Do you know who has access to what this is? The identity at the center podcast? If you're looking for identity and access management talk you've come to the right place and now on to the show, Welcome to the identity of the center podcast. I'm Jeff. And that's Jim. Hey, Jim hey, Jeff. So we're going to skip our normal friendly, upfront inane. Banter, jump straight into today's topic which is blockchain, identity calculator.
That's why most of the people have maybe we should start over, but as I was going to joke around and say that's why most of the people listen to our podcast or banter beginning, banter of friend, you know what, we're going to leave that in because It just shows that real life people. Yes, we too. Sometimes will stumble over things but that's fine. So we're going to skip the inane banter which we just had and get right into blockchain identity.
It's the topic that you and I have been discussing off and on since we started this podcast, so back in July. So, a couple months now, we've brought in some experts to help us do today, to help us with that conversation. We have from ID ramp.com, Mike deasy. How you doing? Mike, I'm doing well. Q. Thanks for having me on the show, thanks for joining us before we get started here.
What if you could just kind of give a brief introduction of yourself and your kind of role in the I am space and then we'll jump right into the blockchain Extravaganza. Sure. Yeah I d-- ramp was really just born out of out of identity challenges and complex corporate identity ecosystems that we would work in.
And, you know, I would say the last 18 months, we really converted to adopting I'm more of a blockchain based model and integrating the blockchain based identity into our existing, into our existing Federation story for Enterprises. So that's that's where idea, rep is and where we came from. And yeah, we're excited to talk about it. So before we get too far down the pipeline, I think we probably want to talk about what is blockchain?
Can you give a brief or a simple explanation around that as maybe something that you would describe it to your mother or a young child? Is that possible certainly? Yeah, I know. And that's that's the right place to start because it really frames everything else. And one of the most important things about talking blockchain, identity is really dispelling, you know, and outlining.
What it's not right, because that's always where the confusion comes in. Everybody has a notion of a blockchain and, and cryptocurrencies and all the places that we have familiarity. And so, so yeah, let me go through a scenario because I think this really He draws a pretty pretty fine point on how blockchain is used in identity verification and an authentication. So let's assume that I want to know something about you. So I may be a home address, for example.
Now I can certainly ask you and you can tell me and and and you know, I had no reason to really not believe that but what if I need a little more proof you could you can pull your driver's license, right? Out of your out of your physical wallet, your leather wallet. And you can show that to me and I'd say, you know, I'm pretty, I'm pretty comfortable that, that I now have the address. What if I really wanted to know? If what if you pull out your passport and showed me the
address for your passport? And then maybe you dug around and found your voter ID card. And you pull that out and said, here's an address on this. Now I'm really sure that if I send you a letter, you're going to get it, right? I'm pretty sure I've got your physical address. That's the way the world works today. So, What is happening in the industry right now is all of those government issue credentials that I just
mentioned. There are projects going on all over the world where government entities and corporations are are transforming the way they issue those physical credentials and also issuing a digital counterpart. So many states in the u.s. here are are either active and projects or looking at projects to perform digital Digital copies of your driver's license. And all of that stuff is going to is going to be issued and live together.
And now it opens the market to applications to create digital wallets instead of physical wallets for you to hold those credentials. And the really important thing is that you are holding those credentials, right? It's not being held in some cloud-based service, or Google, or Facebook, or someone else. That's acting as a as a champion of your identity or a steward of your identity.
Those are, those are yours and they're issued in some, in some digital wallet and that could be an app on your smartphone, it could be a website somewhere. I mean, there's going to be a lot of different permutations of digital wallets, but the takeaway is ultimately, you are responsible for the information in there and you alone have the ability to Grant access to the to the content contained within so. So how does that pertain to the block?
You know, I didn't mention anything about storing information on the blockchain because in fact we're not right? And this scenario those credentials are being held in your personal wallet and and and here's where blockchain fits. So back in our scenario, now I have my digital wallet and it created it contains those three, those three digital credentials. My digital, driver's license, voter ID, and passport. And now I'm going to ask you digitally to prove your address.
All right. So this is some some application or some site or something that I've developed and I'm going to say I would really like to know your home address. And I'm going to ask specifically for your home address, from your driver's license, and your passport, and your voter ID card. What happens is you're going to receive a prompt right from your digital wallet and it's going to say, hey Mike really wants to know your address from these
three sources. Are you willing to share that information and I'm going to say Sure and I send that information back to back to the the application and I now have a tested that digitally. So that's great. But it's not any more secure, right? All I've done is trade one, physical process. Showing you a credential for a digital one block chain allows when that issue or issues that credential.
So the state issues that driver's license, they sign that with some cryptography and they can store or those keys or store that representation think of it as like a certificate of authenticity, right? And they say I certify that this information contained within this credential that I have issued Mike is accurate and it's valid hasn't been tampered with
and it has not been revoked. So so now what happens in that application when the application asks for that address in the three different sources, it can also go to the blockchain and Wide real-time validation that. All three of those things are still valid. And if all of that checks out now, I absolutely know that that's your address. So that's the role. The blockchain plays in identity. It's never storing the information that you hold near and dear.
It's only providing the ability to validate that information on a on a globally deployed Network. So what happens when there is a conflict in the accuracy information, what if my wallet is different than let's say the driver's license or the DMV, right? They would say yeah, this this license is valid or not. How does that get resolved? Sure. So, if and this, at the risk of getting, you know, to technical the proof that is asking, for that makes that determination.
So, if I asked for your address, your wallet can return an address from any credential that satisfies that. If I specifically, Ask for your drivers, like the address contained with on your driver's license. That's the only credential that can provide that proof. So, in the case of where that information is not available, then it's up to you. I guess, as the as the proving party to decide, how to how to go by that, you can say, okay?
Well, since you don't have an address from a state issue, driver's license. Maybe I'll take an address from, you know, some other some other credential or some other piece of information. Is that does that answer your question? Yeah, I think so. I think one of the things that I'm curious about to is, you know, one of the concepts of blockchain least that way I understand is you have this immutable record, right?
And the data essentially, traverses the chain and it's not really held any one spot if I wanted to tamper with one data source, theoretically, there should be some check right somewhere that would say, wait this data source is out of sync with all these others. What's going on here, correct? Right? Yep, you're absolutely right.
And what we're seeing, Big what we're seeing an emergence and now are things like like Sovereign Foundation you know which is they're building a public permission ledger so and they're providing a governance layer to help with things like
that. So you know where the big one of the really big challenges is we have to provide public proofing so that anybody can validate our ask for validation of those credentials, but in order to provide governance, we really have to have Control over the, you know, the people that are issuing, those credentials and how those credentials are being issued. So, so I think that's why it's actually another reason why this technology is now ripe for
adoption. Because we have some of that governance concept and governance layer in place and it's not truly, you know, the Wild Wild West. What's the speed? Like if you have a is it the bigger? The blockchain? It's just faster connections are needed or how does that is the processing take place when you've got you know let's say Pretty big worldwide blockchain going. What applications have to take into account to, you know, expected time to read, you know, for results.
It's those sorts of things. Sure. And the nature of the nature of the, of the network, as I have described, it really takes a lot of the complex processing out of it. The amount of information, and the amount of those, those proofs that are being generated or pretty lightweight because of the, the nature of what they're validating. I I don't know exactly how many, how many stewards are on sovereigns network. Now I think there's an excess of 70, so there's a lot of nodes
that are running globally. Handling, this handling, this load. And we've never, you know, never seen any indication that performance is going to be a problem in the way that this network is designed. Anyway, got it. Now you mentioned the term Steward for the folks that aren't familiar with that term. How do you define Steward on a blockchain? Sure. So a steward is an organization that has been vetted and To the ability to promote, trust
anchors. And a trust anchor is basically anyone that runs a node on the network. So unlike other public non permission blockchains, where you can just stand up a server and plug in to the to the network for for a permission to block chain with with the governance layer such as this, you have to be, you have to be vetted and certified. So Steward has the ability to take an organization and say okay, Okay.
You want to start issuing credentials and and doing proofs to use for your services or employees or whatever. The case might be a steward where has the ability to form that relationship and Grant them the ability to, to deploy their own nodes on the network. So who does the wedding? Then of the stewards is that an organization like Sovereign or some other organization that would be responsible for that? Yeah, that's correct. The Sovereign Foundation.
Why that's actually that's their biggest role is just to provide that the oversight in the end, the structure and doing that vetting of the stewards, got it. And then I would assume it was that. Let me say, I hope that once you become a steward there is still some sort of process to validate that, that still accurate going forward, right? Is that okay? You're always certification or some other time frame, that's correct. It is that it's a, it's not a terribly easy process.
There's a lot of, there's a lot of Hoops. Jump through but but we found it. We found a pretty easy pretty straightforward and it's definitely it's definitely worth the heavy lifting up front just because there's so much certainty and control over things like performance and and and knowing that you know, knowing that this people that are signing these requests have actually been through that that governance process. So are different blockchains? Interoperable with each other.
That is a very, very good question and there's a lot of work going on in the industry right now. So did routing the decentralized identifier became a standard very recently and it is the standard that everyone is marching toward right now and using whether you're building on ethereum or more hyper Ledger everyone is has standardized on this decentralized identifier, which is great news for the
industry. There is still A lot of a lot of routing conversations going on and there's a working group for the called Universal resolver, which is basically a way to use prefixes. In the end, the decentralized identifiers to handle the routing between networks.
That is going to be a place where we obviously have to have some Evolution to make sure that, that, that all of the different networks that are coming up to handle identities, have the ability to, you know, to accept and consume credentials no matter where they're created. So we're still pretty early pretty early days in that in
that conversation. But there are a lot of people at that table and the big, you know, the big people in the industry or certainly leading that charge and making sure that the technologies that come out from Microsoft or IBM and the hyper Ledger team are all consumable and interoperable. Okay, I would imagine that. That's something that's going to have to rapidly iterate, if blockchains going to grow.
Because I can see something like people getting fear of vendor lock-in or something like that, where they're stuck on one chain, right? And they should have gone to another. I like it it very similar to the kind of like Gmail versus Yahoo mail in the old days and you know now it's out looking at which Mail system are you on. It's got a very deep hook into people and it's very difficult
to make change sometimes? Yeah, but I'm also wondering what about International Well, concerns where you might have, I don't know, we use the dresses and example, but some of those conventions, you know, change from country to Country and certainly, you know, language differences, I'm wondering, are there any impacts when it comes to, especially if you're looking at a global Enterprise? Maybe talk about that. Mike. Yeah, I think the I mean the did
spec is pretty routable. I don't I don't think there's any issues internationally. I know of anyway, there are in fact, most of the work that that is being done in practice right now. Are coming from places not in the u.s., right. The province of British Columbia is way ahead of where we are. They're issuing digital credentials to their citizens today that are actually, I believe they're going to go on The Sovereign Network and be
provable there. There's other other countries that are, you know, I said much further ahead than where we are. And so we're catching up though and really things like like the network and the the ability for us to interoperate with Technologies as the technology like, you know, hyper Ledger and Hyper Ledger in D, for example, is suspect that that everyone on Sovereign or a lot of most people in Cyber Network anywhere following this. This Indie spec.
And what that means is, I can issue a credential and that credentials consumable by a multitude of wallets. You don't have to use, just my, my agent or my application in order to hold that credential and provide validation of that. So that that's the common framework that everybody is writing to. And that's why that's why it's getting exciting in this industry because we're seeing now multiple people come in and and are able to issue
credentials. And those credentials are immediately consumable by a host of other applications. And so, so either way, I think that's the most exciting thing that I'm seeing right now, what about data sovereignty? I know that, you know, there's there's a big deal sometimes about where the data is stored countries like Russia and China tend to want to have it and within their own reach and control and be able to inspect the data. How would that apply to the blotching that spreads across?
And by its very nature, distributes that data. Much everywhere. Yeah and and you might be a little bit beyond me there, I'm not sure if there are any active nodes running and in Russia or China and and how that would how that would play, I do know that by nature of the data. There's not any there's not any personally identifiable or any data that we would consider it risk, right?
These are just records of decentralized identifiers and and a public key you know so there's not any significant Data at risk. That would that would cause concern. But I do appreciate fully having worked in some of those regions. The complexity of just deploying, the technology may be a challenge in itself, so maybe we can shift gears and talk anymore on the internal Enterprise use case. What are some current or maybe near-term use cases that you could see.
Let's just take, for example, a US company, you know, they operate their own environment and you know, they sell It's or whatever it may be. Things are taking place inside the firewall, where would blockchain come in handy for something like that? Sure, I see it. And I've been around, you know, the identity space for a long time and one of the biggest heaviest and most expensive systems to maintain is the identity and access management
system. It's, it's a beast and it's involved in every transaction, every service authentication, every user Authentication, Goes through the identity and access management system. So if you have an application that is very heavy in nature and we all know obviously, you know, 8:00 9:00 eastern time when everybody's logging in and onboarding. That's always a huge Spike. And I am systems, right? For for an organization that has primary user base and Eastern us.
We see you know, systems are ramping up their scaling up providing more resources and it's you know, there's there's a Exposure. Also, if that system happens to fail. So the I am systems today are critical but they're also front and center. All of that information is exposed publicly because our services are tied to it directly and and they're absolutely critical, right? If a system is deferring to that, I am system for for authorization and
authentication. It absolutely has to be available hundred percent of the time. So one, you know, one thing that we think of where digital Real credentials really plug in and help here is they can they can help flatten out that that Peak and Valley. Spike that the I am systems go through.
So if you consider that a user comes in and they log in through your IM system and some intelligent policy says okay you're in Human Resources. So we're going to give you a credential to use sap or something and maybe it says okay here's a This guy we're going to give you access to you Salesforce and issues credentials for the services that these users consume throughout the course of their day. And then those systems that that the users are interacting with instead of deferring, back to
the identity management system. If instead, they just say present your digital credential and I will grant, you access directly as long as that credential is not been revoked. Using the same, the same scenario and flow that I outlined. And at the beginning of the
podcast, right? Where that service says, I just need to know who you are, and I tell them directly from that, credential that I present from my personal wallet, and that gets validated on The Ledger. So the Enterprise is not revoked my ability to log into Salesforce. Therefore I can then, you know, then I'd never have to go back through. I never have to be dependent upon that identity, and access management system.
I still may want those metrics and all that can be baked in But they can be distributed at the perimeter instead of centralized at the. I am so for a very bursty service like Sabia webcasting service or something, where we have 30,000 users, that are going to descend on this particular platform for a, for a webcast, they're all going to come in a two to three minute period. That's going to that's going to really be heavy on the IM
system. You know, it's going to it's going to cause a great Spike big load and a A real dependency on that to be up and active. If instead we just say, oh, you're registering for a webcast crate. Here's a digital credential, and issue that to the consumer. Then all the consumer has to do is go to that web, casting service present that credential be validated and and and go do their webcast. And the I am never sees that
traffic. So I think there is significant performance you know, in cost Savings in infrastructure that an Enterprise can realize but also You know, security, you can literally take the IM system off the front line. You know, I RI the IM system that we use it. ID ramp isn't even publicly available so it all sits on the internet and you pick up your credentials and then you go interact with your services and and the identity and access management system is never physically available to the
public internet. Hey Mike, when you mentioned that you would take that webcasting example. Thank you, dish. You a credential to the user and they would present that certain that credential the other wallet. So, picturing something in their browser or something is managing a certificate so can you get down into the, you know, basic blocking and tackling of how would the user go about presenting?
That sure certainly could be. It certainly could be something in the browser that was referencing a Kind of an identity Hub, they contained that you know that collection of wallets right those storing them on behalf of the users it could also be a personal wallet application living on your iOS or Android phone. So there's it could. I mean literally the wallet itself is just a virtual software agent and it can be it can live anywhere you could
write it right into the browser. If you if you choose. We see the most popular without question the most popular way. That those digital, those personal digital wallets are being developed, today is smartphone applications. So there these are sitting on IOS and Android devices. But there are also a lot of a lot of players that are building the ability to really hold those in kind of a kind of a personal wallet identity management system at that point if you
will. And while I feel that has less long-term value than Then something I give you personally, I'm totally understand and and respect the fact that that we may need some, some kind of a middle middle Gap there. Before we get to a full user user hosted wallet, but you know, I'll Riff on that a little bit because there is a big advantage to a personal wallet. If we have a world where there's a bunch of these personal identity wallets and they're
coming on the scene, right? There's more and more every day. Day. And and I have my employees go out and download one of these personal identity wallets, right? They and it's theirs. It's their identity. They create their identity. However, they see fit. They put the attributes in there that they see fit if I can interoperate that, interoperate with that as an Enterprise, and I can say great, you got your
personal wallet. Here's some credentials that you need from my organization to interact with these services that I think you need access to. And the user says, okay, great. I'll just put those in my personal wallet. You're really tearing down a huge barrier and a huge wall that exists today between the employee and the employer. Now, my employer is is literally my technology partner, right?
I'm not saying here is an identity I created for you and to use it. Go through this proprietary laptop with this proprietary, VPN client, and all of this really proprietary software. Instead, I'm just saying these are your access credentials and you put them wherever you hold your identity information and it will seamlessly coexist.
I mean, I think that's a very powerful message that the Enterprise can put out as well and it really does bring the two closer together and in true partnership form, which is a popular place to be for the Enterprise today. I think it's cool. I think it's powerful. I just don't think companies are there yet. I think it's there's there's a trust issue.
I think I feel like we're organizations Do not want to expose their active directory, right to outside of the network, for example, but I see the benefit of having something like
an apple wallet, right? Or a Google pay wall or a Samsung pay wallet where your credentials are in there and stored and you have a way to visually organize them and somehow use that kind of analogy to authenticate to a network is, are you aware of any companies who are doing, what you just described where they're letting their Employees, give them that.
Digital credential, I'm not obviously other than ID room we do. And, and, you know, others that are that are close to the technology are doing similar things. But yeah, that is and I agree with you on one front that I think they're there. They are standoffish about access but I also think that lends itself to this technology very well, they don't want to provide access to that active directory. So you know, so hide it, right? Keep it behind the scenes.
Command, I authenticate, and maybe this is even it could be as literal as going into HR, you know, and for your onboarding process and at that time they say, yep, your you and they issue that credential and it lives in your wallet. It doesn't tell anyone anything other than, you know, you, I've got this association with my employer and so there's no, there's no information really to leak their secure.
They're more secure than allowing you to go to active directory, over some internet connection and in anything short of, you know, an encrypted connection VPN. So, I mean, I think there's a lot of Technology advantages that we could evolve into that are going to help tighten security and control that information, as well as providing a reduced friction for user consumption. I also think I mean, to your point. Jeff. I think that a lot of companies
are followers, right? And so, but there are some companies that will they see a solution that is Better in some way or another, you know, be leaders in the that way. And, you know, I think if governments are, you know, adopting this and it's some of the bigger players like Apple and Google started adopting, those then you'll see more. I mean, certainly the company said, I tend to work with are not looking to be bleeding edge, right?
If you're doing Enterprise identity management, it's not an area. Where you want to take a lot of risks. However, technology leader companies, when they start to say this is important to we're using it, other companies will follow soon. Yeah, I agree with that. I think there is, you know, the
and you're right. The Enterprise is pretty conservative with how they're doing this, which is why I really believe it's important to build Bridges, from where, you know, from where we're at today into this new technology. So we're not asking. For lift and shift. Ironically, I think there's a huge Improvement to the SMB market and the smaller organizations that that don't have the infrastructure and Staffing of some of these large Enterprise to protect themselves.
I think this this, you know, even a even kind of a closed ecosystem for credentialing for their employees is is a huge step forward if their employees can bring a and all a self Sovereign identity and they don't have to build out a complex identity management infrastructure. Instead, all they have to do Is associate a set of metadata, with some personal identity. There's, you know, there's a, that's a, that's a transformational thing as well.
It gets them a lot more velocity and a lot more control over what's going on without without having to go and invest in these. Massive, I am systems that the Enterprises is buying, so I think there's I think there's some opportunity for for both sides there as well.
One thing that this really You're staying and I think this is where I mean, I think this is what's going to help really lead to a lot of adoption as well as if we assume now that our government credentials are being digitally issued and that's going to happen, right? We're going to have there's going to be the debates with, where they go and interoperability, and all that stuff. We're going to have to figure that out. And I think we figure that out by Leading instead of, instead
of waiting, right? We try to inform and guide these organizations and Enlighten them into the art of the possible before they end up just building another, another set of silos that we have to that, we have to worry about tearing down some point in the future. But what really starts to happen is if I mean, think about onboarding an employee.
Now, if I have, if I know that you as a consumer, have a credential from the Social Security Administration, who by the way, is working on that very thing. And I know that you have a state Driver's license or at least I hope you have a state-issued driver's license and you come into on board for HR maybe I want to validate so I can simply present a proof request to you as a consumer and say we would really like to know your educational background.
We want to know your degree status, you know we want to know your state of residence, driver's license, just whether you have it or not, whether it's valid. Maybe we ask for a confirmation of the Address or whatever, but it really is. It's a game-changer from an identity proofing perspective. And from an onboarding perspective, a lot of the stuff that we go through over and over
and over again. As we on board employees or we set employees up simply, you know, wouldn't be needed or will be much more easy to access and we don't have to create replication of that information over over again. Instead, we just store an associate of record to a decentralized Identity that we know of belongs to you and your in your personal wallet and we can request information from
that at any time. So it really provides a much more streamlined workflow and the big Power of using these credentials and credential based systems is not in the ability to say. Okay, I'm going to issue you this thing, and you can come back later and I'm going to ask you to present me that thing like a password, right? Ami passwords. We all agree are. They should have been gone years and years ago and we're still Still, we're still fighting them but that's what a password is,
right? You can you give me this thing and then when you come back I'm going to challenge you and ask you for with credentials. I never have to give it to you, right? I mean, we never have to do that. All I have to do is all I have to know is what I'm asking for. So you come to my service? If all I need is your email address. Why am I going to force you to create a new account and create a new password and all the stuff.
When I just say, you have a valid email address and if you can satisfy that I let you in, so it really changes. It changes a lot of things because now we don't have to create an issue. Something for everything that we're trying to prove, all we have to do is know what questions to ask that makes sense. Let's talk a bit about ID ramp itself as a product so I'm a see. So and we get in the elevator at the same time. What problems are you going to
help me solve? Sure. So ID ramp is ID rope will Give you the ability to bring in any identity source so this can be an IM stack, it could be whatever you have and connect that with traditional Federation. Protocols Samo off, open ID connect take your pick apis and we can provide credential issuance based on that metadata. So we can do. The example I used earlier was with something that's absolutely possible. I can say all of people in
human. Arizona issue a credential for human resources and then and then I can ask for that. So idea app also then provides the the other side of that equation where I can figure that service. You know, I mentioned, I mentioned sales for Salesforce today, doesn't know how to go and ask hyper Ledger or The Sovereign Foundation Network, or they don't know how to build that bridge into that into that system and ask for those credentials directly so idea, right?
Provides tools and services to do that as well. You go into Salesforce and you can just can just configure as a sample service or oauth or whatever put it back to ID ramp and ID ramp will do that translation for you. So, what we've built today is the bridge that will take an Enterprise from a from a traditional, I am funnel based. I am workflow process to a decentralized credential based In process with simple reconfiguration and and clicks.
So, we support that in a, you know, just kind of an a configuration pay as you go type model or we provide apis and then web hooks, you can bake that into native applications, you know, or we can help you get there. As I said, we're Steward and Trust anchors. So we can take, we can take an organization all the way to standing up their own nodes and educating their staff on how to How to get closer to to building those things themselves.
So that's where ID ramp is is focused today and we have a long Heritage of traditional I am we understand Enterprise, I am and the challenges that exist there very well and so we felt that it was our really our responsibility if we're if we're out here saying credential based dish access management is, is this really cool thing that can help save you time and money and make your Make your business more more profitable and
successful and secure. And we really had an obligation to build the tools and services that the Enterprise needs today. In order to dip their toes in the water and start using this. So giving them the ability to just say, not. Just say, I want to take this one service and I want to take these 10 users and let them log in with the distributor credential an issue that might be distributed credential. That's really what we've built. So it's a way to really do your
own. Proof of concept and figure out if the technology is right for you, it's think. So. Where do I find talent to help me with this? Because I think there's this, this, I don't, it's a stigma or not, but watching is complex. You know what do I need? Is an organization to dabble into this, right? Yeah. And you're exactly right. It's it's growing the community of people that are knowledgeable about this is growing exponentially every day but the Exciting thing than that is the
tools. The products and services are coming on board or really help the Enterprise and, and Beyond right to adopt this technology. So ID ramp.com, I mean, certainly we're willing to help those other organizations that are building similar tools products and services, that will help the Enterprise really understand what the stuffs all about and how to do it. And like I said, the beautiful thing is it's all open, you know? I mean there's really no There's nothing close.
There's nothing proprietary and what we're doing, if an organization comes in and uses our technology or technology from from one of our competitors, that that's using the same underlying governance framework and underlying technology stack, there's absolutely nothing preventing them from completely displacing, what they put in place with with ID, ramp with their own technology, just simply by learning more and, and standing up their own.
And so that's the real exciting thing as we give its future proofing, your investment because you're not walked into a single vendor, it's truly vendor agnostic. So, what I run then my own blockchain infrastructure. If I'm ever ization, I want to get into this stand up my own notes. Yep, you could. You could come to idea up and say, hey, we really want to be. We really want to stand up nodes on, on sovereigns network, for example, and and make us a trust anchor.
We go through some paperwork, you trade, some employees and and stand it up. It up and you have the ability to issue your own credentials, build your own proofs. Do everything you want to do directly with the network at that point. Okay what about some IGA focused use cases around blockchain? So identity Governor's Administration. Typically this is where automation of identities get built out. You mentioned you know tying things to an HR Source access
review certification. Do you see any play with watching helping with that in the future? I do. And it's, it's hard to visualize all the different places that can go. But I think that, I think that anytime you have the user more involved in the decision of what is being disseminated and where that only, that only can improve your your governance. In fact, if you think of an example, where cash, what's one
of the examples? I came out the other day, where you're buying a buying a stock Right. You're going to call up your local, Ed Jones, broker guy. And you're going to say, I want to buy, I want to buy a couple shares of Tesla because I think it's a good investment right now. And he says, all right great. I'll place that order for you and then and then it tanks and you're going wait a minute. I didn't do that.
Right. So now is it's just really your word against his if you think about it, if you think about what we just went through and digital credentials and involving me as a participating party in, Now, think about how that workflow changes I can call and make that request and he can program that order. But before that order goes, I'm going to receive, I'm going to receive notification saying, hey, we're going to going to make this transaction on your behalf. Are you okay with it and I say,
yep. And now you have, you know? Now I'm involved right. It's more than just well. Yeah, I called and I actually have skin in the game now. I'm literally confirmed that on a device. That's biometrically checked my, you know. My signature, we know that it's me that that made that request. So I think that's a game changer. And it really opens up a lot in the governance space to really helping organizations control who's doing what with their information. I can imagine casinos might be
interested in that. Yeah, yeah, all right, well before I wrap it up here because you've given us certainly a lot to think about and just for the folks who are listening and know there was kind of a lot to cover today. So I'll be sure to put links for idear. Then some other information in the show notes, how should people get in touch with idear a Mike? Sure start with the website. We have a lot of good information out there and and contacts ID ramp.com.
And you can always send an e-mail to info ID. Ramp.com somebody to get back in touch with you. We love talking to, we love talking to people about the technology. We love talking to companies about their potential interests and Synergy, so yeah. Please reach out there. Going to be any conferences coming up like gardeners. I am. Summit. Biggest, we are not going to the
gardener, I am summit. We're going to be at the no 2020 conference in an April, we're going to be at the connect with on next month, in Provo. And then I believe the next big one is probably I see in Europe will be over there. So yeah well and we'll I think we have a schedule of conferences out there. I'm not sure if we do right now. But check the website. All right well I think this is a probably a pretty good spot to leave it for this week as
always. If folks out there listening have questions they can always get a hold of the podcast at questions at identity. The center.com want to thank Mike for my dear Aunt from joining us. Thank you very much, Mike also want to. Yeah, I also want to thank the identity team. I didn't come up with all these questions on my own. I'm not that smart. So I certainly crowdsource some things to think about as we kind of move forwards, want to thank
them for their questions. And then most of all want to thank everyone who's listening taking the time out of their day to listen into this. And thank you all for sharing and we'll talk to you guys in the next one. You've been listening to the identity at the center podcast to access all episodes visit identity at the center.com.