The Worlds of Identity and Anonymity with Phillip

What is up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. And today, I am joined by Philip Schumacher, the CEO of Identity.com. How's it going Philip? It's going great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to get into the nitty gritty here of Identity. But before we get into, you know, blockchains and identity and all that fun detail, let's talk about your background. You

got some really cool details, a ton of experience. So let's kind of unpack what the the series of events was that got you into Web 3 in the crypto space. Yeah, that sounds good. You know, I was I was fortunate enough to be born and raised in the Bay Area. Right, Silicon Valley. My father was a lifer at IBM, spent his whole career there. And, uh,

and of course, so the first computer I bought was a Mac. You know, it was, it was an Apple product, which just earth Tim. But for me growing up in the Bay Area allowed me to do things like my first job was at a startup called Symantec. And then I went from startup to startup from, but literally I got hired into Symantec as an 18 year

old. Well, going to college. And I just jumped from company to company, you know, every couple of years to try to expand my horizons a bit. I'm a big believer in always learning. Right. Always trying to learn new technologies. So that's what I did going from company to company. I am. I had this, this, this love when the Internet came around just this absolute love for

the anonymous nature of the Internet for me. That was one of the most interesting things about it because I could tell people my true views and stuff without fear of any repercussions on things and I mean, I was really good at this. And I think that really helped freedom of expression. And so for me, anonymity was great. You know, along those lines, as I moved from

company to company, I ultimately built and ran the App Store for Apple. And in doing that, I found that anonymity for developers submitting App Store Store was actually not all that awesome. And required us to do a lot of work trying to find people that would just come back under a different anonymous name. Right. Another name they would just make stuff up and just keep coming

back and stored to do bad things. So I kind of started focusing on identity at that point when I was running the App Store. But, but the big thing that got me was in 2010, good friend of mine sent me the block Bitcoin white paper. And I was, you know, I was running the App Store at the time, but I read that white paper and I

was floored to me. I saw the future, you know, it was just laid out in front of me, especially the blockchain piece, but also Bitcoin in general. Cool. Very cool. So while running the App Store, someone sent you the Bitcoin white paper. That's right. I love that. So before we started recording, I brought up a big name that, you know, you had the pleasure of crossing

paths with, collaborating with being a colleague of Steve Jobs. So if you could share with the listeners out there, you know, some, some fun experience that you had or something that would kind of, you know, enlighten us on what type of person he was and what type of organization it was like when he was there. Yeah. So I, you know, when I started, when I was

writing apps for the App Store, in the very beginning, when the App Store launched, there was a few months that it launched at the end of 2008, I just started writing apps and getting rejected, left and right. And I was so frustrated with the process that I kept writing note letter after letter after letter to Apple, just telling them all the, all the problems with the

app review process. And that's when I got pulled in to start interviewing with the company. At EQ called me up and asked me to come interview. And it was about four months of interviews. And my final interview, I didn't know who it was going to be with, but I walked into a boardroom. And there were all the executives at Apple with Steve sitting right in the

middle on one side of the desk. And on the other side of the conference room table was a chair for me and several phones. And he wanted to, you know, he wanted to look at the phones and talk about the apps and whether I would approve them or not. And it was Steve leading the show there, right. He sat there and argued and debated and got

angry with me every step of the way. He is one of these guys that has a very strong opinion, right. He was always very opinionated, but he was willing to change his opinion. If you had good data and good evidence behind that. But I tell you it was one of the most intimidating experiences that have his, his whole executive staff on one side of the desk.

And he sat at the table yelling at me while I was on the other side. Who knew that that was going to be my life for the next seven or eight years at Apple, having the executives yell at me while I was building a team to approve these apps. But I tell you, it was an amazing experience working with Steve. That was my first experience was

approved an app that they shouldn't have. It's called Baby Shaker. And it got the shaken baby syndrome folks, uh, picketing outside of our offices. And I see my phone ring. And it says, Office of Steve Jobs, his assistant says, Hey, Philip, I'm going to put Steve on and Steve just says one sentence to me. He says, you're stupid. And you hire stupid people. He hung up

the phone, right? So Steve was man who didn't mince his words. He said what he felt, uh, very emotional at times. And, uh, for me, you look, I understood what the point was, our stock had gone down, right? The stock price had gone down because of an app we approved. And this was after record earnings and record downloads. So it was the time that Apple learned

just how powerful the app store truly was. And this was, you know, the fourth week of my, uh, on the job, I got a harsh reality, a harsh, a weakening as to, uh, what to expect moving forward. Um, but that was Steve, you know, I did spend a lot of interesting times with them writing the guidelines. When we ultimately wrote the guidelines for, for the app

store, there was a lot of time I got to spend with Steve to see the way his brain worked. And I have to say he's one of the most, he was one of the smartest people I've ever worked with in my life, just way ahead of the game. You know, when you talk about a slippery slope about approving something, you know, it would be a slippery

slope. He was already down that slope. And talking to you about the other apps that, that if you allow this one in here's what you're going to be allowing in in three years, and it was just, it was an amazing, uh, uh, knowledge that he had an amazing foresight. Nice. Nice. Yeah, that's crazy. The, the call from him. You're stupid and you're stupid, stupid, stupid people.

That's, uh, intense. And I, I've met a lot of people over the years that worked with him in various different capacities and just the real, uh, sort of brute force about approach to, to communication and a lot of, um, a lot of that sort of straight, uh, straight shooting, uh, can really take a toll. And it's so interesting that he's become this icon, you know, as

a, as a visionary and things like that. And people that have worked with him. I've, I've heard some stories about how it was just really, uh, roller coaster, um, of stress and chaos and things like that. So, um, it's, it's really unique that you got to call it. And I've got to, uh, cross pass with him and, and look back on literally having to argue once

a week with the executive team there about, uh, about apps and whatnot is, is really, uh, a unique experience. So let's talk about identity. Yeah. What was the step that took you to kind of leap into identity and that being like your core focus and then we'll get into identity.com. Yeah. In 2016, I had, uh, I left Apple, but, you know, I got to, uh, review

times and review process down to one day. So I figured I, okay, my job is done. And I was tired of all the death threats and, uh, people stalking me because of the, the team I, I ran. So, uh, so I left in 2016, moved to the Dominican Republic just to, to kite surf. And while I was there, all of my blockchain friends started coming by

and, uh, talking blockchain. And, uh, and it was interesting. You know, by that point, uh, I had invested in a few, uh, uh, Bitcoin blockchain companies. Like Bitcoin and I really believed in the technology, but, you know, 2016, I was just trying to catch my breath after the, the whirlwind tour that was Apple. But, uh, but these guys just, you know, everybody just kept showing up

in the DR, talking about, about crypto. So I decided to, you know, stick my head in really, you know, much deeper and realized that blockchain had the potential to solve some of the identity problem that I was running with that, or running into an Apple, you know, at Apple, it's interesting. If an individual submits an app to the App Store, they get vetted strictly by their

email address and their credit card. That's it, right? And so you can go buy a prepaid credit card and go in under any name you want to, right? Uh, and, uh, that's what people were doing. And then they'd submit an app that had something really bad in it that we had to terminate, you know, terminate their membership. And they would just reappear in a matter of

minutes under a different name. And that really bothered me, right? Because there are times, especially as we've seen with code, Google, management, and tech YouTube sessions, and that's exactly how I wanted this off. And so I started digging into it and found that there was this concept of self-sauver and identity, which means you control the keys, right? You control the disclosure of your data to people.

That's another big thing, right? Honeypots of information. I've been hacked so many times. I mean, I just got a new note from Maryout saying my data has been exposed again. And I think that's the ninth one from the one company. And not to mention how many other companies have done that. And I wanted to get rid of this whole honeypot thing. So people stopped trying to

hack, you know, these giant honeypots of PII, personally identifiable information. So I started digging around a company's doing it. And I saw that company called Civic was already in the process of doing that. So I became friends with those guys. And in a chance meeting with Vinny Langham, the CEO of the company Vinny and I decided to create identity.com. And then I just spin it out

of a protocol out of Civic. And let's make this a 501C4 nonprofit. And let's focus on bringing low cost identities to the larger audience. And solving some interesting problems that you can only solve with digital identities. And that's things like vending machine uses and hack. If it could control the jewel or one of those vape pens, so only people of age can smoke vapes. To me,

those were kind of the interesting compelling solutions. And then you get into centralized exchanges, et cetera. And it just kind of exploded. So for me, it was, it was my love of the internet in the early days with anonymity. And then going full circle and finding out the dangers of anonymity with running the app store. And I just wanted to solve that problem. And I thought

blockchain was an ideal way to make it happen. And that's a kind of launched in 2018. We started thinking about spinning out identity.com, which we ultimately did in 2019. And from that point on, we've just been working on our protocols, trying to get more adoption of this decentralized digital identity protocol that we have called gateway. Nice. And right when I restart researching identity.com, I immediately thought

of Vinny and Civic and what they what they had been building there. So that's really cool. The you guys kind of joined forces is Civic still around or did that just totally merge into identity.com. No, Civic is Civic is still around. Vinny is a chairman of their board. He's actually on our board as well. He's a board member. And Civic is our largest user of our

protocol right now. So they are still working on it. Civic has focused a lot on identity and NFTs. And that's a really powerful big space right now. They're also doing bot, bot detection as well to ensure that you're a real person. They're also focusing on uniqueness to make sure that hey, if you shouldn't be able to, if they're saying one NFT per person, you shouldn't be

able to trick it by using different wallets. So Civic has a product for that as well. And it's all based on on our gatekeeper or gateway protocol. Cool. Very cool. And let's talk about being a validator and how this whole system actually works because there's a lot of information. That I was digging into. I'm a big fan of staking have been for many, many years. And

I'm curious as to how this is designed from a high level. If you could explain it, you know, in an elementary way to everybody, including me and the listeners, how it works and how it's set up. Absolutely. So our system is it's, you think of it as a two-sided marketplace. You have people writing services or decentralized apps, right? The app providers that need my help. They

want to have some sort of identity solution in their system. Now they might want to do document verification, like KYC, which will scan your driver's license or your passport. If you need that level of security, right? If you, if you need to know exactly who that person is, and that's for things like financial transactions, et cetera, or you might want to use it just to detect

if this person's unique, if they're a bot, or even if they, you just want them to verify with their LinkedIn account or something like that. There's so many different levels. Of identity, right? There's, there's your social identity. There's your legal identity. And, and those are some of those things that, and then there's also your personal identity, how you, you know, what, what race you are, all

of those other things. But we focus on on two of those really, right? We focus on the legal identity and your social reputation or your social identity. And so what we do is we have these providers on one end, these decentralized app providers or services that want to be able to verify or validate their users. And they just implement our protocol. It's not a lot of

lines of code. And they say, okay, we need to request a document verification. Now that service on the other end goes to, like you said, a validator. It can also be seen as a gatekeeper. The gatekeepers is this new technology we're using, part of the gateway protocol. That's all about people saying, okay, this, I'm a gatekeeper for this network. This network requires people to be validated

with the driver's license or a passport. They need to be over a 18. They need to go through an anti, anti money laundering scan and AML scan, et cetera. Right? You can set up a certain requirements. And a gatekeeper or a validator will validate those. Your identity, whatever the app person, uh, app, uh, develop requires. And the, uh, scan the ID, run all those checks. And

if it comes back positive, it issues a pass into your wallet. And this is just what we call a gateway pass. And the gateway pass says, yes, it's valid for X number of days or hours or years. However, you want to set that up. That's again, up to the gatekeeper or validator to make that happen. And then that pass is added to the wallet. And then

you can use it. Anybody but it supports that gatekeeper. If you go to a different decentralized exchange, ideally, you don't want to go through that KYC process. Again, if that passes is accepted, this identity pass, then it'll just automatically work from decentralized exchange from decks to decks to decks. Right. That's the ultimate goal. So there's kind of two sides. Now the money that gets, there's money.

Get it. There's a CVC's, you know, so we do leverage the civic token still the CVC token gets state gatekeepers have to stake a certain amount of C CVC to be able to say, hey, we're issuing identities. And if we start issuing fraudulent identities, not only will we be penalized, right, with some of their stake being taken away. But there's a good chance that they'll be

removed from the network as well. And this is important. Now because we're in a permissionless system, right. We're in a permissionless system. But at the same time, you need to have checks and balances here because it's all about trust. As soon as you or any user starts starts to not trust the identity. The ecosystem we're done, right. I mean, for us, we really need everyone to

know that we don't just allow any company in to be a gatekeeper or a validator. They have to go through SOC 2 compliance and other types of document retention standards to make sure that they're doing the right thing that hopefully they're, you know, ideally they're deleting all your data. Once you go through the KYC, they should not be holding any PII at all. That should only

exist on your device, right. That's the only place your PII should exist is on your device. So you can handle that. So we validate the validators that come in on board. And when I say we, I mean identity.com. But as part of our weight paper, we've made it clear that, look, we don't want to do this forever. We want to roll out a doubt. Have people

that are part of the network be able to vote on the rules and the requirements to be a gatekeeper and to be part of the network. And over time, they'll be at the ones during the guardianship or the validation of the validators. Got it. Very cool. I like the way that it's designed. I'm going to always a big fan of marketplaces, just because they really can

disrupt quite a bit. I think we've all seen with various different marketplaces, like your Airbnb's and your lifts and things like that. It's very, very exciting. So I like that you take the legal and the social identity from people, because I feel like those are two pretty foundational parts to how we not only choose to identify in this world, but also, legally identify. I think that's

really a smart approach to this. So shifting gears a little bit. Where, where are you guys at? Status wise. Is this fully rolled out? Is this live? I talked to a lot of people that it's projects aren't quite live yet. Do you have people utilizing this? And could you give us an example of like a use case for this? Yeah. So civic has been, so the

answer is yes. With this gateway protocol has been rolled out. Since November of last year. And civic has been using it since then to do NFT launches, primarily on Solsea and Solana marketplaces. We're integrated into the Solana candy machine. So when people mint NFTs through that, it's just built in automatically. You'll see the identity and the civic logos in there as well to reflect that. It's

something that we used to ensure that there's no bots, but also as NFT companies come out, or NFT creators say, look, we actually want to capture identity. Capturing somebody's identity, doing a full document scan to buy an NFT may seem heavy handed. And we know the crypto world is pretty much the Wild West. We ignore a lot of regulations until we're forced to abide by them.

And we know, many of us know that the regulations are coming for the NFT. Especially with companies like Moonbirds and Yuga Labs essentially funding their companies to the sale of these NFTs. We know regulations are coming. So Solana NFT providers now are saying things like, well, we need to do a document scan. We need to make sure that you're from an region we allow, because this

is seen as investment, et cetera. So companies like that are starting to reach out to companies like Civic and Identity. There's two ways to integrate our technology. And there's more than, there'll be more than that over the course of the next six months, is you can go to Civic or you can go directly to us. If you go to Civic, it's pretty much a right one

line of code. And you can integrate relatively quickly. With us, you want more granular control of the technology you can leverage us. So we are, we've been in sense November. But we had no ability to monetize as in November. So all of those passes that we've been using are in the market that we're issued from that point have been free. Over time, we're rolling out version

two of the market of the gatekeeper and gateway protocol in the course of the next few weeks, which allow people to do direct on chain payment. So providers can ultimately pay for issuing a pass. And that's when the money, when the money starts rolling in. And I mean that in an identity space, there's not a lot of money rolling in. But as the money starts going,

feeding the money, and going into the system, that's when we start seeing more people becoming interested and becoming a validator, becoming a decentralized app provider. And it's kind of this flywheel effect that we hope to get going as we roll out the, the new technology. Now part of this is we're also big believers in the W3C and what they're doing with regards to decentralized identifiers. It's

called DIDs. And the DID spec, we are a W3C member. We have approved the spec. We believe that we have a new technology. We believe it's the right thing to do. That's an off chain way to identify yourself. And we use this technology and we allow it to be used on chain or off chain. And it's called DIDs. So DID colon SOL because that's our Solana

implementation of the DID spec. And that's something that developers can use right now. If you want to start playing with DIDs, you can go hit up the identity GitHub. And ultimately start participating in the DIDs. So implementation. And that's one of these really cool features that we're going to see in a few years. Ultimately, that'll be the main way to log into websites and others is

most likely using your DIDs. Very cool. Very cool. So the finale kind of question here is when you're getting up in the morning, what is it that gets you super excited outside of identity.com. You've been in the space for a while and you've seen a lot of things come and go, what is it that you get just very excited about in this whole Web 3 movement?

Web 3 movement to me is finally wrestling back control from the big guys, right? From the apples, from the, you know, the Facebooks, the, the Googles, etc. I'm a huge believer. You know, you said that you're a believer in marketplaces. You know, and I am too. That's why I tried to build it when I was at Palm. I tried to build the marketplace. That's why I

relished working on the marketplace when I was at Apple. The App Store, it would turn out to be phenomenal. And for me, that is what I like. It allows us to monetize different aspects of our life. And that's what I think Web 3 is going to give us. For me to be paid to watch ads rather than paying with my personal data, I'd rather have that

happening, right? Getting paid for the work I put out there for the blogs I write for it. To me, it's wrestling back control of my data and monetization and being able to put that in the hands of users. I am a huge believer in people being being able to let them leverage their skills. That their day to day job might not be able to afford them

to do. And they can do this in the evening in the whole gig economy. I think the Web 3 and the gig economy together are going to help change things. You know, I'm a huge believer in that. I'm a huge believer in pseudonymity and this whole idea of, you know, what your day job, my day job, I'm Philip Schumacher in the evening. I might be someone

else doing, doing some podcasts that, that would be interesting doing that under a pseudonym. And there's no need that one person needs to know who that pseudonym is or how it ultimately ties into my real identity. And that's something that I think is going to be powerful. And it's kind of part of that Web 3 movement is pseudonymity. Cool. Very cool. Well, those are all the

questions I have for you, Philip, wherever you guys are listening in all the links that Philip mentioned will be in these show notes. But people can go and find more on identity.com, right? That's right. Perfect place to go. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story here, Philip. Thank you for your time. This has been fun.