During one of my trips outside the country, I was asked several times for my passport and other documents containing sensitive information for identity validation. Around the same time, I received communication from two retailers who mentioned that they had suffered security breaches resulting in the exposure of my identity and personal information including email address, birth date, SSN, physical address etc.
It occurred to me that
- The breaches were because of a centralized identity verification system.
- E-mail or social media login has become the username.
- Businesses do not validate “identity”.
- Multi Factor authentication is not adequate.
- “Identity” leads to other security attacks like phishing, ransomware etc.
I started exploring a solution for these issues which led me to the blockchain world of distributed ledger and smart contracts. My exposure to the Web3 world and their mechanism of crypto wallets led me to believe that I could combine the crypto wallet technology with the underlying distributed ledger system of blockchain to solve the identity validation and credentials verification challenges. Initial POC were conducted at New York University to test the hypotheses and we started talking to a few early-stage customers in the healthcare and financial verticals.
This was the inspiration to create Web3Fied (Verified Trust in a Zero-Trust World). To maximize adoption, we created an API/SDK solution as it minimizes disruption and can be easily integrated to existing solutions. Identity has always been a fragmented market with multiple solutions and complete disruption has not been successful. By inserting validation of an existing identity and making it decentralized, we hope to slowly disrupt this market and make it far more secure.
Web3Fied Inc. 