Author: Wu said blockchain
Guests and project introduction
David: I am David Jiao, founder and CEO of Privasea. I started my business in 2016. My earliest entrepreneurial project was related to AI, especially in the field of autonomous driving, which is also a mainstream innovative application of AI. From 2016 to 2020, I founded an autonomous golf cart company. We designed it in Sweden, produced it in China, and gradually promoted it in the domestic market. That project received about $20 million in financing at the time.
However, with the pandemic in 2020, I entered the field of cryptocurrency by chance. At that time, some friends invited me to join a privacy computing project - NuLink, and was hired as CEO. I am not the founder of the project, but I participated as a professional manager who only received a salary, responsible for financing, product design, and growth strategy. NuLink's project is mainly to build a proxy re-encryption (Proxy ReEncryption, PRE) network, similar to NuCypher's project on Ethereum. We productized the functions of PRE and deployed them on multiple chains, even including Polkadot and BSC. By participating in this project, I have accumulated a lot of experience in cryptocurrency entrepreneurship.
By 2022, due to the attraction of entrepreneurship itself to me, I resolutely left the previous project. I started to try to do a project that combines AI and blockchain. In fact, during that time, I also studied some privacy computing technologies, confidential computing. So I personally formed a team (including some university professors and PHDs) to focus on researching technologies such as FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) and MPC (Multi-Party Computing). In the end, we believed that FHE had greater growth potential, so we started the Privasea project.
In the early days of the Privasea project, we integrated the early FHE ideas into some intellectual property patents and obtained early investment. However, in 2023, we decided to transform because we observed that the market demand for FHE was gradually recognized. In particular, some of Privasea's early application efforts made Privasea included in Messari's FHE track research report along with Inco, Fhenix, Zama, etc., and thus recognized by the industry.
FHE technology requires strong computing power, so we designed a distributed computing network combined with smart contracts to meet this demand. This is also one of the reasons why we developed privacy computing infrastructure. We created a protocol layer that mainly addresses the needs of privacy computing. Users can host their own machine learning models on our distributed nodes and deduce them through encrypted data. This is different from other computing power projects, such as IO Net and Akash, which focus more on large models or machine learning, while we focus on privacy computing.
After building the privacy computing infrastructure, we realized that we had to find clear application scenarios. During this period, we observed the popular Worldcoin project and also noticed the privacy risks in the project. Therefore, we developed an application called "ImHuman" that focuses on proving the verification of human identity. This application is part of decentralized identity verification (DID). In particular, in the identity verification process before KYC, our system does not store the user's facial data, and only performs POH comparison in an encrypted manner during two verifications.
Currently, the ImHuman application is online. Initially, we support Solana, and now we also support multiple chains, such as Arbitrum. We have minted more than 300,000 times and plan to expand further to build the Proof of Human ecosystem. We have connected PoH with Telegram, gate wallet, Easyflow and some other platforms, and more than 20 projects are being integrated, and more applications will be added in the future.
In general, the Privasea project has two core development directions: one is our privacy computing infrastructure, and the other is our application "ImHuman". As user demand increases, we will continue to expand these two directions and promote the widespread application of privacy computing technology in the decentralized field.
Privasea’s role in project airdrops
David: The original purpose of our application is to achieve real-person verification. Real-person verification can be used not only to counter witch attacks, but also to counter robot attacks. For example, some decentralized applications, especially Web3 projects, increasingly need to ensure the authenticity of users. My personal motivation first came from some observations I made in Europe. Many friends found that there are many scams on these platforms when using dating apps. Scams have now become industrialized. The person chatting with you in the early stage may be a GPT-driven robot. When you reveal key information, someone will take over the conversation. This situation is very common.
Therefore, when we developed the ImHuman app, we hoped to combat this type of robot operation through real-person verification. Our app will soon support Telegram's bot, which can perform anti-robot and anti-fraud verification operations. For example, when you are in a group or when someone asks you to unlock your phone, you can use this bot to perform face verification to ensure the safety of the operation.
Of course, our application is not only used to fight robots and scams. It can also be used to fight Sybil attacks in Web3, but I think that in the entire Web3 ecosystem, behaviors like "airdropping" have become part of the industry and even account for a large proportion of project users. The user base of many projects is largely composed of these "airdropping" users, which is why we cannot simply exclude these users. They are also users, but the behavior is different.
Therefore, our application does not completely ban users with multiple accounts. Our design allows users to register multiple accounts with one face. We do not focus on the uniqueness of the face, but ensure the authenticity of the account through social account association and other methods. Our focus is on ensuring the consistency of the face of the account, not the uniqueness. Through the credit score formed by social connections, we can ensure that the user's multi-account behavior is within a reasonable range. This mechanism ensures that the project party can still maintain a large number of users without losing users due to strict identity verification.
Our solution to the "airdrop scam" issue is also flexible. We can set some restrictions, such as requiring users to complete real-person verification within a certain period of time. In this way, even if a person has multiple accounts, he must complete the verification one by one. These manual operations can prevent users from registering a large number of accounts at once through scripts, limiting the scale of malicious behavior.
As for the future, there are indeed many projects integrating our applications. For example, we are about to launch an ecosystem page based on Proof of Humanity (POH), and many projects will join. We are also making the protocol compatible with the EVM ecosystem, such as the Linea ecosystem. Project parties can search for our POH results on the chain and conduct corresponding verification.
In addition, we have also cooperated with the Move ecosystem to write the results of POH back to the Move chain, so that projects in the Move ecosystem can also use our verification results. We have also come into contact with some medical applications in South Korea, which integrate our POH into the user's secure login process. Similarly, the node service platform can also use POH to verify the user identity when selling nodes and distributing rewards.
In the future, DeFi and gaming projects will also gradually access our API. Our business model is B2B2C. We first cooperate with B-side projects, and then introduce C-side users into our ecosystem to complete the corresponding identity verification work. This will help the entire Web3 ecosystem to further develop, ensure the authenticity of user identities, and also provide security for activities such as airdrops.
For another example, we have reached a strategic partnership with Easeflow. In addition to our own Workheart node users being able to stably host on their platform, we will also integrate POH into their node hosting service to help users easily host and claim node rewards with one click after the real-person verification is completed.
What is the difference between Privasea and the current POH representative Worldcoin, which often faces questions about privacy protection?
David: First of all, I want to clarify that our project does not completely fall into the traditional Proof of Humanity scope. It is more like an identity-based system, which can be understood as issuing a digital passport to users. Its basic logic is to generate a unique digital identity for each user. Unlike some other projects, such as Worldcoin's method, it uses hardware devices to collect users' iris data and stores this data in their centralized database. This approach has certain risks because all data is stored in plain text. Whenever a new user registers, they will compare to see if the new data is repeated with existing data, which means they are doing a one-to-many comparison.
After two years of accumulation, Worldcoin's database already has data on about 6 million users. This is a huge database, but it also brings great security risks. If this database is attacked, all the iris data of these users will be at risk of being leaked.
Compared to Worldcoin, we take a different approach. We do not store user facial data, all of this sensitive data is kept by the user themselves. It's like using a Web3 wallet, your assets are in your own hands. The wallet provider does not store your private keys, and the assets are completely managed by the user. Our application ImHuman also follows a similar philosophy.
In our system, the user's private key is stored in a distributed manner by multiple parties. Specifically, we divide the key into three parts, one part is stored in the user's mobile phone, one part is in the backup drive, and one part is in our server. Only when these three parts exist at the same time can the user decrypt their identity data. This means that the user's identity information as their digital asset is completely protected by themselves. As long as the user remembers their username and password, their identity information can be permanently and securely stored in a decentralized environment, which is almost impossible to be attacked.
I would also like to mention here that the FHE technology we use is a post-quantum technology, and even future quantum computers cannot crack this encryption method. This makes our system very secure and very different from other systems. We only focus on matching identity information, and do not issue actual digital passports. For example, if you lose or change the device of Worldcoin's passport, you need to rescan your iris to retrieve your passport, which is actually a cumbersome process.
Our solution is completely online and focuses only on human identity verification. We will not issue you a digital passport. We are clearly different from traditional DID projects. Worldcoin is more focused on issuing IDs to everyone in the world, and its business logic is to distribute global income through Universal Basic Income (UBI), while our project is more focused on more detailed application scenarios in the Web3 ecosystem, which is very different from both technical and commercial perspectives.
Some users don’t seem to care much about iris data or privacy data. From your perspective, why will privacy and POH become more important in the Gen AI era?
David: For me, user identity information is very sensitive and should not be collected or traded at will. This is my point of view, because once you collect this information, you are responsible for its security and need to consider how to store it permanently. This is actually a very difficult thing. Many project parties may operate well at the beginning, but once they go bankrupt or their capital chain breaks, they will face problems. If a project cannot survive for a long time, what about the user's identity information? This information is still valuable even after the user's death, and it should not be stored in a third-party server for a long time.
We believe that the core concept of Web3 is to allow users to control and manage their own assets. This asset includes not only digital currency, but also identity information and biometric data. I hope that users can manage this data themselves, just as they manage their own digital assets. This is why users in the Web3 community particularly resonate with the concept of "self-control". As long as users remember their private keys, no matter how third-party project parties operate, it will not affect users' control over their own data.
Our FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) technology is also designed to achieve this goal. Compared with technologies such as TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) or MPC (Multi-Party Computation), FHE is the most suitable encryption method for long-term data preservation. It can ensure that data is always encrypted throughout its life cycle without decryption. Technologies like TEE still need to decrypt and re-encrypt when performing calculations, and this process brings potential risks because you cannot fully trust third-party computing organizations and are not sure whether they will leak your data.
The advantage of FHE is that all calculations are performed in an encrypted environment, and only the user can decrypt the original data and calculation results. This solves the security risks in the entire chain and realizes true end-to-end encryption. During the whole process, we do not need any decryption operations, and the data is always in ciphertext, which makes our system very safe and reliable.
Privasea's ecological plan and use cases, recently launched a 10% airdrop plan, how to participate
David: I would like to elaborate on our 10% airdrop plan. This plan covers all Solana users in the first season, and Solana users enjoy a relatively more favorable ratio. Starting from the second season, we hope to attract more users to join. The focus of this season is to closely integrate our system with the EVM ecosystem, because EVM is a very large ecosystem with many on-chain and off-chain users.
The way to participate in the airdrop is actually very simple. Users only need to register and generate an NFT, and then they can participate in various interactions in our entire Proof of Humanity ecosystem. Next, we will also cooperate with OKX Wallet, Gate.io and various other wallets and public chains. These applications will carry out some activities, and users can complete certain services through POH and verify their identity.
The user participation process is very intuitive and cost-free. You only need to complete identity verification when you first sign up, and there is no additional cost for subsequent participation in various interactions. For example, some node operators must verify their identity through POH before claiming rewards to ensure that their addresses are correct so that they can receive mining rewards. For these users, identity verification is a step they must complete.
We will return the verification results to users and project owners, which is equivalent to educating users on how to use POH in the ecosystem. In each link, through POH verification, we ensure that the rights and interests of users are protected. At the same time, we will airdrop these 10% of tokens to users who have completed the verification as a reward. In the future, we will continue to promote growth and continue to allow users to gain benefits through verification.
Especially in terms of the Telegram robot that we will soon connect to, users can complete the POH verification through it. We will also expand to other social networks, such as Discord, Reddit, Line, etc. These platforms will be connected to our verification program, allowing users to more effectively verify the authenticity of the other party no matter which social network they use.
Ultimately, we hope that users can use verification tools to reduce the risk of fraud and protect their assets and personal information in every interaction. This is also the original intention of our development of the ImHuman application, to ensure that users can get real protection in real scenarios through this application.
Free sharing
David: I would also like to add that Privasea is not just an application company, we also have our own network. We are about to launch the second version (V2) of the test network. In fact, we have launched the first version of the test network (V1) in January this year, and can run four or five basic models, such as breast cancer prediction model and fraud email filtering model. These models are data analysis models combined with FHE (fully homomorphic encryption). We provide an open dataset so that users can test these models themselves.
In the upcoming V2 testnet, we will do more work, especially on graphical display and data analysis functions. We will launch some more concrete functions to make it easier for users to apply data in a privacy-protected environment. In the future, we will further expand these application scenarios.
In addition, the mainnet version of our testnet will also be launched this year, when we will deploy the entire protocol and truly enable users to perform privacy computing through our network, especially those who purchase nodes early, who will be able to start mining. Our first season of nodes has been sold out, and some platforms will continue to offer node sales in the future.
