the Miba Buenos Aires wallet, the Miba wallet, so as to showcase citizens, hey, you can use whichever wallet you want. I think that for me that is the second goal, not the first. The first goal is we need to promote the adoption, and I’m focusing primarily the South American, the Caribbeans, because we do know the landscape here, we know people. So our first goal is to promote this type of standards within the region, and I think that as a region that is a must, and I will dive further into that. Once we have a good level of traction there, and we hope that by the end of 2025, maybe semester, the first semester of ‘26, once we have a good adoption in Latin America, then we could start sort of promoting.

Diego Fernández: The usage instead of 10 different wallets, hey, why don’t we sort of all use this or that wallet, or just showcasing that that’s possible? And today we have something like four different wallets from crypto and from entertainment, which are implementing QuarkID because they say, hey, you know what? I would love for citizens to have their credentials in my wallet because they are loyal users, and I think that we could sort of gain more loyalty from their side if they, instead of opening the government application, they use my application, which deals with ticketing or fandoms or whatever. And I see that we will, the wallet arena for me is extremely competitive, and they’re very big and powerful companies in the market. I’m totally fine with that. I hope that an amazing wallet comes with lots of features, and as long as they respect and preserve the ideals behind what QuarkID and we would like to achieve with self-sovereign identity, for me that’s…

Riley Hughes: Yeah, it will be interesting to watch. It’s a little bit of a speculative question that I asked you, but I think you gave a pretty pragmatic answer, so I appreciate that. You mentioned your focus on South America. Are there elements of QuarkID that you developed specifically with the South American market in mind? Are there things that are done differently there than are done in existing open source code bases like Aries or some of the other kind of the approach that the eIDAS 2.0 is taking, or things like that?

Diego Fernández: There are not that much decentralized identity solutions developed in Latin America. I would say that I know QuarkID is perhaps the only one of two, and the only one that has gained adoption, because QuarkID today is being implemented or being evaluated in several places in the region: in Mexico, in Peru, in El Salvador, in several provinces of Argentina. There are governments which have tried and failed, and failed. They have succeeded in providing their citizens with documentation digitally, but they have failed in getting adoption apart from the government. So you have initiatives in Colombia, initiatives in Brazil, but basically private companies are not willing to give information to governments for them to put that information in their wallets.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that is not going to happen.

Diego Fernández: So there are pretty strong government wallets, but they have reached the maximum potential. They are a government wallet, as we were discussing before. I think that the market and technology will move forward the reality of government wallets. And regarding Latin America, I think that as a region we have this incredibly, incredibly burden with bureaucracy. The level of bureaucracy that we have in Latin America is crazy, and that is such a big weight on our competitiveness. Just to give an idea, United States has a GDP of 30 trillion, EU has 20 trillion, Latin America has 6.5 trillion, and we are much less competitive regarding our bureaucracy systems because we are, you know, lots of countries without having common railways in order to exchange information. We haven’t been able of building, you know, a cohesive sort of economic or institutional bloc as the EU. So dealing with things cross-border in Latin America, documentation, payments whatsoever, is really a nightmare, and that burdens our competitiveness.

Diego Fernández: So we need desperately, desperately to achieve some sort of common standard because otherwise, I mean, always if we have this interview or this podcast 10 years from now, we will be speaking that perhaps that difference between 20, 30, 20 and 6.5 got even bigger. And we need to bring prosperity to our society. And I think that, honestly speaking, common, distributed, decentralized, self-sovereign identity standard, which will be a better said, it’s a crucial success factor to gain prosperity to our region. Regarding the specific tech things, we actually did not do any specific tech things in the product. protocol. But of course, for example, in the city of Buenos Aires or in Santa Province or in Mexico, each government took their own approach in how to integrate the technology in their systems. So Buenos Aires connected, we’re using Buenos Aires XRoad technology, which is developed by Estonia in conjunction with Denmark and Iceland in order to interoperate on a back-office basis.

Diego Fernández: So we connected that technology, that XRoad, sort of an ESB, that XRoad ESB, QuarkID with minting credentials. The government in Monterrey used a different approach. The government in Jujuy used a different approach. So that type of custom implementations are done by either governments or partners which connect. The protocol to the existing infrastructure of each party. The same thing, the banks or universities. They develop their own sort of APIs and connectors on their side.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I appreciate that answer a lot, and I definitely agree with you. I mean, I can tell, you know, a lot of your answers have this underlying spirit around common standards for identity leading to prosperity, right, and growth. And I think that that is evidently true. The question is, which standards will win out? How do you get everybody to agree to adopt the same standard? You know, things like that, right? Like, that has been the trouble, in my view, with verifiable credentials generally, is that there are—there’s not—verifiable credential is not a standard. It is a concept that, when you zoom in, has 20 different standards that do that thing. And so I’m hopeful. You know, I hope that, you know, QuarkID could represent a protocol or a standard that can span across Latin America just due to its existing adoption in Argentina. And you mentioned there’s other countries and municipalities that are adopting it as well.

Riley Hughes: I guess, what would you say to either governments or organizations in South America who are looking at their options with regard to decentralized identity, and they’re considering whether to issue a ISO mDL or using QuarkID to issue credentials or kind of following the eIDAS structure with their sets of technology? Like, how would you guide people to think about these questions?

Diego Fernández: This is complete speculation, but I don’t think that a single standard will rule the world. I think that we will have this sort of set of—I don’t think that there will be two kinds of standards, but I don’t think there will be a single standard. Maybe we’ll have four, five, six, ten, whatever. Of course, we will have bridges and connectors. Allow us to interchange information safely and securely between those standards and between those different distributed ledgers or not that each jurisdiction or any given party decided to use. I think that we’re just in the sort of adoption phase, which institutions are choosing. I think that, of course, mDL provides a great service and it’s really strong. I am more in favor of the credentials. I think, in my humble perspective, it’s more aligned with what I think the world should look like, but I respect any different opinion regarding that point. But I think that on a regional basis, of course, when the EU adopts eIDAS 2.0, the region will have that standard and everybody will apply to that standard because it basically common sense.

Diego Fernández: In Latin America, QuarkID is a great abstraction. Maybe mDLs start finalizing its adoption cycle in the U.S. I would like to see this initiative regarding Homeland Security and this passport and this Bring Your Own DID initiative in the U.S., how that rolls out. And I think that, I don’t know, maybe in four to five years’ time, we’re discussing how to interoperate different standards and maybe even within a single region, we have two or three different standards working together and maybe two or three different protocols, as, I don’t know, Privado ID or whichever other, or 1Kosmos or whatever. I think we’re now in the adoption phase. We will then perhaps evolve into the interoperation phase once adoption has been attained. I respect it, so I respect your opinion regarding this point.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I agree. I mean, to the extent that you can get common standards, I think that that’s better. It’s just smoother, easier for everybody. But there’s a benefit to— Divergence, right? Convergence on a single standard is beneficial because you get, you know, the economic wins from it. But divergence is helpful too because you get innovation and you get new products with new features and new experiences that people can, that, you know, the market can then decide what wins. So I think there’s going to be a balance, and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. Well, I like to kind of end the podcasts with forward-looking thinking, right? So I’m curious, how do you think adoption of digital identity will play out in South America over the next, I don’t know, three to five years? Like, in your most likely scenario in your mind, how does this play out, and what does adoption look like in a few years?

Diego Fernández: I’m pretty optimistic regarding adoption in Latin America, and this is kind of counterintuitive. Latin America, in most places, lags behind in digital transformation. So the rest of the world in some places is much more digitalized than we are. Not the city of Buenos Aires, but just to give you an idea, out of 24 different subnational states in Argentina, almost 17 are in an analog or pre-digital phase. And that, you could say, hey, this is very bad. Of course it is. But that also presents a great opportunity because today governments and institutions are so conscious that they need to, I mean, they have no other option. They need to move forward and digitalize themselves right away. When you do that from scratch, it’s much easier to adopt new technology than when you need to transform your old legacy systems, which has been running for the last, I don’t know, 10 to 15 years. And I know this by personal experience in government. You have this huge system that costs millions of dollars per year to maintain.

Diego Fernández: So, I mean, old tech, of course you keep updating the stacks and so on, but migrating is such a huge effort that sometimes starting from scratch with one brand new technology allows you to leapfrog the rest of the pack. I think that there are several governments, I know there are several governments in the region having this top priority in their agendas, and they are moving forward towards implementing digital transform in their governments and their processes, digital interconnecting with the banks and big institutions. And I think that the region is starting to realize either we move forward or we will be optimistic regarding this is going to happen.

Riley Hughes: Great. Well, that’s a great message. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you joining. If people are interested in learning more about QuarkID, getting in touch with you and talking about potentially working with you and your new startup, where should they, you know, go to learn more or get in touch with you directly?

Diego Fernández: Well, that would be QuarkID.org, my Twitter account, Fernandez Diego, or my telephone contact. Feel free to share all of those things out.

Riley Hughes: Okay, great. I can do that. Thanks a lot for joining, Diego. This has been a wonderful conversation. I think people are going to really enjoy an insight into what’s going on in Buenos Aires and in broader Latin America. So I appreciate you coming on and sharing a bit of your experience.

Diego Fernández: Thanks so much, Riley. It’s an honor for me having been here.

Riley Hughes: Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this content, please share it with others who will benefit from it. I’ve been getting some great feedback on the podcast recently, and since we don’t do a lot of self-promotion or ads or whatever, sharing the word really is the best way to signal to us that the content is valuable and that we should keep doing it. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or X at Riley P Hughes, and visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the future of identity. You can also visit trinsic.id/podcast to subscribe to new shows and subscribe to the Future of Identity newsletter, where we’ll share the essential reusable identity news we rely on straight to your inbox.