Yeah so, this company was actually founded by me and industry partners together and the idea of the industry partners was basically we have no idea what blockchain is but we want to be somehow in this space and do something useful. Then we looked around what could actually be done useful on blockchain which is also relevant for many industries not just for the finance industry also but for the energy industry as well as the publishing industry & more. We came around the web 2 which we have right now & it has a huge problem around identity. The biggest problem actually is that identity in the physical world normally belongs to the person, and in the digital world it belongs to a big conglomerate and this is something which puts the user in a worse position than it was in the physical world and that shouldn't be so. This is one of the big problems and we thought, hey maybe this is solvable with blockchain and we found that it is and then we looked at industry use cases and we found that basically every single vertical in the industry needs identity for different types of things, some needed to identify a user, some needed to identify a service, some needed to put identity to IOT devices, etc, but you always have identity and we feel it to be broken in the web 2.0. So, we thought was time to build something on the blockchain which is fit for web 3.0 and this is what KILT is all about.

Well I think there's many challenges when you are a start-up in the blockchain ecosystem. Like every start-up you need to find money which is normal. In our case particularly we feel something like identity on a blockchain is that you have some kind of a regulatory environment and this regulatory environment is different in every single country and it is very relevant for you in the country where you live in because you have your company there and you have to obey the rights the duties that you have from the regulatory side. I didn't expect it to be that big actually so we spent far more money on lawyers than we actually planned to do so & that was a very big surprise to me how complicated it actually is not because the people are against blockchain but because there's always people saying yeah, we're working on this yeah but how long can I wait until you're ready when you're working on it basically so that's really challenging.

Yes definitely. So, in the beginning we made a big research phase so what we had written didn't take off and we pivoted towards let's make identity. Identity is something which is there for thousands of years and there have been different concepts about that and the physical world has a different concept than the digital world and there's differences and lots of things you have to think about so with that we started the company & decided let's take like 10 months and really dig down into everything that identity is. Therefore, we had a very a colourful team of different people starting from mathematicians, computer scientists, economists and also a philosopher because it has to do a lot with philosophy in the end. You could say then after 10 months we could actually fire the philosopher but we didn't because it turned out that he's one of the best developers that we have because he's so bright that he can also do the developer work as he's fantastic so he's still with us and that's excellent.

Actually when we started the whole thing, we were thinking of that and then we also started speaking with governments and then it turned out we were on the wrong way. So, we're not doing it anymore because we found out that digital identity is something that sounds frightening to governments. They just really find it hard to understand as in the physical world they are just one trusted entity which issues credentials. Ideally, they are not the master of my identity, my identifier is my face. For E.g.; it's not being given to me by the government but I can take a picture of my face and then I put it you can put it on some kind of passport and then this passport is issued by a government so they are just a trust identity. They're issuing something and then when I go to university and get a diploma for that then I get it from the university and not from the government so they are just one of many issuers and in the physical where in the digital world with verifiable credentials and decentralized identity it will be the same thing so they're not losing anything compared to what they had before in the physical world but it sounds to them often like hey we make digital identity yeah then all the information which is now at Facebook and google should be in the government and basically it shouldn’t. This is what governments are always looking for and so it's really a complicated discussion because they get it from the wrong side and they think we are working against them actually we're just providing an infrastructure for them. Personally, I think it will take some time until governments are ready to do this and when will be that time, I think the digital identity is going to start off in the tech space so for the blockchain people it's much easier to understand as well as for companies. And for big companies even using identity of their employees internally is much easier to understand such a concept and so what I think will happen is that digital identity comes from blockchain to gamers to the whole Metaverse thing and when it's established in the whole Metaverse thing then governments will notice and be like WoW! there's a lot of things happening in this parallel universe. The transition will happen I guess and they will join then. So, we took it from completely wrong side in the beginning and wasted a lot of time on that speaking with a lot of governments about that and they all were very reluctant to play with us and now we notice that it's just going to happen just like the internet when it wasn't interesting for governments in the beginning but now, they're using it so it will take some time and it will go bottom up and not top down.

Yeah so first when we started, we finished with a white paper and had made our studies on identity, then we said OKAY now we have to implement the whole thing. Of course you think of Ethereum and things like that in the first place because it's also established and then we noticed actually identity transactions have to be very cheap because when you add an identity to an IOT device which costs like two dollars, it is really hard to pay transaction fees like 100 for recording the identity that wouldn't work right so it needs to be cheaper and it needs to be in a way that the network basically can be in control of the gas cost at least for a major part of that. So, we were looking for something else and we were definitely deciding that we need to have our own blockchains that we can't just use on somebody else's blockchain and there were not too many frameworks out there with which you could build your own blockchain. One of them was priority substrate which is the thing where polkadot is based on and we looked at it and we were absolutely blown away by the ideas behind that and said okay this is the technology of the future and now is the right time to jump on this thing even if it's not almost by that time really ready, as we paid a lot for making things because stuff changed but in the end it was the totally right direction and it gives us such a lot of power and flexibility to build on a software which is developed by so many brilliant minds that's absolutely fantastic. The other thing which we didn't plan but which also we found out is that there's actually a very good community around Polkadot, the people they're extremely intelligent, there's great projects in there and working together with those guys is so much fun. So, you could stay say we came for the technology and we stayed for the community basically.

Yeah Social KYC was intended in the beginning as a demo use case basically for what KILT can do but it turns out that it is actually very useful for people. So, it emphasises social capabilities. So, everyone knows what KYC is, this is how you take your governmental documentation and it is necessary if financial transactions are involved and I think it won't go away because banks will always be connected to governmental things and it's okay. For example; when you play a video game with some guy in china and you really want to know that you're paying to the right guy right it really doesn't help if you know his street address and have some government id that describes who that is because if he cheats you in the game you can't go to the Chinese police and say hey he cheated me on the game please find him and arrest him that wouldn't work but if you know who this person is on the internet then you can actually go to twitter and go to email and go to discord and many other things and say hey be aware of this person this person is actually cheating you and this is why we said you need another KYC in the internet and this is determined by proving your control over social media accounts. So, what Social KYC does is you go to Code by C I guess into Social KYC and say I’m XYZ at twitter and then social KYC tells you OKAY if you think you are, then please tweet this sentence with your account and then Social KYC looks at twitter and sees if you really tweeted this then you obviously control this account and then it issues you a credential which says you are basically owning this twitter account and you can use this credential for whatever you want. For Example; you can go to a video game or whatever and tell this video game actually this is me and then you play with know that this is you and if you're cheating they can actually say okay this guy on twitter this guy on this chord which is the same person is actually cheating in the video game so you identify yourself with things outside the government right so you have a new way of identifying yourself and making sure who people actually are and this is very valuable in the internet because lots of things in the internet are not happening with the real names they are happening with addresses in social media.

Yes, they can. They would use probably social KYC credentials or even credentials from governmental KYC providers that's also possible. Then communication would be a little bit different so you wouldn't ask a central service like google or so to provide your identity you would ask the user, then user would see his wallet his wallet popping up saying this service is requesting this and this credential from you maybe two or three credentials so that the service can be really sure that you are you and you haven't been hacked because you can hack an email but hacking twitter email and discord at the same time is complicated so it could ask for three credentials or so and you sign them once and then your wallet sends over the credentials to the service and you're logged in. This has really interesting features for it because the service does not really need to store those credentials as it just has to make sure that those credentials are valid and this can be checked on the blockchain that they are valid right. So, the service itself doesn't really need to store any information about the user which may give it the possibility to be totally GDPR compliant for example because no personal information is stored in the service at all, it is always only stored with the user in his own wallet.

Yeah as an end user you would probably just use services like social KYC. We launched another service just the other week which is called DIDSign which is a signing application which runs directly in your browser which is absolutely fantastic because you don't need any central services anymore. You can have confidential documents because you don't send them out, they're just signed on your browser and then you sign them with your DIDSign which is in your wallet and then you have a signature on this thing actually stating that you signed this thing that you signed the document and you cannot only use documents for it like you can do in many centralized applications. You can also use video files, you could you can sign music, you can sign everything that is basically digital with that and then you can send away the signed file to a person who you want to deliver to and that could be via email, discord, telegram you name it. So, you can use any means of communication and transport your sign your signed file and the other side the receiver can make absolutely sure with did sign again that you are the right person because the receiver can see all the credentials which are attached to it such as your telegram, twitter and your email account so that you can make absolutely sure that you are the right person. So, we're doing something for basically everyone out there where you can see the advantages of web 3 right away because you don't have the central service you have more freedom in the means of communication you have more freedom in selecting your type of document and it is always free because it is just a website which runs in your browser. So, there's no one you can pay for these services and I hope there will be hundreds of these services in the future because people will start building on KILT and these services will actually bring what we call the Web 3.0 to the people's lives and that's how you could actually start benefiting by using those services.

So, there's many options. So, if you are a developer the first website you probably want to look at is dev.kilt.io which is the developer site there you can actually find all the necessary information around how to use the SDK a cookbook on how to build applications on guild, how to build in a Testnet, how to build a verifier, how to run your own nodes if you want all the information about that is there. It is also necessary that you have some kind of discussion group so we don't want to leave you alone so there's a discord channel and channel can be found on KILT.io. Basically, so all the social connections are on the site so I think it becomes more and more important. So, this is what I want to point out because you find like-minded people there so you can discuss your ideas on what to build or maybe somebody's building the same thing and you can make a team out of it or inspire other people or you get help from other people and the Devs of the KILT team are definitely also there to help you out if you get stuck at some point so that's probably all happening on this board.

So the token utility of KILT there's many of them so I think this is the most eager one that everyone would want to know. The smallest one is definitely that there's gas fees, those gas fees are ridiculously low so they don't really make a big business case but they are there just as a spam protection so disregard that they are not important of course. Then there's staking, you can stake your KILT. I would say a bigger utility of the coin is definitely deposits. So why would you need deposits on a blockchain you know that storage is something which costs a lot because it has to be replicated thousands of times in the end and this is what many in blockchains one pays for with a gas fee right and this is why the gas fees are so high so when we want to have ridiculously low gas fees we still have to make sure that people who write something on the blockchain actually care about what they're writing and if they don't need it anymore that they're also deleted. So that’s what we're doing here with KILT. You don't pay a lot of KILTS for saving work on the blockchain but you pay a deposit which means that on your account two KILT coins per DID are locked they're not going away they're not paid to anyone and no one can spend them they're just locked and if you don't want your DID anymore because you decide hey, I’m not interested in blockchain stuff anymore you just delete your DID and your two KILT coins are unlocked so this is the major utilities I would say for now.

There's a huge vision which just came out of the research phase and which is now going into the implementation phase and this is a big one and I’m not promising it for the next two months so this is not going to be ready before beginning of next year. So, we have to be absolutely clear about that because we can always tell great stories and then people are disappointed. The big thing which is coming up is a VCO which stands for Virtual Credential Organizations. They are companies running on the KILT blockchain. Why do we need that? because we think or we see that credentialing is a business which is really important. Also, in the digital world it becomes more important in the Metaverses, so if you are in the Metaverse and you want to build your house you build your house with bricks but those bricks are digital but you want the best bricks of course so you need bricks which are certified so you need a credential on this thing you also need credentials on NFT’s that people find them valuable or something like that so credentialing is a huge thing and this is not just for single persons credentialing is in the real world a trillion dollar business and it will be a huge business. Also, in the digital world you will have companies, how do you form these companies so we decided to give a platform for building such companies directly on the blockchain which can issue credentials.