Shutterstock photo By Michael Scott
Who owns the right to your identity? Is it the government? Or private companies? Or should it be you?
A number of tech startups in the blockchain space are making major inroads with this vexing issue. But at present, most of us have surprisingly little control over our personal information.
We live in a world where, for many of us, our only true form of identity is tied to a government-issued ID. Moreover, our data has become an invaluable asset for businesses seeking to market and profit off of the masses. From social media sites to online surveys to wearables, data is being gathered on us 24/7. Sadly, once the data is produced, the average person has little or no power over it.
Enter Brontech, an Australian startup company focusing on the issuance, verification and usage of sovereign digital identity. It seeks to create a decentralized ecosystem that allows users to manage and control their data — who sees it and what it’s used for. This platform, which will be layered on top of the blockchain, will utilize state-of-the-art technologies such as Interplanetary File System (IPFS), zero-knowledge proofs and distributed hash tables, among others.
Brontech wants to reinvent the relationship between people, their personal data and money. The goal is to provide a means for translating one’s personal data and identity into currency, thereby creating multiple layers of trust. This will then allow the individuals to be at the center of the money creation process as opposed to the outside entities that are profiting off of them.
This innovative quest is the brainchild of CEO Emma Poposka and co-founder Voidan Kardalev. Located in Sydney, Australia, they both are originally from a region in Europe that experienced an economic transition in the ‘90s, resulting in one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in the world.
Poposka said she lived in the U.S. in 2007 and witnessed the emergence of the global financial crisis, which later spread to Europe where she again saw the implications with her own eyes.
“Throughout our lives my business partner and I had several firsthand accounts of financial system failures,” she said. “That’s why, unsurprisingly, back in 2012, when we first heard about the cryptocurrency bitcoin, we got really interested and excited.”
Poposka noted that the two partners got involved in the blockchain space with the inception of the Ethereum project and its first release.
“Around the end of 2015 and beginning 2016, we developed several point-of-concepts for different industry verticals in order to learn about the technology,” she said. “Then we started looking into this huge problem with the current state of data and identity centralization, and we decided to focus on that.”
This led the business partners to pursue the simple idea of issuing digitally verified credentials (uni diplomas, course certificates, etc.), which she said led to a struggle in incorporating and verifying identities (i.e., how do you verify who someone is in the digital world for applications where accurate authentication is crucial?). At that point, it became obvious that there was an emerging need for a tamperproof, private, accurate and secure identity system where custodians control their own ID attributes and personal data.
“We discovered several barriers to creating such a service, one of which is that the users currently do not control most of the digital data about themselves,” Poposka said. “So, we ended up developing an incentivized marketplace — My Bron, where users can monetize the value of their data.”
Poposky pointed out that there are only a handful of companies that own most of the data in the world. This asymmetric access to information, she said, restrains competition, especially when new entrants need this resource to deliver or add value. We enable companies to have an alternative source of data, which they can use to build their own products.
In terms of Brontech’s evolution and what it hopes to accomplish in the near future, Poposky indicated that there is no strict agenda.
“Despite our focus on an open data marketplace at the moment, sovereign digital identity is the long game for us,” she said. “I hope that when we achieve creating a sovereign digital identity, it will be easier for people to interact with each other and establish contextual trust without the need for third-party mediation.”
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2.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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