Jeffrey Schwartz - Acquiring Trinsic Ecosystems & Accelerating the Future of Decentralized Identity

In this episode of the Future of Identity podcast, I’m joined by Jeffrey Schwartz, Founder and CEO of Dentity, to discuss the recent acquisition of Trinsic’s SSI platform assets, their ongoing partnership with Trinsic, and the innovations driving decentralized identity adoption. They explore the journey behind Dentity’s success in achieving market traction, building trust, and scaling decentralized identity solutions in the face of market challenges.
In this episode we dive into:

• The strategy behind Dentity’s success and rapid adoption in the decentralized identity market

• The Trinsic Ecosystem, interoperability challenges, and creating user-friendly identity solutions

• The role of interoperability and strategic partnerships in scaling decentralized identity systems

• The future of decentralized identity and the Trinsic Acceptance Network — connecting users, platforms, and networks globally

Whether you’re an enterprise, developer, or identity enthusiast, this conversation is packed with insights into the future of identity ecosystems and their transformative potential.
You can learn more about Dentity at dentity.com.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcast

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

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’re the first identity acceptance network, helping businesses verify their users ten times faster through close partnerships with dozens of digital identity wallets. Today, I’m here with Jeffrey Schwartz, founder and CEO of Dentity. Jeffrey, welcome to the podcast again.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Thank you very much. I think I was your first guest, wasn’t I?

Riley Hughes: That’s right, you were. So you’re the first guest and then now the first second guest.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Your intro there, the world’s first identity acceptance network, but you also did the world’s first SSI platform, I believe, right?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, we did the world’s first sort of software-as-a-service SSI platform, right? It was sort of the first SSI platform that somebody could kind of issue a credential in five minutes or something versus having to install software locally and do it that way. Yeah, but yeah, that was back in 2019.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah. Yeah, so you’re the innovator, really.

Riley Hughes: Well, appreciate it. Well, Jeffrey, there’s good reason to have you as our first second-time guest on the podcast. Christmas is coming a little early for both Trinsic and for Dentity, I think, this year. I think we’ve got some news. Would you like to share what’s been happening between Trinsic and Dentity over the last little while?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yes, I would. Let me just back up a little bit. So we’ve had this marvelous relationship with Trinsic. It’s been three years. We’ve issued a ton of credentials, a lot of digital wallets. I think we’ve grown together. The product’s grown, and it’s been a fabulous relationship. And it really is fundamentally the reason why we’ve been able to do what we’ve been able to do with millions of credentials and lots of distribution. And so it’s very logical today that we announced that we are acquiring the assets of that SSI platform, which we so dearly love, the platform that we’ve been riding on for the last three years. And we’re incredibly excited to be the new owner of this platform, the assets. And we’re also excited for you, Riley, that you guys have an exciting new opportunity ahead of you. And so I want to spend some time asking you questions about that. But in terms of today, yes, we’re acquiring the assets of the Trinsic SSI platform. We’re super excited about it.

Jeffrey Schwartz: It was a very friendly collegial deal, and it really sets the stage for continuing to grow this partnership on the identity network.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, we’re equally as excited. It’s been equally a productive relationship on our end, Jeffrey. So like I mentioned, we Launched this product in 2019. Since then, we’ve had thousands of developers use the product. We recently sent out an email to the sort of developer list and was like, geez, this is a lot of people. It’s crazy. I guess what happens when you have hundreds of signups every month for five years, right? And despite seeing hundreds of companies build verifiable credentials and wallets and decentralized identity into their products, many have struggled to get launched, get adoption, and really succeed out in the market. And I’ve talked about this a lot on our podcast here with various guests. I’ve talked about it in blog posts, etc. And Dentity has always been the exception. Consistently, we’ve always been asking ourselves internally at Trinsic, how do we get more Dentities? If every company that built on our SSI platform were as successful as Dentity is, we would be in a very different place right now in the world.

Riley Hughes: But I think it just speaks to the certain companies have a unique angle, unique advantage, unique people, unique take on the market, and are able to defy the sort of the standard pattern and really become a breakaway. And that’s what Dentity’s done. So could you speak to that? Maybe speak to the traction that you’ve gotten so far. So give people maybe a sense of the scale of your product so far, and then, you know, how have you been able to do that despite all the challenges that seems like the market has faced more generally with decentralized identity?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah, I mean, we still face challenges. It’s not like we’ve figured it out, Riley. But just in terms of scale, we probably have, I don’t know, five million verified pieces of information on the system now, probably close to 500,000 wallets, which I think is going to scale pretty quickly. We have built this system on your rails, and it’s worked perfectly. I mean, there’s one thing that’s worked perfectly over the last three years, and it’s been Trinsic. Honestly, like, we’ve never had any issues with Trinsic at all. You know, everything else has gone wrong. You know, I mean, we’ve had every other sort of issue. But I’ll tell you, there was no failure condition at all with us and Trinsic, so I’m really pleased about that. We probably have 150 enterprises now that are using the system. We have some big companies that you’re aware of that we haven’t, you know, made public, but we have this big partnership with ENS, for example. So we’re getting big distribution. We’re super excited about it, and that’s part of the strategy with us and the platform.

Jeffrey Schwartz: So the question is, how did we get to market? And what was unique about Dentity? First of all, we started trying to solve a real problem, which is how do you create trust between consumers, you know, online trust. And when you’re starting a business, you have to solve a very small problem. And one of the things that many startup CEOs, founders do is they get too ambitious and they take too big of a bite at the apple. And in my experience, small companies can generally do one thing well, right? They can work on adoption, but they can’t work on monetization. So we’ve been very focused on one thing, and I think it’s been really the secret to our success. Let me tell you, it’s very hard to get to market. It’s a grind. I’ve been CEO of four public companies, and it’s difficult, difficult work. And everyone that you get to that level had its moments where, for me, out in the car in Kansas talking to car dealers in the snow, and that’s just what it takes, Riley.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, it seems like every time we, you know, we’ve had these biweekly check-ins now for three years or something, right? It seems like every time we get on the phone, it is new customer accounts, new deals coming through the pipeline, new commercial activity. And I think, I would say from an outsider’s perspective, I don’t know if anybody is as commercially focused and as go-to-market focused as Dentity’s really been over the last handful of years. And I think that focus on building a good product for one problem and being relentless about getting it out there and in front of as many people as you can has really paid off. I mean, maybe it’s not that simple, right? Maybe there’s no secret sauce. Maybe it’s just you’ve got to get out there and make it happen. I don’t know.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah, you know, there’s always like, people talk about the cold start problem, right? When we were starting Autobytel, there was no internet car lead or anything like that. We didn’t have any car dealers on the program. And you have to pick this stuff up and put it on your back. You can’t say it’s the cold start problem. You got to get in the car and go to Kansas and make sure that car dealer gets on your program. And so I find a lot of entrepreneurs, they sit on the Discord server and they’re just talking to themselves. You’ve got to go out and see your customers. And maybe it’s old-fashioned, you know, get on a plane and go see your customers or pick up the phone and do all this kind of stuff. And maybe everybody’s so used to this sort of virality of Discord and, you know, this sort of happens. I don’t know. But where I come from, you got to go out and it’s hard work to go find customers. And every new customer is you covet and you take care of.

Riley Hughes: So, yeah, you know, as Trinsic, we built this self-sovereign identity platform, this decentralized identity platform, with a lot of care and a lot of intentionality and a lot of purpose. And we put it out there into the world. And I think, I like to think that I did some of what you’re describing, right? Working hard to get it out there in the world. But ultimately, as a platform, in the spirit of trying to solve one problem and do it really, really well, we were trying to solve just one thing at that verifiable credential layer, the standards layer of decentralized identity.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Let me ask you a question. What is unique? Like, tell me what’s unique and special about ecosystems. Like, what’s that one aha moment that you had with that when you were building that?

Riley Hughes: I think that what we found is that there are maybe two or three really big challenges that every single company… launching a decentralized identity wallet or verifiable credential product faces, and we built Trinsic Ecosystems to solve those problems. So one of the first things is that if you direct, you know, if you ask a consumer, go download this app from this startup that you’ve never heard of in order to proceed, it’s going to be really, really difficult. There’s this paradox because everybody thinks consumers want a general purpose wallet with all their data in it that they can use for anything, right? But on the other hand, if you build a product that is so general purpose that it solves everything but nothing specifically, then it’s either really hard to get it adopted or even if consumers do adopt it, they don’t keep it because they forget they have it or they’re cleaning out their phone or they’re short on storage or whatever the case may be, right? So you want to build something that is really scoped and specific to a specific problem.

Riley Hughes: But then the challenge you get is, well then if your app only solves for, I don’t know, say travel, right, then a consumer has to get a different wallet for finance and a different wallet for whatever the case may be. Then how do these wallets eventually converge? And so what we built with ecosystems in the original specification and the original product requirements documentation was this concept that people could create virtual wallets for users or embedded wallets or cloud wallets, whatever you want to call them, that lived in context that a consumer was already in. And they could have as many of these as they wanted, that the consumer owned that wallet somehow through some identifier that they own, whether that be a passkey, a phone number, an email, et cetera. And the idea was that a consumer at any point in time when the timing was right could essentially assert identifiers that they control and then claim these wallets out of the apps that they were stuck in, right, out of the silos and sort of consolidate them all into one wallet, right?

Riley Hughes: It was sort of the like you need one universal wallet for this stuff to work at scale, but you need context-specific wallets for it to work. work to get to scale. And so how do you bridge the gap? And ecosystems are architected to facilitate that journey and accommodate it for into the future.

Jeffrey Schwartz: The one thing that we learned is that, and we went through sort of, I would say, three, in three years, we’ve probably gone through three major adjustments to the product in terms of UI and how talking to the consumer. Consumers don’t really want a wallet. I mean, that’s what we’ve learned. Like, they just want it abstracted. They’re not generally—the only thing to really do in that wallet is for us is like to configure the profile and to invite people to the app and build counterparty trust. But I don’t think consumers are dying for another wallet, Riley. I just don’t. You know, they’re just not. And if you tell them that they have to spend time in this wallet to do things, it’s burdensome. I think the wallet, this identity wallet, is like an SSO. I think it just travels around and it’s kind of context specific. It’s there when you need it, and it has all these magical superpowers when you need it. But you’re not going to really—you don’t really go and spend time with your SSO. It’s just this special thing that you have that you know does something for you, right?

Jeffrey Schwartz: And also the words that we use are so foreign to consumers. You know, we had wallet and credential and all this other stuff. They didn’t understand anything. So we called credentials passes now, and we use the profile and we use the passage, and the profile is where you have your credentials. And so I think we get kind of crazy and loopy in our own language sometimes, Riley, and think that the consumer is going to understand it, but they don’t. Let me ask you a question. If you had an unlimited amount of money and a decent amount of time, what would you now do with ecosystems? Like, what would you build? What would you do?

Riley Hughes: You’re sort of asking me, in a way, what does decentralized identity need to scale, really, right? What does that ideal decentralized identity platform look like, right? And I think that—so there are a couple directions I could go with this. I think, Jeffrey, the point that I made earlier about how consumers will want a general-purpose wallet that works for lots of things at scale, but they need sort of context-specific wallets in the near term to bootstrap the ecosystem and get to scale, right? And then we need some way to merge those two worlds, right? Like, that’s the first thing that ecosystems does that I mentioned. That’s really, I think, the secret sauce and was really the hypothesis behind that. I think the second piece— Is that the whole point. All of this decentralized identity stuff is that consumers should be able to use their identity anywhere they go, and they shouldn’t have to think about whether it’s a verifiable credential or whether it’s a mobile driver’s license or whether it’s a SD-JWT versus a BBS+ signature versus a whatever other thing they have, right?

Riley Hughes: This should all just be in the background. And for that to occur, you need some level of interoperability, right? And so I think with unlimited money and to build the ultimate decentralized identity platform, I think what you want to do is look at supporting various standards, right, in a way that abstracts it away from the consumer. So, for example, in ecosystems, wallets and DIDs can have multiple keys for signing and verifying any sort of credential type, right? And so if a new credential type comes in with a new signature scheme or something, that can be verified seamlessly as a part of the transaction, you know, just like as if it were all one standard. And I think you just need to get to that point where you can have interoperability between different wallets and apps and things like that. And today, if you look at the broad decentralized identity landscape, that interoperability is not present, really.

Riley Hughes: I mean, there are pockets of interoperability between small groups, but what you really need is some glue that kind of ties together the fragmented decentralized identity landscape. And so I think I would just keep doubling down on the interoperability and new standards profiles that exist inside the platform.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I think that’s right. I mean, my hat to you guys because there’s a tent, the Trinsic tent, and you guys have made a lot of effort to get everything, you know, people sharing and make it interoperable inside the tent. It makes sense to be, if you’re inside the tent, and also work together, right? Is the identity network that you’re building, is that in the tent? I mean, are you, like, how are you making that all work together? Tell me about the new product. I’m super excited about it, and we’re going to be a customer, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, so in May, we launched the Trinsic Acceptance Network. And when we launched it, we went all in, right? Just like you say, it’s really hard to focus on more than one thing at a time. And so we really went all in on the Trinsic Acceptance Network in May. We pulled the Trinsic Ecosystems product off the website, of course continued supporting it for customers like Dentity and others, but did not sign new customers up onto that platform for a little while. And ever since then, we’ve just been all in on it. So… the Acceptance Network is a way to apply reusable identities for one specific use case and an attempt to, instead of trying to build a network, right, like build a Trinsic tent, for example, our objective is to basically be a gateway, right? So if you are Airbnb and you want to accept pre-verified users because the user experience is better, how big do you think that network needs to be until you get interested in it, right? I mean, Airbnb has one billion users, right?

Riley Hughes: If your network has 10 million users, which again, if we built the Trinsic tent with 10 million users, I would have been over the moon. And yet Airbnb, Capital One, Uber, it’s not big enough, doesn’t even scratch the surface. And so when we started to think about it that way, it’s like, all right, it’s a lot of work to build the network. Obviously, somebody like Dentity is one in thousands of customers being able to reach meaningful escape velocity. But even then, right, you add Dentity’s sort of millions of users on top of five other networks’ millions of users, Clear has 20 million users, Onfido slash Airside has 10 million users. You start to add up all the different reusable ID networks that are out there, and pretty soon you start to get to a reasonably big number. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re essentially building a gateway into the entire reusable ID landscape. Another way to think about it is that Trinsic Ecosystems was a product for creating digital identities, which is what Dentity has used it for, right? And you’ve created millions of these.

Riley Hughes: And now Trinsic Acceptance Network is a product for making those identities useful, right? Making them used more broadly by as many relying parties as we can. So it’s the accept side, the gateway into the fragmented ecosystem. So it’s really the same mission. Jeffrey, I mean, we’ve just been doing this thing trying to get decentralized identity and reusable identity adopted for five years. And originally I thought we need to build Make it easy for people to create these identities. And the success we had with that, as you know now, our belief is that the most important way to drive adoption is to help make the reusable identities that are already out there as useful as possible.

Jeffrey Schwartz: You know, that’s really smart because, you know, we’re creating all these identities, right, these verifiable credentials. And when we do this, we have to stand up all sides, right? We have to stand up the whole triangle. And it’s hard, right? Like with notaries and somebody’s got to hold it, and then we got to issue it, and then somebody, we got to find a relying party. It’s not easy. And so it forces you to really create, like, very specific and sometimes very small use cases where you can do it all. And this, to me, is the escape. It’s the, you know, if you can put this together in the way that I think you can, then all of our credentials will be accepted everywhere. I mean, it’s really, really smart. I really like it.

Riley Hughes: That’s the goal. And today, the network has about 95 million end users in it. And the other way to think about that is there’s now 95 million people who can, in one click, instantly access any of the relying parties and partners in the Dentity ecosystem. And then as Dentity grows and your ecosystem grows, all the users that you onboard can not only use their identity with the partners in the Dentity ecosystem, but also through this sort of gateway can access parties that Trinsic…

Jeffrey Schwartz: Would you make it comparable to Visa, or it’s a completely different idea?

Riley Hughes: Well, Visa is what, I mean, this is really like the amount of pitches I’ve seen that say Visa for identity is insane, right? Our pitch deck, if you looked at our seed round from two years ago.

Jeffrey Schwartz: That’s right, you used that back in the day.

Riley Hughes: We said Visa for identity, right? And the idea with that is that Visa doesn’t actually issue you credit, right? They provide the rails and the standard and the background stuff to enable you to use credit from any bank to transact with any merchant. And that is still the vision, right? With Trinsic, the goal is you can use your identity from any provider, be it Dentity or Clear or whatever. To transact with any relying party, right? So the high level, the concept is the same. Practically speaking, I think the right way to think about it is a little bit more like a Stripe or a Square or some kind of an acceptance product or gateway, right? Like, regardless of whether the consumer comes with Venmo, PayPal, or with a Visa card or with Apple Pay or with whatever, like, you as a merchant, you can accept payment. Like, the user comes with whatever payment method they prefer, and you can accept it, right? And we’re basically, that’s what we do, but for identity verification specifically.

Jeffrey Schwartz: One of the vexing things here, and I know you’ve thought a lot about it, is creating liquidity in the market for reusable credentials at the enterprise level. If there isn’t a standard, right, if there isn’t like, you know, grade AB, right, then why would I be comfortable accepting somebody else’s identity? How are you thinking about that, and how do you solve that problem?

Riley Hughes: When we started Trinsic in 2019, the whole idea was that, I mean, we started in July because we saw that the W3C verifiable credential data model was going to move from draft to recommendation status. In other words, there was going to be a standard, right? And we thought, let’s build a company around this and make it happen. And what we’ve seen since then is the standards are important, but there’s an emphasis on the plurality of that word, standards, right? There is not one single standard that everybody is using and adopting. And so while there are standards, to your point, everything uses different standards, whether it be different technology standards, different level of assurance standards, or even processes that seem at the surface like they’re similar. For example, there’s a hundred vendors that will take a photo of an ID, take a selfie, and match the image, you know, up and give you a result of an identity verification.

Riley Hughes: Even those services, they all differ in terms of their quality and in terms of the standards they employ and the efficacy of the biometric matching or the liveness detection or what have you, right? So there, yeah, you’re right. There’s a lot of complexity here, and essentially what we do is we allow relying parties or acceptors to specify what they require for… their use case, and then we filter the universe of reusable IDs down to just the ones that are relevant for them.

Jeffrey Schwartz: And so, in essence, you do the filtering. I didn’t know that. So if I have a certain identity standard, right, I need to comply with, you know, OFAC, AML, whatever it is, that I tell you, and then you basically only send me, as a relayer, those identities that meet that criteria.

Riley Hughes: Yes, that’s right. Our business is basically two things. Right now in the acceptance network, it’s basically get as much coverage as we can from a supply-side perspective, right? Make as many partnerships with as many decentralized identity wallets, mobile driver’s licenses, eIDs, reusable ID networks, et cetera, that we can, right? And so there’s like sort of 95 million people in that right now. That’s the headline number. But for a given relying party, at the California DMV hackathon recently, we demonstrated a use case with one of our partners, Mitek, some of their car dealerships and car rental marketplaces, the ability to accept mobile driver’s licenses, right? But as you can imagine, if you are a car rental use case, you don’t care if I uploaded my passport to verify the first time. You need it to be a driver’s license, right? So right there, I mean, you take our 95 million identities and you cut it in half or something, right? Now there’s only 40 million because there’s only 40 that were done with a driver’s license.

Riley Hughes: And then you might say, well, this needs to have had a liveness detection, and we wanted like a source data check on it, or we wanted some other AML check or whatever the case may be. And then you take the 40 million and you reduce it down even further. So I will tell you that although we are feeling a lot of traction and we feel like this is working pretty well, this acceptance network concept, we’re not out of the woods. 95 million people is still not enough. We still need the network to grow fast. And this is part of why I’m excited that Dentity is taking over the self-sovereign identity platform from Trinsic, because I think it’s going to enable you to move faster. You’re going to have a stronger competitive advantage in the market, and you’re going to continue to be able to scale even faster. Which, of course, all the identities that are verified and put in an identity wallet, right, those then feed into the network as well. And so I think this is, you know, again, a pretty win-win thing for everybody involved.

Jeffrey Schwartz: There’s no question about it. Let me tell you one thing, Riley. We’re going to open a can of whoop-ass on this thing like you’ve never seen before. We have so much distribution. We really do. You have an inkling of some of the distribution that we have, but now owning this gem of an asset, I mean, it’s an absolute gem of an asset, and we’re so excited and proud, by the way, to be the owners of it. And it’s, you know, it’s a very classy asset, and you’re a very classy guy, you and Michael. It’s nice to be doing a business deal with you guys because you guys are spot on. You guys are good guys. So I don’t know that we’re going to go stand up an enterprise sales effort and run around and try and do that stuff on LinkedIn. I mean, we may or may not. I don’t know that we will. But intrinsically, inside of our company, with deals that we already have and with deals that are on deck, the ability to scale some of this stuff is going to be, you know, 50 million identity wallets, 10 million identity wallets.

Jeffrey Schwartz: If we could put wins like that on the board, 5 million, 1 million, whatever the number is, it’s a material change in credential issuances from where we are today. Not just where we are, but the industry, you know.

Riley Hughes: Maybe speak to that a little more, Jeffrey. I know that there’s some deals that you can’t speak to yet, but of course, to the extent that there are ones that you can, I mean, even if you just isolate ENS and the kind of scale that they have and what you’re doing there, it’s really compelling. But anything else you can speak to about what do the next 12 months look like for Dentity, and specifically, what does that look like for your expectation on consumer adoption of decentralized identity?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah. So we have a number of agreements that some are public, some are not public. Let’s talk about ENS, for example. So we made a business agreement with them some time ago. They came to us, by the way, and they said, Hey, the next billion users of blockchain are not going to be crypto natives. They’re going to be using educational credentials or professional credentials, or they’re going to be traditional financial services, right? So they came to us and they said, Hey, we want real identity on-chain. ENS is the on-chain leader of identity, but identity on-chain is not the same thing. When we think about verified identity, right, it’s very different. So we embarked on probably a three-month process to create a product where we integrated verifiable credentials into ENS and verifiable credentials, Real World Identity. And now we just stood up proof of personhood and proof of unique personhood. So we have these products, and we verify the social accounts there as well. So that’s a great distribution source for us. It’s an excellent product and an excellent organization.

Jeffrey Schwartz: And let me just give you an example. They have a deal with PayPal Venmo, and given the constraints of their relationship with PayPal Venmo, PayPal Venmo can only do, like, discovery and sending this wallet this amount of crypto and whatnot. But those guys also need KYC, right? So the way our agreement with ENS works is that we do KYC if the user, the ENS user, chooses to do KYC. But if they don’t, then we’ll do proof of personhood. But what we do with the KYC information is that we make it permissioned. So in the ENS feed, you can get proof of personhood, a proof of personhood credential, and you can get all the social verifications. That’s permissionless. And at DevCon a few weeks ago, we announced our JavaScript library where any developer now can go pick that up, any project can go pick that up. But if you want the KYC information, that’s expensive data and it’s coveted data. You have to become a customer of Dentity, go through our system, and then we’ll give you the KYC. So that source of distribution, I think, is going to be an excellent one.

Jeffrey Schwartz: We natively, as you know, are Web2 guys, right? We’re Web2 guys. We didn’t start the company three years ago and say, Hey, we want to do a token, or, Hey, we want to have a blockchain identity company. So the way I’ve read the market, Riley, is that there’s been a bunch of Web3 identity purists, and they’re trying to get Discord servers with credentials and doing all this kind of stuff. I think fundamentally the use case wasn’t big enough. And I think most of those guys, or many of those guys, have not been able to find a use case that is sizable and significant. And then what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to come our way, which is Web2. What we’ve done is we’ve always been kind of a Web2 company. And if you look at our partnerships, like with, for example, Acorns, they have 10 million paid users in the U.S. We went through a one-year-long POC with them. which was successful, and they’re now integrating Dentity into their app to do when an account gets canceled, you know, we’re doing the account onboarding. So that’s a pure Web2 case, right?

Jeffrey Schwartz: But— it could also be a Web3 case, right? Because they have an app, right? And it may be at some point they choose to build in decentralized identity into their app. So now, right, whereas without owning this asset, I would pick up the phone with you, and you and I would make a joint business development call, which we did many times. But now we have the relationship with Acorns as an example, and we can pick up the phone and say, Hey, we have two flavors now. We have flavor one, which is Dentity, which is the consumer experience, and we have flavor two, which is you guys building this natively into your app. So I think that’s a great example of, with some of the corporates that we have, I think we maybe have 150 accounts on the program now. But with some of those corporates that over the next 12 to 24 months, Riley, they want to build identity into their decentralized identity into their apps, we now have the solution. The other thing that we should just think about generally is what is the biggest Web2 use case of identity? It’s DNS identity, right?

Jeffrey Schwartz: The identity system that when you go to a browser, you type in rileyhughes.com, right? So that’s identity, right? And in fact, there’s large companies that call themselves identity or digital identity that don’t look anything like digital identity when you and I talk about digital identity. It’s Web2 DNS-based identity, right? So at some point, those guys are going to want to infuse their Web2 identities with Web3 services, right? Flash payments, flash wallets, right? So what you can imagine is a wave of innovation where Web2 identity meets Web3 identity. DNS identity meets Web3 blockchain identity. So we’re exploring those partnerships. In fact, we have a major partnership, which I don’t want to talk about now, but we’re really excited about that because the thing that consumers know, there’s discoverability, right? Discoverability on Web3 is very low. Discoverability on Web2, go to a browser and type in something. Like, consumers know how to do that, right?

Jeffrey Schwartz: So if you can bring Web3 services and marry it with that level of discoverability that consumers already know, then you have the potential for massive adoption of digital identity, blockchain identity, right? The identity that you and I think about.

Riley Hughes: Do you happen to know why we are named Trinsic?

Jeffrey Schwartz: You told me once, but I’ve since forgotten. Why are you named Trinsic?

Riley Hughes: Well, Trinsic is the common denominator between intrinsic identity and extrinsic identity. It was originally the idea, right? Intrinsic being what do you say about yourself, right? It’s your gender identity, your social or political identity, your familial identity, things like that. And then, you know, your extrinsic identity is what do others say about you, right? What does your university say about your degree? What does the DMV say about whether you can drive or not? What does the whatever third party say about you? What claims do others make about you? And my original hypothesis was, if you look at some of the largest companies on Earth, let’s just take Facebook, they basically succeeded because they allowed you to put your intrinsic identity online. Or in other words, build a profile, share your parts of you, your intrinsic self-expression on the internet. You can expand that to blogs, newsletters, email, any user-generated content thing, YouTube, TikTok, whatever, right?

Riley Hughes: Like, these are all places where creators can express pieces of their intrinsic identity and put it out to the world. And my thinking was the internet basically doesn’t have an extrinsic identity component, right? There’s no way for me to prove things that others say about me. And the goal was always to say, like, somehow these things need to come together, and consumers need one place to manage their intrinsic and extrinsic identity. And that was the original thinking behind building what became Trinsic ecosystems. And now, obviously, aligns perfectly with the vision that you just outlined, right?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah, no, I love that. I didn’t know that, but I’m going to use that again. I love that. That’s really good. But look, the thing is that we believe that blockchain is the most important thing in the world. And the reality is, is that people don’t wake up and they say they want to be decentralized. That’s not the way people think, right? We use that word more in a week than people will use in a lifetime. Consumers wake up and they want to solve problems. They want to buy something on Craigslist. They want to invite a dog walker to their home. They want to do things that involve, for example, counterparty trust, right? And they don’t today have an easy way to do it. They can’t because we don’t custody our data, right, in a digital wallet as a credential that can be shared in a privacy sort of respecting way. We don’t have that. And the problem is, is that many people believe that these platforms serve this purpose, right? And the reality is they don’t. They don’t serve this purpose. They don’t verify their users, and they don’t even verify that they’re humans now, right?

Jeffrey Schwartz: And why don’t they do that, right? They don’t do that because they know that a large percentage of those users they have aren’t human, right, or aren’t real, or they’re scams. I’ll give you an example. The FTC is suing Match.com because the FTC claims that 30% of their listings are bogus. They’re fraud. They’re fraud-related. The number that we regularly hear on Facebook Marketplace is 25%. So in both of these huge platforms, there’s 25, 30%, whatever the number is, that they’re just there to scam people, or they’re not humans, right? And so the thing that I think about is how do we use verified digital identity as the bulwark, as the tip of the spear, right? Because it’s only getting worse, right? And it’s only going to really get worse with AI. So we have to find a way to widely and broadly disseminate digital identity. So we all have this sort of common denominator, Riley, where I can prove something about myself and you can prove something to me about yourself in a way to sort of do it that is where you’re not oversharing information.

Jeffrey Schwartz: So that fundamentally is the core thesis of identity, right? It’s allowing consumers to build trust with other consumers. I always say that it’s like Olympic level of trust, you know, with strangers. But think about the digital economy. Think about the sharing economy. It’s a $500 billion economy, Riley, and it’s going to grow to a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. If we can’t figure out peer-to-peer trust, like if we can’t figure that out, if it just collapses and breaks down, then that segment of the economy, if you can’t trust somebody and you don’t have a system and a method, a way to trust them, that kills commerce. I mean, the essence of commerce is trust, right? And the great fallacy that we have here is that, oh, don’t worry about it, Uber takes care of it. Don’t worry about it. These guys take care of it. But they don’t. They just don’t. And consumers have to have a way to do it on their own. They have to. And fundamentally, what we do is that’s what we do for them. We’ve given consumers access to the best ID tech in the world. the best ID tech in the world.

Jeffrey Schwartz: And the reason I know it’s the best is because everybody uses it. One of the great things that I always laugh about is a lot of this tech is getting used and reused by, it’s being circulated around from all of us, right? And so I’ll make a customer call, sales call, and these guys say, Well, these guys say they’re the best. Oh no, that’s great because we’re using the same technology they are, right? Fundamentally, I mean, there definitely is some distinction out in the market. I’m not saying there isn’t distinction, but there’s also a lot of overlap, right? And so we basically put this tech into the hands of the consumer, right? We abstract all the complexity away. We make it really easy, and we give them the ability to do it to each other, right? To do it to each other. And that really is the virality of Dentity. If you want to get a billion people verified, it’s not going to happen on X or Meta because people don’t trust those guys with your data. It’s going to have to be end to end. It’s going to have to be consumer to consumer. That’s the only way this spreads out.

Riley Hughes: I think the problem you outlined of 30%, which is insane, of Match.com listings being fake, 25% of Facebook Marketplace being fake, right? The amount of scams and romance scams and phishing and robocalls that are like now AI voices that are—I mean, there was just one here in Utah recently where it was completely an AI voice that was calling people, and they made a ton of money, unfortunately, from mostly seniors and other people who are vulnerable. And when you outline that problem, the most common thing that you hear people say on the internet is, Oh, we need identity verification. And then you hear the other side say, Oh no, we need anonymity. And both of those answers just scratch a little bit at the surface on either end. But the reality is that if you were to do identity verification, I mean, you just listed how many services. You listed Match.com, Facebook Marketplace, Uber, Craigslist. There’s thousands of places that would theoretically need to do identity verification on users. And would that stop the bad guys? Yes, of course. Is that the end of the story?

Riley Hughes: Well, obviously not, because then the good consumers need to re-upload documents and re-verify themselves dozens and dozens and dozens of times across every service that they use, and they’re just not going to do it. They’re just going to get sick of it, and you know what they’re going to say? They’re going to say, I already verified my identity on Uber. I’ll just keep using that app, right? So what I think Uber solved half the problem. They solved the first half, the onboarding of the identity verification into it, right? And them solving half the problem brought like 10x the size of the taxi industry, right? It took the taxi industry from 30 billion a year GMV to 300 billion a year GMV or something like that, right? And the other half of the problem is making that verified identity reusable. And now when the consumer has that trust that they can transport to a new context, right, and you grease the wheels of commerce like you were just saying, you can 10x it again, right, across not only sharing economy, but across everywhere, especially peer-to-peer use cases, right?

Jeffrey Schwartz: This is the thing. So it’s the portability of trust, right? And you just outlined it perfectly. The fact that I’m verified in the Uber app doesn’t help me when I want to go somewhere else. I’m only verified in the Uber app. And so the portability of trust, when you, like, just think about the gig economy worker, right? So 50% of workers in America now are either independent contractors or gig economy workers. The most important thing they have is trust, but they don’t own their trust, Riley. The platform owns their trust, and they can be deplatformed in a second. So how do you solve that problem, right? You have to have portable trust in this market for gig economy workers, because otherwise they have trust at eBay, and they have trust at TaskRabbit, and trust at Uber. That’s a mess. So if you can find a way to work with these big, you know, Uber is a great example, right? They’re verifying 100 million riders in the U.S., but trust me, they don’t want their identity credential reusable. They want their identity credential to be usable only on the Uber platform.

Jeffrey Schwartz: So it’s a struggle and it’s a challenge, and it may just be that we have these big monoliths, Uber and— Google and eBay, that you have to do this in each of these big platforms, and that’s a mess. That’s not efficient.

Riley Hughes: Well, 40% of gig economy workers work for more than one platform, right? Do work on more than one platform. And again, they have to get reverified from scratch again, right? If you go back to that argument of like, oh, we just should do identity verification, or, oh no, we need anonymity, right? Like, the reality is you need both, but you need them in different contexts. The fallacy of privacy tech is assuming that consumers only want to limit the information that they share. But in reality, consumers want to prove who they are in contexts where that is valuable, and they want to keep their privacy and retain their information in contexts where their information is not relevant, right? And so this is what an identity wallet does, right? Not only do you solve the onboarding problem where, you know, now you don’t— reusable ID, you don’t need to reverify at a thousand different places across your life, right? You get verified one or maybe two times or whatever for different use cases and levels of assurance, and then you can reuse across the landscape.

Riley Hughes: But also, you can tailor what information from the wallet is shared with each context to suit the use case. And this is honestly, it’s the perfect answer to all the, like, again on Twitter, should they verify people or should they let them be anonymous? Well, the reality is you can do both of those things while simultaneously creating this virtuous ecosystem that enables GDP to grow and all of that by introducing reusable ID and identity wallets. So I feel like we’re on our soapboxes here.

Jeffrey Schwartz: You and I are right on point. This is the issue that we have to solve, right? It’s the portability of trust. It’s big platforms allowing trust to only be useful and identity when they do it only in their platform, and it just reinforces the problem that we already have, which is, you know, there’s trust in silos and it’s not portable and you don’t own it, right? So that’s the big challenge that we have, and that’s going to take some amount of time because, honestly, you and I have both gotten around and spoken with these big corporates. There’s still a tremendous amount of arrogance, right? Well, I already have a wallet. Like, why should they get your wallet? You know, I have a hundred million people that have my wallet. How many people use your wallet, right? So it’s a struggle and it’s a challenge, but there’s going to be a breakthrough. I think the step that you’re doing with this acceptance network is really, really, really interesting.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Because if you can prove that you’ve got close to 100 million identities, and you can prove sort of usability, right, in that context, then that goes a long way to telling the Ubers and the Googles and all these other guys that, hey, this actually can work, right? So I think the study that you have now going on, it’s a study, let’s face it, because we don’t really know. We don’t really know, but it’s a study. But I think you have the greatest likelihood of success here because the industry, the tech, and you’re solving a very small problem, a very specific problem. You’re not trying to boil the ocean here, and so I think that gives you a really good chance of success. Let me ask you a question. You’re a pioneer. You’ve been doing this for a hell of a long time. What surprises you? What didn’t happen or what did happen when you were a kid in college and you were working at Sovereign and you’re a spreadsheet monkey and jockey and all this stuff? You’ve been doing this a long time. What happened and what didn’t happen in context of what you thought was going to happen 10 years ago?

Riley Hughes: One thing that happened is I stopped getting to live in my spreadsheet for quite so many hours per week, which is a bummer. That was a lot of fun. When I got into the space, right, and was at Sovereign, and then we started Trinsic right before the verifiable credential standard became a standard, right, I thought that the game theory here for the world’s identity companies and all the companies that wanted to play a role in the decentralized identity world, I thought the game theory would bring everybody toward a single equilibrium state where people agreed on the standard. And what would happen there is because everybody else agrees on the standard, you would have no incentive, a given company would have no incentive to defect. But what we’ve seen instead is that because there is no coalescing around a single standard, right, it’s again in this prisoner’s dilemma here, right, because everyone else is defecting, it incentivizes you to defect. defect and then incentivizes the next person to defect.

Riley Hughes: So I thought what would happen is there would be a coalescence around a standard, and then every additional node that came into that network or that ecosystem would enhance the network effect of that ecosystem, therefore make it harder for other ecosystems to emerge and compete, and then sort of increase the liquidity and utility of all the identities in that network, which would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. How many credential formats do we have? I think last time I checked, it was 17 or maybe 19. How many DID formats do we have? Over 200 now. So this thing broke apart in the way that you’re describing exactly right. I had really hoped that it would not. And then with Trinsic ecosystems, we tried to pick the top five credential formats and DID standards and integrate all of those so that we could kind of be a bridge between these, which I think was valuable. But, and I know has been useful for customers like Dentity and others to have that exist. And I want that to continue to happen, and I want the world to coalesce around more interoperable open standards.

Riley Hughes: And at the same time, I think Trinsic, our new acceptance network, in some ways is a bet on continued fragmentation, right? It’s essentially a bet networks that can solve specific problems for consumers in the near term are going to win, and that the ones that, when you add them all together, you get a meaningful network effect there. On the other side, right, the optimistic case that I’ll make, because that was a little bit of a pessimistic comment, but the optimistic case is that governments are really driving this in a way that I did not really thought, like, oh, governments are going to be so slow, you can’t rely on them for driving adoption. You know, it’s got to be the private sector, so let’s go figure out all these use cases. And the reality is governments are really driving this in a way that is more, like, faster and more sophisticated than what I had expected that they would be.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Are you talking about mDL and stuff like that?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, like the EU digital identity stuff that they’re doing, right? They’re really putting a flag in the ground with regard to certain standards, which hopefully is helpful in just, like, frankly, I don’t even care what standard they pick. I just pick something because the reality is anybody who says, oh, that standard’s not perfect, use mine or use this other one. Well, what is the status quo here? Tens of millions of people a day photographing a plastic ID card and uploading their biometrics to a third Third-party server in Russia or Israel or Mexico or whatever, you don’t know. And so the point is that anything that we can get agreed on is going to be better than a perfect solution that nobody uses, right? So I hope that the EU maybe helps drive some of the standardization. And then I think mobile driver’s licenses in the U.S. are just happening faster than I thought that they would, and the adoption of each one is faster. We last updated our numbers on California mobile driver’s license adoption. You know, it was like August or something, and they had 800,000 DLs.

Riley Hughes: And then we checked again in October, and the number was 1.2 million, right? And it’s like, geez, that’s a 50% growth in three months or something, right? And it continues to grow month over month, not only in California but in other populous states like New York and Virginia. And then some states with really high adoption continue to add new use cases, right? And I think government’s really driving.

Jeffrey Schwartz: What does the world look like when we’re doing JSON-LD credentials and somebody else is doing ANO credentials or something like that? Are we able to verify those credentials? Are we able to have a verification routine that does that?

Riley Hughes: That’s part of what we built Trinsic Ecosystems to do, right, was to be able to issue multiple credential types, verify multiple credential types, allow the wallets to hold multiple credential types. I think the place you end up there, though, is like, it’s kind of funny how so many people look at something like, I don’t know, I don’t want to pick on any particular credential format, but there are specific formats that have been around for five years and claim to be widely adopted. And with the Trinsic acceptance network, we have customers that are like, if there’s reusable IDs out there, we want to verify them. So we spend a lot of time going out and trying to figure out where real, true adoption actually exists, even in places that have been ostensibly trying to do this particular credential format or something for five years or whatever. They don’t have anything real, right? I mean, it’s still just being worked on. It’s still coming. It’s still three to five years away, three to five years after I asked the last time, right?

Riley Hughes: And so I think I would caution people to not over-index on like, well, what if another credential type comes? I want to be able to verify it. It’s like, well, when the other credential type comes, you should solve that problem, right? But that may not happen, so I don’t know if I would bet on that now. I think we spent too much time and money. with Trinsic ecosystems supporting standards that never got any use. And if I could go back, I would have just focused more on real commercial opportunities and where we were getting the most traction.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I recall a BizDev discussion maybe two years ago that we had, and you were in the BizDev discussion, and it was with a company that was doing a different credential format. And they were committed to their credential format. And it was not JSON-LD. And we did the call, and then we had our separate side calls. And you said, I just don’t know, Jeff. Like, I just don’t know if this credential format is real and what’s going to happen to it. And that was really the first time I just, I realized that this is that everybody isn’t using JSON-LD credentials. And it was a bit of an eye-opener for me. And subsequently, I don’t think that company with that credential format really got much traction.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Even in cases where, like, for example, Dentity uses JSON-LD credentials with BBS+ signatures and with OIDC as the transport mechanism to get the credentials from one place to another, right? And you could dig even deeper to that where, like, what did method do you use? Well, where do you anchor the DIDs? Where do you whatever, you know? And the reality is, if a company did 99% the exact same as Dentity, it still would not be interoperable because you basically need everything to be identical in order for that all to work, right? You need—if there’s a 90% chance that the counterparty uses the same credential type, a 90% chance they use the same signature scheme and DID method and transport protocol and what have you, you go down the list of five or ten different things, you multiply 90% times 90% times 90%, pretty soon you’re at like a 20% probability that there’s interoperability, right? And so, again, this is the challenge. This is why I think Dentity has succeeded, frankly, is because you have not been spinning your wheels or running in sand, right?

Riley Hughes: You have been on the pavement cruising, working on real customer problems. And I think, frankly, why the Trinsic Acceptance Network is working pretty well also, it’s because we have a concrete use case with—we have reusable ID supply, we have customers that need to verify those, and neither of us are sitting around waiting for some external force to act upon us or something to be successful. We’re both making that happen ourselves.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I always say that we don’t have a technology problem; we have an adoption problem. And the technology will be fine. I’m not worried about the technology. Go out and get the use cases. Go out and get adoption. Because really, to your point about there’s going to be some sort of energy that’s associated with use cases and credential formats and signature formats and whatever, for example, that get traction, right? And if you’re out there getting traction… And getting adoption with your kit of the technology and signatures and whatnot that you’re using, then there should be some movement to your standard, right? And I don’t know if that’s going to be the case, but the way I look at it, what we do with Trinsic is right down the middle. It’s right in the middle, you know, right between the bumpers. And when I go out and talk to people that are using sort of esoteric combinations of things, I say, well, okay, good luck with that, right? I think the stuff we’re doing, it’s just right down the middle. Wouldn’t you agree?

Riley Hughes: Absolutely, yes. I mean, what I would say is anytime somebody’s doing some esoteric thing or some new credential thing or invented their own key management protocol or their own blockchain or their own whatever, I am always like, Awesome. I can’t wait to see how this experiment goes. Good luck. If it works, amazing. I’m sure it’s better. I’m sure you’re doing it for some reason. I’m sure it’s really, really great. And I can’t wait. If it works, then I’m going to be super stoked. But it doesn’t mean that the world is going to start to revolve around that particular thing, right? The world will keep turning, and consumers will keep using what they’re going to use, and frankly, they’re going to use the thing that solves their problem in the near term. And that is where people should be spending the vast majority of their time, I think. So, Jeffrey, maybe I could kind of close the loop on this conversation. I mean, this has been obviously a lot of fun. We could go on for hours, I think.

Riley Hughes: But to close the loop on the conversation, if there are people listening who want to work with Dentity, perhaps in the ecosystem as a partner for the product that you’ve built, right, the consumer product that you’ve built, or if there are people who are interested in working with Dentity with regard to Trinsic ecosystems and the product that was formerly Trinsic Ecosystems, right, and is now the Dentity decentralized identity platform. I’m not sure if you’ll have a name for it yet, but what would you say? Where would you point people? How should they get in touch? And what would be your sort of call to action if people are energized by this conversation?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah, what I would say is these guys did a wonderful, terrific job with this product, and I’m super excited. Our aspiration is to be as amazing and supportive as you guys were. You guys built a hell of a community on your Slack. I mean, there was so much stuff going on over there. You were so supportive. And so our objective is to be as supportive as you guys were, because we’re an operating company and you guys were a platform technology company. So we bring a different perspective and potentially different assets and And potentially distribution opportunities. And so what I would say is: pick up the phone, hit me on LinkedIn, and we’ll get you talking to the right people. But we intend to be an active owner. We intend to be supportive of all the developers and activity, just like you guys were. And we intend to also offer something special and something different than what you guys offered, because we’re different. Dentity is different than Trinsic. There’s a lot of exciting things. I mean, we’re so excited about this transaction. It’s a wonderful asset.

Jeffrey Schwartz: We’re so proud to be the owner of it, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to participate. Riley, we really appreciate it. There’s really exciting things happening with digital identity. I think 25 is going to be a kick-ass year. It’s going to be so exciting. There’s going to be a renaissance, you know, a renaissance of activity that’s going to happen on this platform and other platforms. And so what I would say is: reach out, talk to me, give me a call. We’ll get you in touch with the right people, and we’re going to stand up a whole product roadmap for the system. And you guys had a wonderful product roadmap, and at some point, you know, you said, Well, we’re kind of going this way, and you probably said, Well, it probably doesn’t make sense for us to have a whole product roadmap here. But we will. We have over a dozen engineers full-time at any one time. We have the resources to be able to get this product updated and all the new things that we want to add to it. So super stoked, super excited about it.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Again, we thank you for giving us the opportunity to do this transaction. You guys are classy guys. We love working with you, and we’re going to enjoy working with you guys in your new business. And we’re so excited about the new business. I think it’s going to be a kick-ass business for you guys, and we’ll be there supporting you guys as well.

Riley Hughes: Well, thanks a lot for the kind words there, Jeffrey. And I couldn’t agree more. You’re the natural home for this platform, I think, and you’re going to take it to the next level. I’m fully confident of that. So can’t wait to see where it goes, and I’m glad that we continue to be partners as well.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah, and I appreciate it. and I appreciate all the stuff that you do for the industry as well. You’re a stand-up guy when it comes to the industry stuff.

Riley Hughes: Well, I appreciate it, Jeffrey. Well, anything else we should say here on the podcast?

Jeffrey Schwartz: I would ask you the question about, because people will know that you’ve been on this theme, I just want to ask you one question. You don’t have to spend a lot of time answering it, but recently you’ve been out in the market, and it started at the Identity Conference that I was at, and you had seemingly hundreds of people around you. It was a very popular session, but you’ve been talking about the adoption of verifiable credentials and why they aren’t getting adopted at the rate that we all expected them to. So will you answer that question or riff a little bit about kind of how your mind is working around that subject?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, well, you’re right. In that session at the Internet Identity Workshop, I mentioned that verifiable credentials are not growing at the rate that I expected and sort of explained how Trinsic was pivoting, right? And we were launching the new acceptance network, and we would be de-emphasizing this SSI platform, right, which Dentity is the new owner of. I think I started that session basically by saying not enough people were successful enough, right? And another way to say that is D and maybe a half a dozen others were really successful, and we needed maybe five times that amount to be really successful, to build a hundred million dollar business or something, right? I mean, we reached milestones that I’m really proud of, including a million in revenue and including a million-plus wallets and credentials issued and things like that. But again, I needed to see a path to 100 million in revenue, right? I needed to see a path to a whole different tier of success if we were to build the kind of company that I have the ambition to build.

Riley Hughes: And so I think if we wanted to build a different kind of company, if we wanted to build a consultancy, right, or if we wanted to build something that was a little more bespoke, or if we were just diehard SSI people, we didn’t really care about the outcome of the company, we just wanted to work on this cool tech, right, then we could have a different outcome. I mean, the short answer is just not enough people are succeeding enough, and I could, of course— Attribute that, right? I could explain why people are not executing well enough, but the long and short of it is the things we’ve already talked about, right? It’s just not enough people flying out to Kansas in the snow to get their deals done, right? Not enough people focused enough on the consumer problem. Too many people focused too much on the standards and not enough on the problem that’s going to get solved.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I go around and I talk to business school seniors every year, and I talk to them about go-to-market and the cold start problem and all these things. Think that you’re talking to a group of 100 seniors at, you know, USC Business School, and they want your raw experience of building a beautiful product and then trying to get it to market. That’s the difficulty. So let me ask the question. So if you’re sitting in a business school setting and you’re teaching seniors, all of whom want to be entrepreneurs and everybody wants to be a startup person, how would you characterize your experience of building a product and then trying to get it to market? Because you’ve just been in the middle of this, and I think you probably have a lot of insight into this question.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. When you have something that the world needs, they try to take it away from you faster than you can even give it to them. I think this has been my experience over the last little while, right? Like somebody needs this and they’re going to pull it from you, as opposed to you having to push it onto them. As soon as, of course, they get it, right? So you’ve got to reach them and you’ve got to do all that stuff. But, I mean, in order to get to that place of product-market fit, or whatever you want to call it, you need to have a hypothesis about the model of the world, right? And build a product that maps to that model of the world that you have in your head. And if you build a product and you try to give it to the world and there’s not a fit, right, that the world rejects it or something, then you can conclude that your model of the world is wrong. You’re not going to change the world. You’re not going to change the reality of the market, right? You are in control of your product.

Riley Hughes: So the objective, I think, for an entrepreneur going to market, and this is kind of how I think of our business, is just do your best to understand reality. Map out what is reality as you see it, right? What is your hypothesis of reality? Because, by the way, if it were known how to do certain things, it would be done. By definition, the upside of building a nice product that is growing fast or whatever is so big that anything that’s obvious is going to get done. So by definition, anything that has not been done yet, any innovation that is new to the market is going to be something that is new to the market, right? It hasn’t been done because it is unknown. Nobody knows how to do it, so that’s why it hasn’t been done. So what you need to do is hypothesize what is the reality of the market, build a product to test. Essentially, your objective is test whether the market model that you have in your head is accurate. So you just build the minimum thing needed to sort of test whether that model is right, and then you try it.

Riley Hughes: You try to fit the puzzle pieces together, and if they don’t fit, then you come back and say, okay, where are the tension points? Where did it break? Why does it not map to the reality? And then you alter the product to get it a little closer, and then you try again. And in my opinion, your objective is to rule out wrong paths as quickly as possible. Some people say fail fast or something, and I think that’s the wrong mindset because you’re not failing. Every time you test a product against this model of the world that you have in your head, it’s an experiment that has succeeded, right? And you succeed if you get new information that you can translate into a new iteration of the product as quickly as you can. So the goal is, right, and it’s a little bit tricky because the market is also a moving target, right? Markets change and everything. So things that I did three years ago with SSI, I think I ruled out as a possibility, maybe are possible now, and so I would never discourage anybody from trying experiments in this space.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I think that’s well put. I think it’s difficult being a product company and not a sales company, right? Because product companies do exactly what you just said. They iterate. They put a little product to market. They listen to their customers. They see what’s happening, then they bring it back and they iterate again. Sales companies can gloss over a bad product, and even a product that people don’t even like or aren’t adopted, with very good marketing and sales techniques. And so I think guys like you and I are product guys, and we build product companies, and we make the product sell itself, right? The product has to sell itself because you don’t want to just be a highfalutin sales company that is just selling a bunch of stuff out there that isn’t really good stuff. The other thing that I would say, just an observation, is maybe you were too early, right? Maybe you were so innovative that you were in this pocket of innovation, right, when you were going to college and all these everybody was an SSI guy. You just thought maybe everybody was this guy.

Jeffrey Schwartz: But maybe in 12 to 24 months from here, you have a different world. You have corporates building SSI, decentralized tech into their apps, and maybe you were three years too early. I don’t… know. I mean, do you ever think about that?

Riley Hughes: Oh yeah, I think about this all the time. But I don’t want to ever excuse myself or create that excuse. I’m sure that there are companies that tried to build consumer identity wallet that solved peer-to-peer trust problem on top of Trinsic and failed to get it up off the ground, and they may have told themselves that they were too early. And then they may listen to this podcast and look at Dentity and go, Well, crap, they weren’t too early, and they did it the same time as us. So I think that to do a startup, again, if we’re talking in the context of my advice to an entrepreneur or something, right, you’ve got to think that you have a way to move the market, or that there is some, again, in your model of reality of what is the market, there is some wedge or some gap or some hole that you can fill now. And if there’s not, then you can’t build a startup on the idea that the market’s going to change at some point in the next three to five to 10 years and you want to be around for when that change happens. I mean, that’s completely out of your control.

Riley Hughes: So you’ve got to think there’s something that you can control that you can execute against, and that’s really why we pivoted at Trinsic, right, was because our destiny was a function of the execution of our customers, not our own execution. In fact, there was one month where I said, We will stop all sales, all marketing, all everything. We stopped all go-to-market activities entirely. And guess what? Revenue growth, user growth, new leads, everything continued to go at the exact same rate as before. And I realized that our success was not a function of the inputs that were under our control. It was essentially an index on the overall decentralized identity market, which, again, just didn’t have enough success stories.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Let me give you an alternative hypothesis.

Riley Hughes: Yeah.

Jeffrey Schwartz: We haven’t found the killer use case yet, and I’m going to give you my proxy with automotive. So in the ‘90s, nobody had published pricing on the internet, you know, invoice pricing. We were the first guys to do it. And as soon as we did, that was the killer use case for the automotive internet. That blew everything up. And then we were the first internet company, did the Super Bowl ad in ‘97 and ‘98. And for many years, I was running around talking to dealers about, Oh, the internet leads and the internet. And they would say, Son, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how big your ad is in the Sunday paper. But once we found the killer use case, consumers drove the adoption of automotive internet. And I still think that we have not found the killer use case that has blown up this category. I just don’t. I think we will, but there’s going to be some killer use case that we find that just blows this thing up in a way that you and I never imagined, just like invoice pricing did for the automotive internet.

Riley Hughes: Well, if you look at my bet, right, and in other words, if you look at my actions, which are the purest way to see what my convictions are, I am betting that this standard identity verification use case is the killer use case. Today, tens of millions of people photograph a plastic ID card and upload it with a biometric, right? And nobody likes that process, right? And there are hundreds of millions of reusable IDs out there where an identity verification has already been done on that user. Now, our network does not encapsulate all of the hundreds of millions of reusable IDs out there, but it’s 95 million today, and it’s going to grow. And my belief is that that’s going to be— I don’t know about the killer use case, but it surely is a valuable use case to do right now because, right, like if we use, just as an example here, they’re already asking millions of people to photograph an ID card. All you need to do is give them the option to accept a digital ID alongside a physical ID in an existing workflow that already happens, right? It’s faster, it’s cheaper, right?

Riley Hughes: Frankly, it’s a no-brainer, and it’s starting to work, right? And it doesn’t work without an ecosystem, right? Like Trinsic could not exist without Dentity and Clear and Yoti and mobile driver’s licenses and other partners that we have, right? So we pay revenue back to our partners, and so they appreciate it as well. But I think that this is going to be one of the killer use cases that really drives reusable ID.

Jeffrey Schwartz: And you know what? I agree with you. I think you got it exactly right, because today this is the killer use case. This is the only use case that has a real economy attached to it, and it’s the only use case where you’re really solving a major pain-in-the-ass point of having to do this again and again and again. I’m betting on you. I’m betting on you guys.

Riley Hughes: Well, and we’re betting on you right back, right? So, yeah. Well, this is great. This has been a super fun conversation. 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.