On November 9th, the Ivey FinTech Club heard from Duncan Brown, CEO and founder of Distributed ID (DIID), who shared his insights on Blockchain’s potential to secure an individual’s digital identification (“digital ID”). Duncan is a 2015 Western Computer Software Engineering graduate and is currently working on developing an identity service to be used by banks to reduce the cost of Know Your Client (KYC) and fraud. DIID recently won $20,000 at the Distributed: Trade conference hackathon in St. Louis, Missouri (https://godistributed.com/articles/distributed-identity-project-wins-k-hackathon-prize-at-distributed-trade-conference/). Despite being fairly new to blockchain technology, the DIID team developed a public key/private key approach to managing digital IDs, involving a customer, a vendor and government agencies for identification checks. As hackathon judge Jeremy Gardner of Blockchain Capital noted, “The challenge of solving digital identity is a graveyard littered with millions of dollars in failed startups.” However, the judges felt that Distributed ID team had a unique and promising approach to this problem using blockchain technology.
To learn more about Blockchain and DIID’d solution for securing digital IDs, please see Duncan Brown’s slides or contact Duncan at duncan@diid.today