At uPort we're working to create the future of digital identity by putting you the user in control. We call itself sovereign identity and we think it will help unleash Web 3.0. Identity is about communicating who you are, proving your personal information is critically important and nearly every interaction we have with companies, with governments, with service providers, with social groups and more. Sounds simple and it may have been when people only transact with others they knew personally, but in a global and digital world this model based on personal trust doesn't scale, and is in need of a complete overhaul. That overhaul is putting you the user in control of your own personal data. There are three major classes of identity systems, each of which have shortcomings that we'll learn from. First, national identity systems were built to help nation states organize its services and people. So they are rigid and hierarchical. Furthermore 1.1 billion people are still excluded from these basic forms of identity, limiting their ability to participate in modern societies. Second, usernames or passwords are extremely inefficient and insecure with redundant and siloed data scattered on the web, and huge burdens on both people and companies to keep track of unsecured passwords. Lastly, single sign-on systems and federated identity provided by large pervasive tech companies add some convenience but lead to massive value concentration in the hands of a few powerful multinationals, growing privacy concerns and security risks. UPort is using the Ethereum blockchain network to build the next generation decentralized identity system. Blockchains are breakthrough cryptographic technology that allow for complete trust in a distributed system even when the individual participants have no prior knowledge of each other. It allows the network to efficiently form and maintain consensus as well as provide an immutable public record of all previous transactions that can be read and trusted by all of the participants. Taking advantage of these features and other Ethereums flexible programming language as well as its developer community, uPort moves control of identity and personal data to each individual user and the distributed network as a whole. With uPort, you can improve your privacy and security by owning your identity and controlling the data associated with it. Using this identity and data you can log into all kinds of applications without using usernames and passwords. You can approve secure identity requests right from your mobile wallet, and you can collect information back from applications that you use to build a rich, user-centric reputation that you can share with the same app or with other apps in the future. Now, let's look at the uPort demo app. So, the uPort demo app you can add to demo.uport.me, define our demo application where here we're just walking through a few of uPorts core functionalities. So, on my mobile phone I have the uPort app, you see I've created an identity, I am Christian the cat, I have some information such as living in the United States and a fake phone number. So, I'll use this mobile wallet to login to the demo application. So here I'll click continue with uPort, now it's saying, asking me to continue with uPort again giving me the option to download the mobile app if I don't already have it, so I can create my identity, you can get it on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. But since we already have the app downloaded and setup, will just continue with uPort and now we'll log in to the demo application using this app. Just click the scan key, and what we're scanning is a QR code that encodes the login request from the application. So, in order to authenticate me as a user, the demo app is going to request certain information about me, thing like my name, my avatar, maybe my phone number and more, and this request is encoded in a URL which is turned into a QR code and displayed to me the user. So now when I scan it, my phone will intake this request and I can improve it or act on it. So here I'll scan this code and now you see a login request on my mobile phone, it shows me Christian the cat logging into the uPort demo, and uPort demo is asking me to provide my name, my phone number, country I live in, my avatar, and the ability to send me push communication. So I don't have to scan the QR code every time I want to interact with the app. So here I'll click continue and what this does, is it shares my information with the app which authenticates me because the message came from my uPort ID. So now I'm logged in. This is a buy shares transaction, and currently you see I have zero shares. You can really imagine this buy shares function is any function that interacts with the Ethereum blockchain here it's just buy shares. So here let's say i will buy two shares I have none. So when I click the buy shares button, what the web app is going to do is generate the raw Ethereum transaction that says I'm going to buy two shares, and it will send it to my mobile app using the ability to send me push notifications that I just provided. So when I click buy shares, you'll see a transaction card up here on my phone, and here it says you see I'm calling the Smart Contract function at this address and it's Christian the cat interacting with this theorem smart contract, and there's some details about the event or the function, so the function is update shares, there's the number of shares I'm purchasing which is two, shows me the address of the Smart Contract, and it tells me the network that the Smart Contract is on. So here I'll prove this transaction and really what that does is now my mobile phone is executing a signature on the raw transaction and sending it back to the Ethereum network. The way uPort works under the hood is that anyone can create an identity in the form of a Smart Contract on your Ethereum network. The Smart Contract acts as a unique identifier that's tied to cryptographic keys. These keys can then be used for authentication or to sign documents, claims, or authentications, or blockchain transactions. The only thing that's publicly visible on the blockchain are abstract identifiers and these public keys. So no personal data is ever visible on the blockchain. Once claims data are issued by an entity, they are held by the user and can be shared with anyone else. So now imagine receiving a digital driver's license claim from your government agency that contains various attributes including your name, birth date, ability to drive, your address and more. Later that day you attend an 18 and older concert and you gain entry only by sharing your birthday attribute with a venue, or even proof that you're only over 18 without disclosing the actual date, everything else like your name, address, and more that were also contained in your digital claim stay completely private in your wallet. Only the information you choose to disclose with the venue is shared, and yet this entire system is completely trustworthy. Similarly, you could receive an attestation from your bank with your balance, then provide a proof that your account is over a certain threshold when applying for a loan or making an investment all without disclosing any other information about your personal account including your actual balance. Consumers can know that their data is secure and not being abused. Businesses can maintain great customer relationships without the cost and liability of seeing and storing sensitive data. Users can switch to new service providers, bring their history and data with them. Providers can onboard new customers without having to build up a relationship and knowledge of them from zero, and those are just the use cases we can already foresee. We'll be opening up our platform and tools to the Ethereum developer community, so that others can build this user-centric Web 3.0 with us. We're working hard to bring self sovereign, digital identity to the decentralized ecosystem. If you want to be a part of it please check out uport.me to see the latest news and join our community.
