Open transcript
Welcome back to Box Mining. So we have a very special guest. We have Terence from Humanity. And we're talking about a very important subject here because there's an increasing need to prove that we're humans. Even though I know you are human. Yes. You kind of know that I'm a human, maybe. Absolutely. There's a rise in deep fakes. Generative content. Generative content. There's a huge need for the proof, proving that someone is human. And you guys are directly solving that issue. So let's talk, let's have a little bit of talk about that. So I think for us, we look at not just a Web3 world, right? We look at the entire technology world where artificial intelligence is becoming more impressive and in a way also scarier and scarier, right? You look at all the deep fake videos. You look at all these Twitter bot accounts where it's ChatGPT generating content, commenting on each other, different sort of AI agents. We think actually it's important that there is an ability to differentiate between what is a human being and what is not. Because at the end of the humans have value. Humans are value of actual value. Actual comments, actual replies, actual opinions are value. But AI replies have no value. Only humans largely have value because they're consumers. Like advertising to a bunch of AI bots doesn't do you any good. Brands want to advertise to people who might buy their things, right? Just as, you know, a bunch of bots playing games and then farming airdrops doesn't do anything. You really want... That doesn't build a community. It doesn't build a community. You actually want real human beings to be engaging, whether it's a DeFi platform, whether it's an on-chain game, or even in the Web2 world, whether it's a social media platform, right? A billion fake LinkedIn accounts is not very valuable, right? And it costs like a dollar to make a fake LinkedIn account. It doesn't cost much. And it's becoming more and more useless when this happens, right? And so for us, we think there are two phases to Humanity Protocol. First phase is what we call proof of humanity, which is focusing on getting to know whether you're a human being or not. So whether it's a DID and an address, is there a human being behind it or not? Right now, you don't know, right? You look at blockchain addresses, you look at Ethereum, you look at Bitcoin, one person can have 5,000 of them. And you know, you don't really know whether there's a human being behind it. And so the first phase, we are solving that with biometrics, because we think biometrics is pretty much the only way to prove whether you're a human being or not. And then later on, we're actually moving into phase two, where we're going to actually allow identity validators to issue additional verifiable credentials, so that we're not just proving you're human, but we might actually even prove that you're Michael. We might actually even prove that you went to this school. We might even prove that this is your job experience. So essentially creating a complete human and identity layer on the blockchain. And the use case for this is not just in the Web3 world. We actually think whether it's the Web2 world or even offline settings, there are many, many things that could leverage this open network. So let me pause you there. This is a big problem to solve, because a lot of people have been trying to solve this, right? And then they've got to fail, because in the past, they've been like, let's verify mobile phone. And then you realize people can form phone numbers. Let's try to verify email ID, but people have multiple IDs. And they don't really want to trust their ID. So how does the barometrics work for you guys? So what we actually have is, you know, obviously there's a project called Worldcoin, which is using your iris. We think it's the iris is unique for every single person. Right. The challenge with using an iris scan is that it requires expensive dedicated hardware. Yeah, exactly. And it's some people are okay with it, but some people find it quite dystopian or invasive. Right. And so what we've actually decided to do is there's a technology that a couple big companies are actually starting to leverage for for payments. So Amazon in the US for Whole Foods, China for Tencent, they're using it for payments, essentially your palm is unique. So what we're actually doing is two two parts to it. One is your palm print. So your palm print is all the patterns, all the creases, it's a way larger surface area than your fingerprints. Okay. And then the second part to it is actually your palm vein. So with the palm print through a camera, we can actually just scan your palm and know who you are. Camera? With a regular phone camera. Really? That's quite scary. I can actually show you. Not yet. So we now have your DID created. And then what we're going to do is, for example, I can now verify humanity. And here's the interesting thing. If we verify humanity and I scan my palm, if I scan my palm, you'll see that it fails. Right. Because I am already an existing human being on the network. And then if you try yours. Try mine. All right, we're fully docked now. We got this. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. My cuckoo. Nice. Nice. That's really, that's pretty smart, man. That's right. And then so now it's successful. And then in which case, now you are actually a human being. And you can actually claim your Genesis reward. Oh, nice. This is actually on our DevNet. So it's not live yet. But this will be live on TestNet soon. Uh-huh. And so the idea for us is to leverage a palm print scan and then down the road also a palm vein scan with a dedicated infrared hardware dongle so that we can know for a fact that you're a human being and that you're a unique human being. And that becomes really powerful compared to, you know, the project that I was mentioning before because there are already stories of people lining up, villages lining up in developing countries, Right, right, right. Getting their iris scanned and then selling that ID, you know, or whatever. So it ultimately, there's no consistency and there's no sustainability in the usage of that ID, right? Whereas in our case, I guess you can verify on the spot. You can verify on the spot. We can use it for authentication. We can use it as a, as a login mechanism. We can use this as almost key recovery. It's like a high five. Yo, high five. But the idea for us is not just to do one form of biometrics. Later on, we want this to be potentially other forms of biometrics that we can build in. Other types of information and attributes that are tied to you that we can also bring onto the network so that we can create essentially a complete profile of micro group. Right. And once this is done, so in terms of the tech, it's just demonstrated that, right? But in terms of blockchain aspects, how do I protect my privacy then in that case? Because, you know, it's starting to tie everything together. Now, you're kind of removing the anonymous portart of blockchain. Is that a risk for us? So we are not removing the anonymous part of blockchain. Any address on the surface, we are actually building a Zika EVM layer two. The addresses look exactly the same as any other EVM chain. Right. It's only when the user actually gives permission that you would actually be able to find out whether he's that address as a human being or not, or potentially your nationality, your name, different sort of information. Everything is encrypted. And then using zero knowledge proofs, there is no way for anybody to have access to that information. It's only very possible in the last few years because ZK's finally got popular and the circuits that they built are now more popular and more validated. So I guess in the sense that, you know, with the explosion of ZK, we can finally do some like magical maps, I guess. I think in the last, obviously a lot of people have talked about identity proof of personhood since, you know, four or five, six, seven years ago. Sometimes it really takes technology to mature in order for somebody to be able to come and implement it. Right. You know, you can think about building Uber all you want, but it really doesn't, is not possible until now, you know, iPhone is fast enough. Photography now is just good enough for us to verify without revealing our doxing ourselves. Absolutely. That we own a dress, particular dress, that we're human and that we can proceed. So what's the progress on that now? So right now, what features are available? What's kind of on the timeline and roadmap for everything? We actually have launched our testnet waitlist. So we haven't launched the testnet yet. The testnet is actually built, you know, with, I can show you in a bit, we are actually doing two things. One is the waitlist is now almost half a million people already on it. And then in terms of what we're also doing is we're going to be announcing a number of partners, because unlike some of the other projects that are in this space, we're very focused on decentralization. So in terms of, we actually have verifier nodes, a node network that actually comes in, helps with verifying that the verifiable credentials are valid. And what we are doing right now is we're actually bringing on verifier node partners. And instead, we will actually allow the public to also participate. But in the meantime, we're also securing a number of exciting project partnerships, whether it's in the gaming space, the infrastructure space, the AI space, to actually come together and help us build this human centric network. Nice. Is there any call to action for our community right now? So you said you talked about verifiers, is there any call to action that people should be other than a waitlist? They should absolutely join the waitlist. We will be announcing how the verifier nodes and everything works very soon. Do stay up to date, because everything is going to be happening in the next couple weeks. It's very exciting time for you guys. Nice. So looking in the future as well, you said there was two phases. What's your big vision for this? The big vision is very simple, right? We don't think of like WorldCoin as a competitor. We look at the entire identity graph for human beings. That has historically been valuable for somebody like a Facebook, somebody like a Google. But all that data has been essentially controlled and owned by these centralized entities, right? What we essentially want to do is build a largest network of human beings, where all the information and identity is completely self-sovereign. You get to own it, you get to control what you want to share with any sort of applications, and essentially for us to onboard billions of people, right? And this becomes really... With just your palm, which is actually very easy. With just your palm, and then later on with different sort of... palm is one thing, and then the other thing is also potentially even using this as the authentication mechanism, using this as verification. Many different... We essentially think of this as the base layer for human beings, which is really interesting because everybody's talking about AI, and so this is something that we're super excited about. That's really cool. That's a really cool wrap for this, because like we see AI growing, but the human element is... could be potentially lost, but you're restoring that. We're basically giving people to verify humanity, and to build a state, kind of bring human data back to humans. Absolutely. One other way to think about this is AI is largely used as... I mean, AI is largely a product that people use for saving time, right? And so as a result, humans are going to have a lot more time, and you want to be able... And humans are the consumers, right? So they're going to become even more valuable, and that's why we think it's important to be able to recognize them and build this entire identity graph on Web3. So thank you guys for sharing what you're doing. Thanks, Michael. And that's pretty amazing to demonstrate that here, and I really hope you have a good launch.
