By Lorenzo G. and Camila Cezar Franzero, CP3P-F
The most famous word into crypto since Bitcoin’s Whitepaper published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2014 is, without a shadow of doubt, decentralization.
This basic premise from the surging market craves to accomplish a whole new stage on the liberal economy by reducing levels of state control and large corporations with distinct interests that might not be matching with crypto users and enthusiasts.
Taking into consideration the current maturity of this market and its exposure at the “realty of challenges”, some level of regulation is required in order to prevent frauds and bring institutional safety to those involved, enlightening the protection of institutional equity, remembering that this capital trusts new technologies potential but shows some regrets when it comes to user safety forms.
What is to be done, then? Well… In traditional markets there’s a very well-defined compliance methodology due to adherence to standards and rules built across decades of solid knowledge about all aspects of operational procedures and its practices – some still far when it comes to Blockchain market – given the time of its existence and transformation dynamics that occurs, without considering yet, the lack of technical expertise of many jurisdictions about technical requirements and implications of use and adoption of blockchain technology.
Starting from the premise that technology shall be used in benefit of users and increasing efficiency to several processes and industries, we can think what is next when such different proposals (regulation x decentralization) meet each other.
The KYC procedure seems to threaten the principles of freedom onto Web 3.0, but the very same Web 3.0 brings possible solutions for that, which remain little explored until now and the recent highs phenomenon/spikes of the new trend of DIDs NFTs (decentralized identity) sheds light about a path to be followed. Those NFTs, considered a sort of bridge between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, connect features by associating your apps, logins and addresses under a unique domain, in the same way as the recent success of ENS (Ethereum Name Service).
These tendencies ensure users to avoid being indiscriminately identified, keeping a safe level of privacy (also avoiding spams, unwanted advertising, phishing…) which could make it easier for companies that may have to adapt increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of data protection laws, raising their costs to do so. The very same market is responsible for preventing frauds and crimes in these environments. What to do then?
Maybe the answer is on determining how trackable a user can be onto Web 3.0. Concepts like DAOs inquiry consensus mechanisms, keeping away possibilities to have a decision taken by 50% plus one of the vowels – accounting that true consensus must have 100% of vowels.
Same way we like to think of possibilities of bringing tech to help organizational aspects: if there’s no consensus in a group of thousands, why not reduce this group? The key is to create a tool that might not expose the user completely, but bring a way to do so when it comes to frauds or crimes. The model should be a layer-2 solution where the KYC is made by independent mechanism related to DID NFT, making a user trackable if needed, but keeping a new security level to their privacy.
Considering it, we think practical development of such a mechanism would take place onto a model where some users of consensus mechanism would be given randomly identifiable parts of this new KYC method, revealing them if needed or required, onto a sort of Democratic Preservation of Decentralization.
This way, when users spot a dangerous/harming situation as a consensus mechanism, they would have access to KYC in order to apply it and use it on Arbitration Chambers or Courts, bringing a solution to the core challenge of impossibility to avoid legal systems, ensuring individuality and choices to be preserved.
Of course, as well, these Distributed Democratic Models (DDM) need to be carefully developed to ensure its perfect functioning, but makes it bright and clear a new thinking approach shall be required to pave a road to make feasible law accomplishments without harming the potential of tech innovation.