Jeffrey Schwartz: Build More, Talk Less — Solving Real Problems with Verifiable Credentials

Today’s guest is Jeffrey Schwartz, Founder & CEO of Dentity whose mission is to make the internet a safer place for people everywhere. Jeffrey’s background in the automotive industry (of all places) opened his eyes to the need for better digital identity. He co-founded Dentity to solve the trust problem in peer-to-peer transactions and discusses the surprising breadth of use cases they’re already tackling, from frat parties to notaries.
Jeffrey then drops loads of knowledge about what he’s learned building a consumer product, from the user experience and onboarding lessons learned, to the messaging that resonates with consumers and businesses (including overcoming the baggage with the term “web3”).
Jeffrey continues with a bit of a hot take about the role of industry working groups and standards bodies, and how he prefers doing over talking. He explains how their single-minded focus on customers and product has been key to their success, and how they’ve balanced developing a great user-experience with the principles of self-sovereign identity.
Learn more about Dentity at https://www.dentity.com/ and reach out to Jeffrey (jeffrey (at) dentity.com).
Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id). We’d love to hear from you.

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to the Future of Identity podcast, where we talk to the people building the identity tech products of tomorrow. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Trinsic, and we’re a platform for launching identity products. Today’s guest is Jeffrey Schwartz, founder and CEO of Dentity, whose mission it is to make the internet a safer place for everyone. We start by talking about how Jeffrey’s background in the automotive industry, of all places, opened his eyes to the need for better digital identity. We go on to discuss Dentity’s product and the surprising breadth of use cases they’re already tackling, from frat parties to notaries. Jeffrey then drops loads of knowledge about what he’s learned building a consumer product, from the user experience and onboarding lessons learned to the messaging that resonates with both consumers and businesses, including overcoming the baggage with the term Web3. Jeffrey continues with a bit of a hot take about the role of industry working groups and standards bodies, and how he prefers doing over talking.

Riley Hughes: He explains how their single-minded focus on customers and product has been key to their success and how they’ve balanced developing this great user experience with the principles of self-sovereign identity. I left my conversation with Jeffrey so energized. His vision for how better identity products will literally save lives, and his success in building a product that his customers love speaks for itself. There are countless tactical insights for identity tech entrepreneurs contained in this conversation, and I can’t wait for you to hear it. So now, on to my conversation with Jeffrey. Jeffrey, how are you doing?

Jeffrey Schwartz: I’m doing great. How are you doing? Hope all is well.

Riley Hughes: All is well. Glad that you could be here. I’m excited to talk to you about what you’re up to at Dentity. First, though, I’d love to hear a little more about your background. I had a look at your LinkedIn, and it’s not sort of your typical 25 years in digital identity kind of background or anything like that. So I’d love to hear what you’re doing at Dentity and then how you ended up here.

Jeffrey Schwartz: It’s candidly illogical that I’m here, but to give you the backstory, I grew up in LA and started my career at the Walt Disney Company doing corporate business development, and then became interested in the ‘90s in this thing called the internet, which it wasn’t entirely clear what the internet was back then. And that led me to a company called Automotive, which was an automotive lead generation business that we took public in ‘99. And I spent the last 25 years really in and around automotive. And so always thinking about how do you solve problems in a particular industry. So we do quite a bit of peer-to-peer automotive sales, online automotive sales through all the platforms that you’re aware of. And the thing that always vexed us was this sort of inability to really figure out who was on the other side. It was always a PayPal scam or something wacky. And as I started to investigate, how do you really verify identity, it sort of struck me that there wasn’t a free, consumer-focused, easy-to-use, bank-level, enterprise-grade, peer-to-peer identity software solution.

Jeffrey Schwartz: And so that really was the genesis of Dentity a couple years ago, trying to solve peer-to-peer issues of verification, identity, trust. And as you know, Riley, it’s not just in automotive, but it’s in dating, and anytime somebody sells a couch or a TV on Craigslist or anywhere else, you’re inviting people into your home and you really don’t know who they are. And so we built that product and had a lot of success with it. Thousands of consumers are using it and sign up every day. And then, you know, we recognized the obvious, which is this has to live in a Web3 ego system. It’s the only way that you’re really going to give the power to the consumer to be able to do this. And so we quickly and thankfully found you and Trinsic. And for the last year, I’ve been building the platform with Wallet issuance platform and verification technology. And now it’s getting very exciting because we’re starting to get adoption, solving real tangible problems for businesses and organizations and companies.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. Thanks for that intro. That’s really helpful. So it sounds like you’re solving sort of the reason why my wife wants to meet in a Target parking lot if we’re selling something on Facebook Marketplace or whatever. It sounds like that’s the problem you set out to solve.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah, it’s a real problem. I mean, you know, not to bore you with the malignancies of the internet, but there’s a lot of bad people out there. The solution is so easy, Riley. It’s such an easy solution. The app is free. It’s easy to use. It doesn’t require download. Any consumer can pick up their phone and verify their identity and exchange verifiable identity credentials with somebody who purports to be male or 25 years old or whatever. And identity, we’re finding, is a deterrent to bad action. Typically, bad people do bad things under the guise of anonymity. And so the light of day, verified identity, scares out a lot of those bad people.

Riley Hughes: That makes a lot of sense. When I think about it, it’s so big. There’s lots of people out there, and they all have an identity, and their identity touches every aspect of their lives, right? So it’s so big. I guess where do you start? Do you start with that kind of Craigslist sell-your-couch use case? And in that scenario, I could imagine a world where I might want to sell my couch and I maybe ask the buyer, Can you use Dentity? Is that kind of how it goes, or I guess where do you start?

Jeffrey Schwartz: We definitely start with peer-to-peer commerce. The sharing economy is going to be, I don’t know, $350 billion this year globally. Fifty percent of workers in America in the next few years are going to be gig economy workers. So this is real stuff for people every day. We use these apps, right? And all of our trust—I’m an Uber driver, or I do TaskRabbit, or one of these other sharing economy apps—lives in these platforms. And the trust isn’t portable, Riley. It sits there, and you can be deplatformed in a moment. Your many years. of building trust, you don’t own it. It’s owned by the platform. One thing that we’re working on is this idea of the portability of trust equity. Using Web3 and verifiable credentials and identity, how do you give gig economy and independent workers the ability to own their trust in their own Web3 wallet and build it and share it? Because if you’re an Uber driver, that trust isn’t portable to eBay or to Craigslist or to Facebook. So it’s a big, enormous opportunity, and we’re just taking one bite of the elephant at a time.

Riley Hughes: That’s really compelling. Is that the pitch, though, to the average person? Is the pitch sort of portable trust equity, or do you tailor the message a little bit to the everyday consumer in a way that it’s a little more accessible? Or how have you found the success that you have with the consumer? I guess, do consumers care about self-sovereign identity? Do they really care about privacy, right? This is something I hear as a sort of critique of this space quite a bit, so I’m curious your take.

Jeffrey Schwartz: That’s certainly not the way we position it. Portability of trust are the things that Riley and Jeff talk about when nobody’s looking and nobody cares. But consumers do care about internet safety, and they do care about all the bad things that happen to women and children on social media. Those are real stories that we think about and see on the news every day. And so we tell the story to consumers that way, about a new and better way to protect your privacy so bad people don’t get your information, and a new and better way to verify somebody on the other end. And many people revel in the idea of anonymity. They think that the internet is great because nobody knows you’re a dog on the internet. And that works to an extent. But the internet, as you know, Riley, wasn’t created to be this big mosh pit of peer-to-peer interaction. It lacked identity. It was built using TCP/IP protocol to connect autonomous machines to each other, and that was fine for a while. But now, we have people coming into our home every day who are people that we’ve met or come to us through the internet.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I just think that this idea of identity, verified identity, is something that consumers are going to have to lean into over time.

Riley Hughes: You mentioned you’ve got a lot of people using the product. Do you have any examples of a person or a group of people who’ve used the product to do something they couldn’t have done before, or something to kind of make it really tangible?

Jeffrey Schwartz: I mean, I could give you many examples. The thing about the product is that identity is only one aspect of it, verified identity. Most companies that we work with don’t actually even use identity or verified identity, but use our platform. I’ll give you just a bunch of examples. We have major universities, Greek systems, fraternities, that have standardized on Dentity for event access. And so all the fraternities, before they have parties, they issue digital passes to the partygoers. There’s a line of hundreds of people. I’ve seen this, and they walk up and they scan a QR code. And instead of the door attendant fumbling through a list, the person that holds the credential and scans the QR code and verifies the credential gets access to the party. So that’s a real tangible use case where event management, access management is being done on Dentity Web3 rails. We have member organizations, an increasing number of them, that are specifically issuing digital membership cards on Dentity. And the benefit of that is that they then can extend the value of that membership.

Jeffrey Schwartz: So they can go and do a partnership with an online learning company or a brand for discounts, and that website can verify that digital membership using our OpenID Connect client. We have use cases where in financial transactions, notaries, for example, are having their identity verified on our service and then using that as a counterparty. The counterparty might be an escrow company or a signer or a title company to prove they’ve had their identity and background verified. So there’s a lot of use cases, and they’re not all related to verified identity.

Riley Hughes: When I think about Web3 products I’ve used, I don’t exactly think ease of use, user experience. These aren’t exactly the first things that come to my mind. But it sounds like you’re talking about a product that people don’t have to download. You’re talking about something that sounds easy to use. I think if a member of a fraternity is willing to download it, it’s probably pretty straightforward, right? So how have you made that easy?

Jeffrey Schwartz: The approach we’re taking is that we’re doing cloud wallets. We’re not doing a mobile app. So the path is pretty straightforward. I think we’ve developed a really slick onboarding process for downloading credentials. We’ve done user testing with thousands of consumers that have done this, and everybody says it’s a pretty seamless process. The Web3 that most people think about, as you know, is sort of the tokenized, financialized Web3. And the process of using a crypto wallet, for example, is cumbersome. The process of using our wallet, you know, you can download a credential and onboard into our wallet in less than a minute. And there’s no KYC requirements, unlike some of the crypto wallets.

Riley Hughes: That’s because it’s not financialized?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah. Storing crypto and storing NFTs are different than storing verifiable credentials. The one thing that has been very interesting to us— is that there’s a need for different levels of identity. On one end of the spectrum, it’s just a proof of liveness. Is there a live person here? Which we can do. And you can’t do that through Google Recaptcha or OTPs. And then we have this sort of scale. We call it DIAL, digital identity attribute levels, D-I-A-L, and we have a scale from one to five. DIAL 3 would be kind of our core product, which is just our verified identity product using a document. We’ve seen the need for regulated entities like broker-dealers to have specific compliance with NIST 800-63-3 in terms of strength of evidence and the types of documents that are required. And so we have a specific workflow and identity level that is compliant with NIST 800-63, and we call that DIAL 4. And then the last level we call DIAL 5, and that is NIST compliant, plus it also includes compliance with the Patriot Act and the FATF Travel Rule.

Jeffrey Schwartz: And specific to the Financial Advisory Task Force Travel Rule, crypto exchanges internationally, in order for somebody to take out more than a thousand dollars, they have to have FATF compliance, which is OFAC and terrorist watch list and PEP and all that stuff. And so we do all this, and we’re now starting to get a stream of customers who need an identity attribute level at a specific, I’ll call it regulatory compliance level. And so we’re now able to accommodate that. It’s been a very interesting few months in particular because we’re finding we’re getting a lot more companies calling us with specific requests for these types of identity products.

Riley Hughes: That’s interesting. You’ve mentioned from college students going to a party all the way up to now we’re talking about OFAC compliance and terrorist watch lists. I mean, it must be some kind of a step up deal, right? You mentioned it’s very easy to onboard with no KYC, but you also have this ability to have a very high assurance identity as a part of that.

Jeffrey Schwartz: That’s exactly right. I mean, I think of consumers don’t really understand AML and travel rule compliance and NIST requirements. So what we’re doing in the app, and it’ll be launched here in the next month or two, is we’re going to gamify it a little bit. Each of these dial levels will correspond to a different sort of metallic level: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and black. For the consumer, they’ll be able to unlock certain benefits based on the strength of their identity credential. So if you want access to a party somewhere, you don’t need identity, verified identity. You just need Web3.

Riley Hughes: Makes sense. So, you know, we started by talking about the kind of peer-to-peer use case. They’re like, I don’t want to necessarily have to meet you at a Target parking lot. I just want to know that you’re not an axe murderer so you can come to my house and pick up the couch. And now we’re talking about the very verified identity, right? Fully KYC’d, NIST compliant. And I know from talking to you in the past that you’ve actually been successful selling to large companies. One of the things I hear a lot of in terms of a criticism of the Web3 identity concept is that enterprises don’t want to give consumers their identity. They want to hold on to that identity and keep it captured behind those walls. Have you encountered that as you’ve talked to the enterprise customers that you have and prospects you’ve engaged with, or how do you overcome that concern?

Jeffrey Schwartz: We haven’t faced that specific objection, Riley. We’ve never spoken with a large organization or company that has said, Well, I understand what you’re doing, but I really just want to keep all the information myself. What we’ve had to fight through, and we still have to fight through every day, is this sort of substantial brand issue that Web3 has. And the branding problem relates to, you pick up the newspaper every day, there’s another crypto exchange going out of business, or another crypto executive doing the perp walk and getting arrested. And there’s all these NFTs that have gone bust and all these horror stories, right? So the problem that we typically have to fight through, Riley, is this issue of explaining to companies and organizations that Web3 is greater than the sum of crypto or tokenomics, that it really is this sort of empowering technology that de-centers all this information and is enormously valuable to not just the consumer, but all these sort of new ecosystems of trust and all this other kind of stuff.

Jeffrey Schwartz: We spend a lot of time explaining the difference between NFTs and verifiable credentials in terms of the non-transferability and the revocation and the divisibility and all these properties. And we still have this sort of hangover. And I’m pretty certain that the kind of implosion of financialized, tokenized Web3 assets has had a material impact on the stuff that you and I do. You get fired when you do a Web3 deal because they’re like, Wait, we don’t want to do NFTs or tokens, you know? So I think it’ll take some time. We’ve got to fight through it as an industry. We have to have some really excellent use cases that we can point to and say, like, look, this substantial company or organization that has 5 million members or 10 million members, look at how they’re using Web3 for member benefits or for digital membership cards or whatever.

Riley Hughes: I’ve got to ask then, what is your take on Web5?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Web5 is a term. It’s kind of like jokish because it’s like, well, what happened to Web4? As a concept, I get it. I read the stuff that’s out there, and Web5 is what is sort of aspirationally what we’re trying to get to. From a branding perspective, I kind of like it because the reasons we just discussed, like Web3 is tainted and tarred with all this bad stuff. And so if the concept of Web5 takes off, then I’ll be right behind it.

Riley Hughes: You know, I’ve used the term Web5, basically used it as shorthand for decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, personal data wallets or data stores or whatever. And I think a lot of people feel like it’s a meaningless term. And my response is, yeah, that’s why it’s great. It has no meaning. And so we can invent the meaning out of whole cloth here.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I’ll tell you what, I think you made a contribution. You talk about ID tech, and I’ve taken to using that, giving you attribution, of course, but I think that’s a good way to describe a lot of the stuff that we’re doing, because it’s not just layer one or layer two or consumer identity and access management. There’s a bunch of tech and a bunch of stuff going on, and I like the term ID tech. I think you’ve made a contribution by fashioning that term.

Riley Hughes: I like the term too. Obviously, you sort of worry too much about attribution there. I just hope that it’s useful, and if it’s a useful term, it’ll get used. The idea there is really that Web3, Web5, Web whatever is kind of very techy. It’s sort of talking about the tech. When I think Web3, I think blockchain. When I think Web2, I think of surveillance. And IDtech is meant to point our minds toward the product and the application itself instead of the technology used to build it. So I think we need a way to talk about the product level. And you surely have done a really good job at this. I don’t know if you spend a lot of time in industry meetings at the W3C and the Trust over IP Foundation and the Decentralized Identity Foundation, and I don’t know how much time you spend there.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Zero.

Riley Hughes: Zero, yeah. I see you spend a lot of time, you know, shipping product. Clearly. I mean, your velocity on the product side is very fast. From a business development perspective, it’s been really impressive to see your journey there, and clearly you’ve figured a few things out there. Unpack that for me. Like, you say you spend zero time at these industry meetings and—

Jeffrey Schwartz: Okay, I could spend all day talking about this, but this is the thing, and I’m not going to diminish the value of all these groups up on Discord, but there’s a chattering class in this industry unlike I’ve never seen before. And I find that that’s not useful or beneficial. What’s useful or beneficial is going out into the market and trying to solve real-world problems, like how do notaries build trust? How do senior citizens fight elder financial fraud and abuse? How do you fight romance scams? How do you create trust on Craigslist? We just only focus on talking to businesses, talking to customers, talking to consumers, and trying to solve problems. This is very much a zero-to-one business, not a one-to-n business. And because it’s zero to one, I don’t feel the need to always See what everybody else is doing. I stay close to our industry partners like you. And so I really stay close to a very small handful of people and companies that I think are thought leaders and interesting, and I spend very little time or no time at industry conferences, industry events.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I’m not really here to build a big following or network with a bunch of people. I want to solve problems. I think the technology can be used for good, and I think every single day this technology can save somebody’s life on the internet. It can make the internet safer. And so when I wake up, that’s what I think about. I think about, okay, how can we get this technology in more people’s hands, not what’s the next industry conference and are we using the right verifiable credential format? I look to guys like you, who are our partners, to help us make those decisions, and you haven’t led us down a wrong path yet. And so I’m going to keep following you.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s a lot of the motivation behind starting to use the term IDTech more, because when I think about verifiable credentials or decentralized identifiers, that sort of orients the mind toward the technology itself, as if that will inherently solve a problem. But actually, it’s where the rubber meets the road. That’s where the sort of forward momentum happens. And it doesn’t happen until the verifiable credentials get into the hands of people. It doesn’t happen until the verifiers get to check people’s identity and give them access to the stuff they need much easier and more safely. And so it’s actually the application of these technologies that really matters. And the wonderful thing is, I maybe wouldn’t be saying this in the same way if we were in an industry that really lacked standardization work or something, you know what I mean? But at this point, I am not worried at all about the technologists figuring out the right standards to build and protocols to run it on and all of those things, right?

Riley Hughes: That’s all happening, and we’re involved in some of that as well. And so that doesn’t seem to be the existential challenge of this industry. The existential challenge is like, can people build successful products that are paid for by businesses or people or somebody that create a sustainable business and make the internet a safer place, like you say?

Jeffrey Schwartz: Yeah, I appreciate that. And, you know, the other thing, Riley, is that some folks are inclined to wait for this sort of big Mongo enterprise adoption day in the future. Credit is going to be completely decentralized, and that every government is going to adopt. digital identities and interoperable wallets and all this stuff. But you don’t know what’s going to drive the next sort of 10 million Web3 wallets or 100 million Web3 wallets. It could be Puppy credentials, or it could be a pass that gets you ahead of the beer drinking line or something like that. And so we don’t know. You don’t know. We have a marketplace. We see people downloading credentials every single day. The point is, is that we can’t wait around for all this sort of tech to be fully developed or some great sort of enterprise adoption that somehow is going to magically appear in the future. We got to figure out how this tech can solve problems today. And it can. This is a technology that can be used for good. It can massively improve the customer journey, protect their privacy, prevent them from identity theft.

Jeffrey Schwartz: This technology can do that. And so we have to find ways to get it in the hands of consumers.

Riley Hughes: Amen. You know, you mentioned Puppy credentials. I’m happy to intro you to people working on verifiable credentials for dogs and other pets. But suppose you were talking to somebody building dog credentials or a wallet for animals or whatever the use case may be. I’ve heard of more than I could count that are surprising and interesting. But if you were talking to somebody like that and they shared the goal of wanting to get product in the hands of users and get real-world adoption, what are some tactical tips that you would give them or places that you would encourage them to look or to start or to focus on?

Jeffrey Schwartz: So the very first piece of advice would be that Uber didn’t invent the taxi cab, which to me is proxy for saying, like, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. What you have to do is leverage what’s already out there. And so when we started to build our application, we said, okay, who’s the best company that will help us? We went to you guys, and you’ve massively accelerated the progress of our business. And that’s not to say that we couldn’t spend the extra time and money trying to recreate what you guys did, but there was no reason to because the taxi cab has already been invented. And so a lot of times we talk to niche use cases, and they think they need to figure it all out. They think they need to figure out how to anchor DIDs on ION, and they need to figure out how to build a wallet, and they need to figure out verifiable credentials, and they need to go build an OIDC client app. And I’m like, guys, you have access to all that in 10 minutes. Go create an account.

Jeffrey Schwartz: And so the very first piece of advice I would give them is it’s super complicated technology, takes a long time to build, and even if you build it, you don’t even know if you got it right until you’ve got a lot of user testing, a lot of adoption. And so leverage what’s already out there, whether it’s our service or your service or another service, that they can come in and start to do their work pretty easily. We’ve spent a lot of time, and we have tens and tens of thousands of use cases here of the path that the consumer has to go through to actually download one of these credentials. There’s so many ways that you can screw it up for the consumer and make it cumbersome and difficult. So I would say make it super simple for the consumer. And then the other thing I would say is that consumers have a reticence about giving up their personal information, as they should, right? Because they don’t know Dentity, and they’ve been burned in the past.

Riley Hughes: Absolutely.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Like, we’ve done literally thousands of consumer panels with thousands of consumers. We’ve probed this deeply by ethnicity, by income, by region, and consumers fundamentally are not trusting. They’re like, Oh, this is just another one of those services that’s going to collect a lot of information from me. So what we found is that there’s a sort of natural cadence to allowing the consumer to disclose and add information to their wallet, and they don’t have to have a level five identity within 30 seconds of them being introduced to Dentity. And so I would say, don’t rush the process because there’s the natural process that consumers need.

Riley Hughes: That’s great tactical advice. This is not a commercial. I did not rehearse this, you know, but obviously the point about sort of leveraging what’s there and not reinventing the wheel. I mean, I don’t know how much I’ve talked about this sort of publicly, but this is actually the story why we ended up building Trinsic. Initially, we had an idea for a product that we wanted to build that leveraged decentralized identity to make the mortgage process much easier. And when we went out to build it, we were building with open source tools that were out there. And as we pivoted our idea a little bit or tweaked it, the infrastructure meant that we were much slower in our ability to be nimble. And so ultimately, we had to build our own infrastructure layer so that we could build our own product on top. Ultimately, that infrastructure layer, long story short, we ended up specializing on that because there were enough other people that wanted to build the products on top. It wasn’t even intentional. It was just that we let some other people use it.

Riley Hughes: They were asking for more features, and so we added more, and it was kind of just, we fell into it.

Jeffrey Schwartz: That’s great. I didn’t know that story, Riley. That’s good. You know, the other thing, Riley, that I’ve seen is that at least at this stage in the development of sort of our little world, everybody wants to work with each other. Everybody has been very collaborative. We make referrals all the time to you guys. Other people make referrals to us. We really have the approach that the rising tide floats all boats here. If there ever was a time to collaborate in the sort of Web3 identity space, now is, I would say, a golden moment. Wouldn’t you say? You kind of know. what I mean.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I totally do. It’s a really cool time because it’s still so early, obviously, but it’s also a lot of the infrastructure is at a point where you can pick it up off the shelf and use it and run. It’s remarkable to me that you spend zero time in some of these industry meetings. That would have been pretty much impossible a few years ago because just so much tribal knowledge locked up inside of these working group meetings that it would have been impossible to really do anything without it. So yeah, I totally agree that now’s a good time to be a builder. One kind of follow-up here, or last thread to pull, is, you know, imagine this ID tech product builder who’s building dog credentials. Here’s all of your advice, takes it all to heart, but feels in their heart like, if I do all of this, will my product be self-sovereign enough or something, right? Like, will it be truly idealistically where I want it to be sort of thing? For example, without having a mobile app.

Riley Hughes: We see lots of mobile apps being developed in this space, lots of redirecting to app stores, downloading, onboarding, and all of the stuff that comes along with that, scanning QR codes back and forth for a few minutes before you can really proceed and all those things. Because in many people’s minds, that’s what it takes to be self-sovereign. You’ve got to support a certain checklist of certain boxes to do that. What is your response to that?

Jeffrey Schwartz: What I would tell you is that there’s the agent paradox. In every self-sovereign, every app that claims to be truly self-sovereign and purist, there’s an agent paradox. You always need the agent. You don’t always need the agent, but that’s the reality of where we are. And so I struggle sometimes with this idea of, like— The ideals of self-sovereign identity, and I try to compare that to where we are as a business, as an app, as an overall ecosystem. And I just read an article from the gentleman that runs Binance, and he was talking about the fact that 99% of the people that hold their keys are going to lose their crypto. That’s the data that he has, and it’s just an inevitability. The other challenge is this challenge that you and I have discussed about anchoring DIDs, say, on Bitcoin or on any other ledger. It’s a very expensive proposition. And moreover, if you did anchor holder DIDs on a blockchain, that’s immutable, and that may not meet the standards for GDPR and personal data and all this other stuff.

Jeffrey Schwartz: So there’s a lot of challenges, practical challenges, that if you’re an absolute purist, you’re going to have to face. Because we always have to balance, Riley, this issue of adoption versus purity. And the truth is always somewhere in the middle. That’s been my experience in business and life. You want to respect the principles, and we’re all working towards this sort of fully decentralized, self-sovereign identity world. But there’s real practical considerations that we have to address. Your business partner, Michael, I always talk to him about this, and he says, Talk to me when we have 100 million Web3 wallets. Like, when we have 100 million Web3 wallets, then let’s talk about non-custodial wallets and private keys and all this other stuff.

Riley Hughes: I think that there are going to be attempts at all these. I think it would be a mistake for everybody in the market to focus only on the maximally self-sovereign approach, because then the risk is that… What if the market actually decides it wants something that’s not that way, and Google and Facebook end up with even more power because they introduced something that solves a similar problem but just without any of the privacy bits or something, right? And so I think I’m glad that there’s a spectrum of people working at all points in that spectrum. And it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s a path to it. It doesn’t sound like you’re saying that it’s going to be one way forever. Maybe people who want to take their keys and go home probably can.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I’m in agreement with that. All those opportunities will be available and be built into our product and other products. But I agree that the approach today to be maximally self-sovereign, at least from our product, from our perspective, is not the choice we’re making because we’re interested in more adoption and getting this technology in the hands of more people. We have a thousand people a day sign up just using just the website, not including the business stuff we do, and nobody has ever asked us if they can have access to their keys.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I can relate to that. So, Jeffrey, I always say we could build the most ideologically pure, most elegant technology imaginable, but if it doesn’t get adopted, then sort of what’s the point, right? We start with the adoption side and we build the best product that we possibly can that solves problems for people, and we do it in a way that doesn’t close any doors to people being fully self-sovereign or whatever down the road when that is something that people really care about. But I think optimizing for adoption and building a great product, solving a real problem, building a real business, those are the things that I think we optimize for because we have no other choice. Down the road, identity is going to be a lot better than it is today. Period. We’re all going to be able to walk through the airport and just walk straight through customs, no problem.

Riley Hughes: The question is, do we have what we need on a device we control, and is that how we get through customs, or is it going to be cameras that are using facial recognition and they recognize everywhere we went in France or wherever we went on vacation because they have this surveillance everywhere? So it’s about the kind of world we want to live in, and I think that optimizing for adoption is going to be the key to getting there.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I agree. If I can just make one last point, and it’s a bit of an editorial point, I’d be anxious to get your opinion about it. But I think one of the great challenges that we have right now is, I don’t want to say fighting, but resisting the temptation. for Apple, for example, iOS, to consolidate all this identity information in their platform. When you look at what Apple is doing with TSA and the patents that have been assigned from TSA back to Apple, it’s pretty clear to me that we, as Web3, open standard kind of guys, really have to resist that temptation for everything to just be consolidated into iOS or Android or into your Chrome browser. And so I think the big fight that we all have is independence and fighting for a future where consumers have choice about where they store this information and how they use this information and how much information Apple has about you or Google has about you. That’s something that I think a lot about. It’s a very powerful force, Riley. I don’t know if you think about that at all.

Riley Hughes: Look, I have Apple Wallet and I have an Apple Card. I also have other fintech apps that allow me to pay for things. I have other credit cards. I think as long as we build good products that consumers prefer over the sort of out-of-the-box generic thing that Apple is going to do, clearly they’ll do something. Hopefully they do something that is compatible with verifiable credentials and is interoperability standards-based, right? It seems that they are doing that based on their investment in the ISO mDL standard. Then I think it’s a net win. I think it’s going to be a good thing to help people get used to using a digital wallet, which is really what Apple Wallet is. It’s not open. It’s proprietary, but it is a digital wallet, and using that to get access to their stuff. I think opens the door to lots of use cases. I mean, you’re talking, you know, a lot of use cases from notaries to, you know, all sorts of things. There’s a long tail, a very, very long tail of identity use cases. My personal take is Apple kind of entering, or Google or whomever, will be a net positive for the space.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Good to hear that.

Riley Hughes: Well, in closing, you know, you mentioned at the beginning a little bit about your background, being a public company CEO, getting involved in tech early. You’re probably not doing this necessarily so that you can make your rent payment in a couple weeks or something, if you know what I mean. So tell me what the future of identity looks like to you, and why does that matter?

Jeffrey Schwartz: I’m not doing this to pay my rent. If you look at our mission, it’s about making the internet a safer place. And that really is what drives me. Every time I wake up and I see something bad happen on the internet, I think, you know, this technology, it’s free to use, it’s easy to use. Consumers can save lives using the technology. And so when I think about the future of what we’re focused on, we’re thinking about how do we get to 10 million wallets in the next year, and we think we’ve got a path there. And then we’re thinking about how can these digital identities be used by consumers to help them protect their privacy, not always giving out more and more personal information, to be able to exchange this identity information in a privacy-protective way, to verify people and protect their safety. So I think a lot about the consumer and how they can leverage this technology. I think businesses are an easy use case. Businesses will find use in Web3.

Jeffrey Schwartz: But it’s really thinking about driving consumer adoption, Riley, and the benefits to the consumer, both in terms of their privacy and their safety. That’s the stuff that gets me motivated. And up until a couple weeks ago, this was a business that I funded myself. And we’ve been fortunate to bring on some excellent partners and really our first big round of capital that we think will help us kind of get to the next level with consumers. But it’s a product of passion, Riley. Not that this is the last business I do. I’m 55, but I’ve been doing businesses for 25-plus years, and this one is really about making the world a better place.

Riley Hughes: That’s really special. That’s a really awesome message and a really great conversation, like really tremendous insight and advice and intro to, you know, what you’re doing. Before people leave, where should people find you if they’re interested in using Dentity or collaborating with you?

Jeffrey Schwartz: We’d love you to find us. It’s Dentity.com, D-E-N-T-I-T-Y.com. My email is Jeffrey, J-E-F-F-R-E-Y, at Dentity.com. I’d love to hear from you. We welcome all conversations. The financial commitment is de minimis. We’re looking for great use cases that solve great problems that help consumers. So please reach out to us. I’d love to hear from you.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. And I can attest to your product. A few months ago, you know, you’d mentioned something and I thought, you know, I wonder if I could use Dentity to give access to our board meeting to all of our board members. And I logged in, and about 10 minutes later, I had issued verified Trinsic board member credentials to all of our board members. We used the OIDC flow to unlock access to our board materials and the Zoom meeting and everything. And I can attest to how easy it is to use and how useful it is. I felt like the board stuff was very secure behind those, you know, it took a verifiable credential to sort of unlock it. So that was great.

Jeffrey Schwartz: I love it.

Riley Hughes: With that, thanks for listening. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at Trinsic underscore ID, or me at Riley P. Hughes. Visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the ID tech products of the future, and feel free to subscribe to be updated as we drop more episodes. Thanks a lot, Jeffrey. It was wonderful to have you.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Great conversation.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, take care.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Cheers.