Building the Infrastructure for Universal Identity

What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. And today I am joined by Fabrice Chang, the co-founder and CEO of Quadrata. How's it going Fabrice? Hey, thank you Steve. Nice to be here. Thanks for being by. Awesome, awesome. So before we get into Quadrata, let's dive into your origin story. How did you get into the space and how did you

get started? Yes. So my background is more of a builder. So I've been building my entire career as an engineer, software engineer. And you know, I've kind of ventured across so many different things trying to kind of see where I feel the best, you know, mobile dev web dev, back and dev, all those things. And when I came across blockchain technology with my curiosity peeking, that's

really where I found something that was able to stick. So I discovered Ethereum pretty early in 2016. And that's kind of when you start kind of building things on top of it. And back then, you know, things were very, very, very new. There wasn't much help online. Friends sometimes tend to joke about how they, they, they can like type something on Google and they happen to,

on my post, asking the questions. But I think the blockchain space has something that has always stick around with me because it's kind of the first time it's an intersection between two of my favorite subject, which are technology and finance. And I really saw in blockchain, kind of the conversions of both. And I think my gut feeling was that this is going to be a very,

very important piece of the technology that hopefully you kind of ease the next step following the internet, where basically internet allows everyone to be interconnected. But somehow, when today you go on every applications in the web to space, it's connected, but very connect, you know, a silo. You have an identity in the repetitions in the applications. And as well as we leave this application, you can

do everything. Blockchain is really this amazing technology that is built not upon a, you know, a technology stack that is not owned by, you know, a government company, a private company, it's technology for all. And where people can easily build and deploy things on top of that and allow us to connect this global ownership and global text stack that people can use and deploy it and

ensure that access across different applications and industry. So that's really where the sticky point came from me. And shortly after, basically, what we tried to do was essentially building, kind of building applications on top of that, kind of, you know, where does the blockchain stack fit. And, you know, by myself, try to basically fit into the supply chain, feel to the e-commerce, kind of venturing in

terms of how to best use applications. And I end up setting up a company called Swing Labs, which I led connection technology, where we try to basically facilitate exchange of base and city consumer information in a way that it gives, again, is privacy preserving and hence, data security and hence, data privacy between connect and not USX. So that's connect and we've very, very big summary of

how my job career, my personal career has led me to quite often. Nice. Nice. Yeah. I think there's such an importance, as I mentioned before, about, you know, what identity represents on, you know, in the virtual world and everything like that. So I'd love to hear from you. What, what Quadrada does and why this concept of identity and making it universal is very important. Right. So

if we take a step back and we look at two, three day, the status quo of blockchain, anyone can interact with a potential application with a wallet address. It essentially acts as your, you know, email logging password. It's unique identifier. And it's used across all this blockchain. It's fantastic. Because the first time you have this, like, simple sign on that every application is a green on

using. And today, you only did this and we think, you know, a few seconds you can start lending, you can start exchanging your decks. You can start exchanging your decks. You can start buying energies. The user creations are reduced to minimum and fantastic. However, applications just don't have at all any information about any of the users anymore. And because of that, they have to kind of

build product that can assume the worst case theorems and they cannot create product that just located towards a persona profile, reputations, or even sometimes no compliance. And as specifically when we talk about no D5, for instance, one thing that tends to happen is, you know, how do we make sure that the actors are being kept out of my system. And that's something that's most regulated entity

companies have as a requirement. They are not able to transact the product that doesn't have protections about keeping back to the way. So again, for that, you do need the identity piece on the other side. And you have, how do we prevent, how do we know if it uses the real users, how do we know that it is not, you know, a bunch of automated parts

that have betrayed and spread across hundreds of thousands of wallets that is pretending to be real users. So all those things seem to be kind of obvious that in order to improve the experience for the users, in order to improve the quiet products being brought into a free, this missing key infrastructure, that is identity has to be solved. And this is what Corona is attempting to

do. Very cool, very cool. So from a tech perspective, we don't have to get into deep, but I'd love to better understand how this works because there's, there's quite a few of these different, you know, we have civic and some of these projects that have been at this for a while with identity and KYC AML style, you know, technologies bringing it into the metaverse. And on

chain and whatnot, but I'd love to hear from you how, how you guys are doing it when you're involving, you know, the blockchain. Right. I think you're right that identity, this has left a lot of, you know, bones, fat and bones behind. I think one of the reason is also sometimes company would maybe just too early trying to find, you know, a prompt to a prompt

that did not exist at the end. Today, you know, hearing what you said before the podcast about like, there's been a lot of your mind, that's something that we keep hearing across a lot of those blockchain companies to identity, compliance and repulations of things that becomes up to the mind because, here, once you start innovating and trying to find better product than what exists today, you're

all going to need those piece of information. So everyone's going to start thinking about this. So today, the landscape is very different. How we are doing it, you know, without getting into too much of the weed is that we are embracing blockchain. We're embracing where free to its core. We are getting a solution that is for native blockchain applications directly today, they don't have a way

to access information. Maybe beyond chain. We are basically creating a NFT passports that contain a privacy preserving way, information. Very occasion proof that certain checks have been done, such as, you know, you've been K. O. S. E. or you have an email risk or in below certain threshold or, you know, you are a unixable DID. As to make sure that you are a unique person across

identity is not transferable in real life, that's the thing that applies in your free. Very cool. So it's, it's a, an NFT represented, a representing that you've gone through the valid checks. And I think that's, it's a very clever way of doing it. I guess the question then is, who accepts that NFT? The, the different people that you've partnered with, you have to kind of partner

with all of the businesses that need to K. O. S. E. People, is that kind of how you're viewing this? Is that it has to be? Because if I go through the process right now, go through all the checks. And then I get this NFT, it's really as good as who accepts that, that pass, right? Right. I think there's two, there's two side here. You have

the people issuing those NFT. Those have to be reputable companies that you can trust. If ultimately my neighbors is issuing my NFT, nobody's gonna take that seriously. So you're right, that on the first hand, we do need to trust, who are the issues of those auto passports. And to do that, we are not, you know, a curator doing the NFT yourself. We basically are technology layer

that plugs with service providers that does that for a living. They have the experience expertise to do K, I see their mail compliance checks. And and, and, and editions of the ideas. All those things are being handled by centralized trustable web to companies that are basically bridging that information to web pre. And over time, although it's still important, more and more of those data providers. And

they could be multiple serving the same purposes. You know, if you ultimately have three different KYC providers that are testing the same information that give you a lot more certainty that this is micro information. On this, on the other side, you have people consuming those information. And for people to consume those information, one of the criteria, two criteria is going to be for them is, is

our product, you know, feeding kind of their, you know, compliance requirements, legal requirements, and so forth. And that is going to be kind of, you know, through due diligence and looking at kind of who are all data providers and passports issues. And on the second hand is again, the user frictions with others impact the user journey on their website. And for us, we take, you know,

we take admissions based seriously. Both the integrations we feed the ecosystem is, we try to make it as simple as possible. So on the, on the technological side. And the reason why we create this universe of passport is because over time, as more and more people have a passport, they don't have to re-kill I see a real involved with every single application. So go as really

you have this kind of passport attached to your wallet. And that's it. Then you can transact with every application that accepts it without having to be on board. So it's really, the mindset of reducing user friction while at the same time, there's no reason why you wouldn't lose your entire application, your entire identity, your entire, like, a compliance check. If you move from that, you're the

people that are doing this as a living. I think that's a great, a great way of approaching it. Because that's infrastructure. And I think that that's always important to differentiate the, who's doing the infrastructure and who's doing the actual like issuance and things like that. I think that's very key. It with the metaverse and defi, you know, on, on your website when I was checking it

out before the interview, using words like metaverse and defi, I think are very broad. So I'd love to hear an example of how we could walk through this in defi. How would something like this KYC NFT? I guess I could kind of boil it down to is I verified that I've gone through these checks. I get this NFT. Can you walk us through an example of

how this would play out in something like a defi or the metaverse? Absolutely. So I think those are two different use cases and very, very concrete examples because those are the type of inbound records. So that's the question we get from companies in those firms. So as an example, let's assume you had a defi lending protocol that essentially wants to screen every lenders and boroughs to

make sure that they are real person. And they, you know, ultimately pass their compliance risk. Right. They want to make sure that they want to keep back to the way they want to make sure that everyone in that liquidity pool has been there. The way they would do it essentially is, you know, being a smart person, a contract based application, they would just include those few

lands of code between their smart contract that basically every time somebody tries to deposit, when it's going to query, let's say the AMR risk or of these product passports. And depending on the results, they allow the rest of transactions to go through, meaning the deposit succeed or fail and don't let them go through. And the beauty of smart contract is exactly that we can compose. You

can kind of use all the people's technology by using it by having a few lands of code and basically leverage that entire compliance check to put out the passports. And in terms of the user experience, they don't see that as two different action. It's literally one action when they click on the deposit behind the scenes is doing the passport checks or the check advances, allowing the

deposit or that in a single transaction. So that's kind of how it would work in a deep pipeline protocol. Who's hoping to leverage a technology for compliance check point, for example. Now, let's take a use case of the metaverse. Like today, the metaverse are a bit less focused on compliance side. What they care the most about is, what they want is to make sure that a

user is unique and a user is a real user. So again, by using a lot of technology, because people have to onboard, people have to provide a government issue ideas that prove a real people ultimately. And we do have this technology that allows to detect, if you mean different passports across different wallet, a player earn. Can a company can again use a passport to screen for

all the above, meaning, does he have a passport? Yes, it's a real person. Can we can check for the DID to make sure it's unique and not again spawn across many words. And all that, they can leverage that finally on shame. And ultimately that will benefit their reuses because today, the people being affected are the reuses for trying to just have a fair experience on work.

Yeah. That's a great segue actually into why this is important. There's often a lot of pushback from projects about KYC and Web3 and stuff like that. And if you've been building in the space for a while, you know that it's pretty much the standard to do it, unless it's like a DAO or something like that. There's a lot of controversy around it with people that are

against it and whatnot. But ultimately, as it business, if you want to survive in jurisdictions that have all the humans, you know, you have to abide by rules and regulations. So I'm curious, as do your take on that criticism. A lot of people think that Web3 should be open and KYC shouldn't be a thing. I'd love to know your thoughts on that take. Right. I would

say the mindset of the race shifted quite a bit. When I started this journey, yet a half ago, I've had a chance to talk with other major D5 protocols, for instance. And the feedback was precisely that KYC never, like we do not want to deal with this. And today, you look at a lot of those top D5 protocols. A lot of them have announced that they

are either being a permission pause or catering to institutions and therefore having to have more compliance and KYC procedures screening. So it's very interesting. That you know, the space has shifted already drastically. And my prediction is that we're going to see that more and more. Not necessarily just to answer regulatory pressure. But frankly, because I think as users and product realize more and more, that it

is not necessarily a constraint, but it is a benefit to the product because they are able to provide a safer experience for the users. Be automatically by compliance. And be able to be safer. They are able to try more consumer, consumer, and more institutional capital, which makes product better when you have a bigger effort of some users. And three, I think the added benefits that we

will see from all those, what we call like a product that is leveraging KYC. I think we'll see a lot more new features that will come out of it. You know, features that can be enabled by reputation that keep you able to comply with. And I think those incentives, the users will really drive and force applications who do not take, you know, account into account those

information. Because as a user, I think there is a friction, but there's also an incentive level that once high enough, as a user, you would probably be willing to go through that one time, a burning flow to get those incentives. So I think in the beginning, I see this type of product being used by an R marketing, not necessarily like a street requirement, you have to

be KYC to use it. But for instance, you can start slowly by saying, if you do KYC, you might have, you know, those incentives, those added incentives. And if the incentives are aligned with the users, some of them will probably go through and some of them also. But I think over time, we'll see in one more features and benefits to users that a product that rely

on reputation identity will become better for the end users. Well, yeah, I really like what you said about the incentives, because I totally agree with the idea that if the incentive is great enough on the other side, there's no reason why not to go through a process like that. I'm just verifying you are who you are and you're a safe person to enter a system. I

think that if that system has enough value for the user, which it should, by the way, I think that if you're not sure what you're going to do, you're going to have to do that. By all means as a business, you should be providing value to the marketplace. So I think it's so well thought through that as long as the incentives are correct, as long as

there is a value behind that verification process, it's a win-win scenario by all measures. So yeah, well said. So that is kind of winding down the pieces here about quadratic. I'm really eager, somebody that's building in this space to know what you're excited about. Outside of the world of KYC and AML and identity, what is it that you get up in the morning and you're just

hyped about? You check your phone and you're just really excited to look at. Right. I think there's so many things that excites me about the web-free space. One of the things that I do not work directly in it, but anything that ties to the manavir's ultimately is for me just fascinating because, for me, this is really where you not only have the intersection with finance and

tech, but you have the intersection of finance, take, artists, all sort of and gamers and all those different people that can kind of conversion into one thing, I'm very curious to basically see the evolution of a web-free native branding. I think people sometimes ask me like, you know, kind of why do I think NFT that those types of projects have value. And for me, I'm just

thinking about kind of branding. If we think that you know, evolution and human are going to move more and more towards a digital world, which I do believe we are, you know, heading there, right? We are having this podcast day through, you know, digital means ultimately. Then slowly over time, digital branding will have bigger and bigger place because that's kind of where most of the people

would spend. And I think, you know, this is something that for me has just a massive opportunity there. And I'm just very curious to hear how that's going to be, doesn't it, much? I'm hoping that the biggest brand will be native web-free branding and see how they, you know, compare when basically other, the big brands in the web-free space start to migrate there. Got it. Yeah.

I'm on the same page. The, the, can be a divergence of all of these together in a virtual kind of experience is the, it feels like what we've all been working towards, you know, like all the infrastructure, all the NFTs, all the crypto, all this stuff. It feels like we're all kind of coming to this pinnacle, which is the virtual society as we know it. And

I think it's, it's going to, it's something that we can't really explain now, which is very exciting. Some kid in a basement somewhere is probably going to be the person that, that makes this thing a simulation. But I, I think it's, it's such an exciting time because we don't know what, what it's going to turn out like, what it's going to, you know, cause the next

run, stuff like that. So very cool. Well, those are the questions that, that I have for you. I guess the, the finale bit in addition to what you're excited about is, I'm curious as to what's next. For quadrata and where can people go and learn more? Right. So we ultimately lunch seven days ago, our technology on the film, mainnet. And what we're doing today is we

are doing kind of, you know, is to several lunch, we're doing like an NFT sweepstays, where we able to kind of give away like pretty point fts like a doodle on Newton and co-cat. And I think it's been just a baby, good so far feedback, you know, over a hundred people have claimed their part of the past. So it's been just a very good way to

reinforce our technology and to ultimately have also a global testing phase, right? Can I be able to support and see how our technology perform with passport minted from Indonesia and so forth. So this is kind of where we are today in this beta lunch where we make sure that not technology is ready for the, for the, for the real world when technology could be accepted by

thousands of applications. And our main focus now is continuing to basically onboard as many applications that needs this technology. And I think ultimately it is an ecosystem play the more applications integrate the easer it is for users to not having to again, we onboard and being able to reinforce the NFT. One thing that we know it's coming down the pipeline is connected small tight chain of

work with we are hoping ultimately to be part technology into a polygon, we've received a request going there. So that's something that we're keeping, you know, a, a visibility in the roadmap to be able to support all the blockchain. Very cool, very cool. And it's just quadrata.com is where people can go and learn. Quarata.com, we have a Twitter Quarantine network and we are on Discord as

well. The link is going to be on the website. But I feel it's really hard to us and on Discord will be active. We tend to respond to usually, usually do things. If you always most very cool, very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, fab and sharing everything that is quadrata. Thank you Steve Pejo.