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Catch up with Orange Protocol
Recorded: Aug. 8, 2025 Duration: 0:31:18Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, key insights were shared on the launch of Orange Pass, a new token aimed at enhancing user privacy, alongside trends in DAO governance and the challenges of compliance in real-world asset tokenization. The conversation highlighted the importance of partnerships and innovative solutions in driving growth within the crypto ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM, just I'm going to kick off in about two minutes and just let folks roll on in. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I'll just do a quick tech check.
I assume you guys can hear me if you can't.
Or if you can hear me, just throw up one of your emojis.
But it's great to be back.
Sorry, for last week or Monday, actually.
I sounded less than human.
I know my voice is very bad but much much better today so
it's good to be back with you guys back to doing the Friday updates. So just before we kick off
I wanted to just do some kind of housekeeping stuff just to keep you guys up to date. I think
one of the most interesting things that's happened this week, it only happened yesterday,
is I know Jeff, our head of community, joined Barnabas, one of our really active harbingers who manages Ontology Africa,
hosted a space to kind of deep dive into exactly what is Ontology, right?
Ontology has been around for so long.
Like we just celebrated our seventh birthday.
There's always a lot of things happening within Ontology, a lot of different products, a lot of different developments. So I think it's always really important just to kind of get back to basics and really try to understand exactly what Ontology is.
So I think there was a lot of listeners on this space.
I won't go into too much detail on it because I'll take up too much time, but I'd recommend everybody to go if you haven't had a chance to go listen to the spaces.
There was a bunch of different developers, I believe, all based within Africa, and they were just chatting about how developments,
how they see things developing and how they see kind of Ontology's input in this. So it was really great to see.
And thanks again to Barnabas for getting involved with this and also for Jeff for representing Ontology there.
So yeah, so today we have Dave from Orange Protocol.
He's joined us a bunch of times, but we're going to go through all these different use cases that Orange Protocol has been working on recently.
So Orange has always been very busy, but I'll let Dave kind of take over.
And Dave, if you want to just do a quick intro to yourself and a quick intro to Orange for folks that maybe haven't kind of come across you before.
Are we, okay, are you back?
Hey, can you hear me?
Perfect, loud and clear. Yeah, I was just saying, if you want to just do an introduction to yourself
and to Orange Protocol for any of the folks on the call
that may not have come across you guys before.
Yeah, yeah, sure thing.
I'm Dave, I lead marketing for Orange.
So basically, Orange is a reputation protocol, part of the ontology ecosystem.
So what we've created is
this decentralized portable reputation that you can take across different chains, different protocols.
We already have built up a bunch of different data models with like leading projects in the space.
You can verify web2 credentials, web3 credentials, on-chain activity,
off-chain activity. So we're trying to basically build the most complete
comprehensive reputation protocol in the space.
So part of that, I think, is the launch of Orange Pass,
which is our ZKTLS.
Confirm details with projects, confirm reputation, things completed without divulging any of
your private information with concern for folks, which means that we don't hold your info,
the partner who's checking the reputation doesn't hold any of it. It's all kind of held yourself
and just the CKTLS just confirms that the information is there, whether it be like you have over 10K in your Binance account
or you have this particular NFT
or you have X amount of social media followers,
whatever it might be.
So it's a big step forward for us in terms of building trust
and kind of privacy with the users of Orange Protocol,
but also adding more value to the website.
Great, Jay. Thanks so much.
And just as a reminder, folks, actually, for anybody that might have missed this,
that Orange Pass is live on Chrome Web Store.
So this is really interesting.
So by using, obviously, Orange Pass, you can kind of securely and quickly prove,
I guess, ideally to any third party your information on any Web2 website. So that's a really interesting update
to have. And just as a quick reminder for anybody that might have missed it. But Dave, I really do
appreciate you joining us today. I know that you're super busy, but I wanted to give folks
kind of some insights into these use cases that you've been working on. And I know also where I'd like to start is around lending,
because I know obviously the market's clearly looking for,
I think, ways to move beyond like over collateralization,
I guess, without sacrificing trust,
which trust is something that we're always talking about, right?
So within this, we're looking kind of towards privacy preserving,
exchange balance proofs as a fix.
So maybe could you walk
us through at maybe a high level how these maybe balance proofs let borrower prove essentially
borrowers prove that they're solvent without exposing kind of all their all of their um
all their positions or on-chain activity yeah it's it's a really interesting use case i think so if anyone has kind of gone to a bank
and taken out a loan they know that the process is that the bank will check your credit check all
these kind of all the information around you it's all very centralized it's it's actually a much
easier process uh than it is in web3 um and then you either get your loan or you don't get your loan.
So what happens because you can't do
all of this kind of centralized checking
within Web3, what happens is,
and within DeFi,
all of these kind of lending protocols
will over collateralize,
which means they'll be super, super conservative
with what they give you
because they can't trust off-chain signals.
So what we do with Orange's EKTLS is a borrower can now prove locally that they meet a condition
on a centralized exchange.
So as I mentioned earlier, this might be your Binance balance is over 10K for the last six
months or you've already passed KYC without sharing your account,
without sharing the balance itself or any other private information. So then what happens is the
ZK proof mints an orange attestation which is then tied to your wallet. So lenders can just check that
with our on-chain verifier and then they can set your kind of lending amount accordingly.
and then they can set your kind of lending amount accordingly.
So this reduces a lot of the kind of clutter and bad user experience
that a lot of lending protocols have.
Like, so there's no centralized Oracle, no API fees,
and then the user can then reuse that.
And this is what I, when I spoke about kind of portable reputation,
or this is the great thing about it.
Like previously, if you pass with one lending protocol,
whatever checks they might put in place,
and then you go to another one,
you have to do the same thing all over again.
It's very, very tedious.
Like nobody likes kind of doing these things.
So the user can now reuse this credential
across protocols until it expires.
So it's more capital efficient for lenders.
Like there's less likelihood, for example,
of the borrower defaulting,
or they're not giving out enough loans
because they're not sure exactly
how credit worthy these people are,
which obviously means more money for them,
less money lost.
It's privacy preserving for the users,
which means you're never actually giving away any kind of crucial information.
The borrower doesn't see it, or the lender doesn't see it.
Orange doesn't see it.
It's just an attestation that says,
yeah, this person fulfills all the criteria we've set out
for this particular lending product.
And then also these attestations also feed into your Orange Humanity score.
So you basically have a way of combining solvency with reputation
if you want to kind of have more kind of tighter risk controls.
So what it means is it just kind of streamlines the whole process.
The borrower is making more money or the lender is making more money.
The borrower has easier access to capital
and everything's a little bit more efficient and privacy is still protected.
So as a use case, I think it's a really, really strong one.
It's just, it brings kind of DeFi lending to the same kind of user experience level as traffic.
Definitely.
And I think that was something that we potentially thought could never happen.
And it's interesting that you mentioned about portable reputation, because I know previously we'd spoken a lot about this within gaming, but it might have after the call feel free to reach out but these are all going to be
articles and topics that are going to be kind of more broadly discussed so
there'll be a lot more information shared so as I said it definitely makes
a lot more sense and I think obviously the work that you're putting in and the
team is putting in is to kind of I guess bridge that gap between transparency and
this kind of competitive secrecy right which I can't imagine how tricky that is.
So I really appreciate that answer.
So if we want to kind of switch things up and go from lending towards governance, right,
so obviously DAOs keep running into civil attacks,
and we talk about civil attacks quite a lot.
And I know within one of these use cases,
you've suggested an interesting kind of multi-source social ZKTLS approach so I think just for any folks on the call
who maybe aren't familiar with how ZKTLS works we could maybe chat about ZKTLS extending
kind of beyond a concept to provide identity assurances for a DAO without doxing members.
Yeah, again, like if you think about it, it's another like super obvious use case.
Like DAOs, yeah, DAOs are great for governance, but the downside is that you're dealing with
like anonymity, you're dealing with like cartels essentially who can gain governance and make it kind of very ineffective
for the community as a whole.
I like that term being used actually around cartels.
It's quite funny.
Yeah, that's a good one.
All right.
Yeah, so cyber resistance is very, very important one.
You don't want a whole bunch of people
or a whole bunch of people creating multiple accounts
and attacking kind of attacking the governance to basically
push it towards whatever they want against the best wishes of the community or whatever
project it is.
So what we found was that single source checks, like you can connect your Twitter, very easy
to game.
They also leak identities.
So you can see how people are voting.
And this again opens up a whole other host of problems around privacy and people being
kind of doxxed and attacked.
So essentially what we're trying to do is kind of flip that with the ZKTLS.
So a member of a DAO can now privately prove across different sources, prove identity across
different sources.
So it could be something like they've more than 10 Twitter followers.
The account is more than two years old.
Their discount account is connected to that.
It's also a real Firecaster account.
So then what we do is then aggregate all those into an on-chain credential.
So we can set, like, you can set a point system on this as well.
So that's what we've done with Orange Humanity score is that the more of these
you have, the higher your score, the more likely you are to be, a real person who does real things and kind of takes on chain actions and is active or whatever it might be.
So essentially the governors of the DAO can set the rule.
So basically you need, I don't know, like two out of three of these.
So just go over to BA. This is the DAO never sees handles,
never sees a personal information.
It only sees a yes, no against the policy.
So you get like much stronger Sybil hardening,
you don't get any doxing,
and it's just a drop in integration.
So it's super simple for any DAO to set up,
it doesn't require any kind of major tech resource
or anything like that.
And then it's fully composable.
So again, if you want to update this rule later,
like you want to make it more difficult to vote in the DAO,
or less difficult if you're not getting kind of a lot of activity there, you can kind of revoke the current attestation and set up a new one and then it's just live straight away.
within their community, that these are real people,
that people aren't colluding,
people aren't kind of working against the best interests
of the community in order to benefit themselves,
which has been up to now has been kind of the major issue
that you see with a lot of devs.
They're great for governance,
great for kind of decentralizing opinions
on kind of key issues,
but they're prone to certain types of attacks.
And with Orange Pass, then we're hoping to solve a lot of these.
Thank you so much.
That was so insightful.
Just one part that I think I'd love to reiterate or just to repeat is that it's an easy lift
for devs.
We should really, really highlight this in use case.
Because, you know, we've worked with devs for years on and off,
and I think it's always difficult.
I mean, this is what we always talk about,
removing barriers or making it easier for devs to do work.
So knowing that this is easy for devs to kind of implement,
I think it's something that should be really highlighted.
But it's great to definitely hear how this could reshape voter weighting models.
So I'm gonna just move on to another topic.
I know we're kind of going through these quite quickly,
but something that's been coming up a lot
is our RWAs, right?
So real world assets and kind of token launches,
probably one of the most popular areas right now I think,
I kind of given the regulatory spotlight. So how I guess within this use case kind of considering
balancing compliance requirements like KYC or AML or accredited investor checks with privacy
guarantees within the crypto or that the crypto community kind of expects.
If you could go into like high level overview of this, that'd be great.
Yeah, and again, it's a really good one because it touches on a different area.
Like real world assets, one of the key features of them is that they're legally enforceable
in the real world outside of kind of crypto, outside of Web3. Like, so it could be something like property or stocks or assets or
whatever it might be. Yeah, that's why I think it's so interesting to have this as a use case
within Web3. Exactly. Yeah. So what you need to do then is you can't just kind of fulfill the
criteria of the Web3 world. you need to take into account compliance.
So as you mentioned, like AML, KYC.
So for like, especially kind of,
for any kind of big or WA launch,
like teams are gonna need like KYC,
they're gonna need region checks as well.
There's certain regions that you can't launch on,
but you don't wanna kind of do things
like have to store passports and stuff like that.
I think that's the last thing that most projects
wants is responsibility for that.
So with the Orange Pass kind of ZKTLS,
the user just proves KYC passed allowed jurisdiction.
It may be for EU KYC or US KYC, whatever it might be.
So again, it's just another attestation.
It's attached to the wallet.
And then during the sale or subscription contract,
it just confirms on the verifier.
So again, super simple.
The project doesn't have to do much.
The user, once it's there, can kind of use it for this launch,
use it for the next launch until it expires.
So again, no personal data leaves the
user, nothing sits on servers. And another big thing that people don't take into account is
actually KYC API intermediaries. So I'm sure everyone has used one of those apps where you
spin your face around and you hold your passport up. They're actually quite expensive, especially
at scale. So if you've got a big. They're actually quite expensive, especially at scale.
So if you've got a big launch coming up, that can be a major cost.
So this basically avoids that altogether.
And then you can use that same attestation to gate like future things. So like if you've already had your launch, you might have a future redemption.
You might have secondary trading, LPing for security tokens.
So then you can just reuse that.
So again, cost saving, ease of use. It's a much more kind of
streamlined process, user experience for the user once they've kind of, they're in the system
and they've confirmed things. It's just, you can continue to do that until that attestation expires.
So maybe their password expires on a certain date or whatever it might be. And then if you want kind
of more nuance on top of that, you can blend it with OHS.
So you need both compliance.
So they fulfill the KYC criteria.
They've got all their passports in the right places,
but they've also got a baseline reputation.
Again, all of this still private, still on chain,
and then easy to audit via the expiry timestamp.
So these are kind of limited time things.
As long as it's valid, it's great.
But once it's kind of expired,
you can then look at it again and kind of adjust or change the attestation levels.
So it makes it more difficult
to get involved in a launch, less difficult.
So it means you can kind of,
you can not only confirm
that people are in the right places
and all the kind of legal and compliance stuff is complete, but also that people have a certain
level of reputation.
So if you want to target more high reputation folks, people who have a higher Orange Humanity
score, they're more likely to be active in the future, less likely to dump tokens and
do things that you don't want as a project.
that you don't want as a project that's kind of a great way to do it so you can combine these two
That's kind of a great way to do it.
kind of the reputation side and then the compliance side as well so a couple of benefits there
awesome dave thank you so much um that was a lot to go through i really do appreciate your time
so that i know there are two other use cases, but I think we'll save them for another call.
It was a lot to go through today.
Can I just quickly ask, well, all these use cases,
are they on the Orange blog now or they will be?
Yeah, they will be in the next couple of weeks or so.
Yeah, we're just on one week.
Okay, that's great.
So we're looking forward to this series and there are two others.
So I think this is a complete five-part series, But yeah, I think we will save them for another call. There's a couple of topics that I want to go through with everyone today. So Dave, you took your time, you went through privacy preserving exchange balance proofs for under collateralized DeFi lending. Then we chatted about Dow civil resistance via multi source social ZKTLS proofs and finally compliance all around RWAs
and token launches. It was a lot, I do appreciate your time and I took a lot away from that.
These are really interesting use cases and I'm excited to share the other two with folks. So
as soon as these are live and you're promoting them on X or Twitter or twitter as i i always say um i hope everybody's going to
going to check these out but as i said feel free to reach out and ask any questions about these
dave is there anything you want to wrap up with today uh yeah thanks for thanks for having me on
i really appreciate the time and everyone kind of listening in um i think probably the big thing i
always say is yeah go on mint your rn score, get started on that. There's a couple of campaigns there you can get involved in
that you can get rewards from, stuff like that.
So definitely worth doing.
You can take it with you then once you've minted it.
Awesome, Dave.
Yeah, there's always a campaign happening with Orange,
so make sure that you're going over there
and you're going to Orange and you're getting rewarded.
Dave, feel free to drop off.
I know you've got other calls,
so I do appreciate your time this morning thanks Claire thanks guys great so that that was quite
interesting a lot for Dave to go through I know there was a high level overview but I think the
articles that are being produced are actually a lot more technical and so as Dave said there's
going to be one a week so it's a five-part series. There are two other topics to go through, but I think we'll save them for another call.
There was one other piece of content that I wanted to chat through today.
So last week, Jeff wrote this really insightful piece.
So Jeff will just do a reminder for anybody that listens in.
I can't believe he wouldn't know who he is, but he's our head of Community Ride.
You'll see him everywhere. He's always on our AMAs.
He helps everybody out. But he wrote this really insightful piece on stable coins
so this is on our blog if you go to defi or the did and privacy section in the categories
it's much easier to navigate now since we've changed the site over to wordpress so the topic
is i really love je Jeff's topics or the
titles, but the brutal truth around stable coin adoption, right? Speed is solved and identity
isn't. So I'm going to do a high level overview. I'm not going to do the article justice, but please
do go over and read it because what we're learning from this is that it's like not speed. Obviously
blockchains have already nailed that. The hurdle is trust.
We talk about this all the time.
Dave even just mentioned it there.
So stable coins are everywhere now.
People are using them for like paying freelancers, talking like cross-border shopping.
I mean, that's just to name a couple.
But big names like Stripe and Shopify, I'm sure everybody has seen it.
And some other like major exchanges, for example, are all on board.
So yes, I think rails are fast and cheap, but is there a catch, right?
And this is what Jeff chats about.
It's all around identity.
So why today's setup kind of creaks or makes people maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable
is most stablecoins were never designed with compliance in mind. So merchants can't see who's actually paying them, like apps
keep like bolting on like one KYC provider to another or after another and then users kind of
end up re-verifying our identity which we don't like to do right every time we kind of touch a
new wallet or a bridge and then there's also there's also this issue that there's zero shared standard
for kind of crypto KYC as well across the ecosystem.
So kind of in short, you could argue that we've rebuilt the old Web2 problems, right?
So it's really interesting that we've potentially siloed data, repeated checks,
potentially siloed data, repeated checks, fragile trust layers, and then also just general
headaches that we all thought crypto would ideally solve.
So then there's an interesting section where Jeff kind of discusses what we really need.
And this is where we get into the whole whole all of his elements around verifiable identity so I guess as regulators kind of roll out
different rules right like platforms are we've seen it right they're kind of
scrambling to stay compliant but does compliance kind of mean like... The verify ones, hold the credential yourself,
and then kind of glide between apps without like handing your data
to every new platform.
So this is kind of this, obviously this idea that we talk about all the
time, that self-solving identity is actually an action. So these three must-haves for mass adoption
include, will our users need to prove who they are without exposing everything? Merchants need
to confirm payments without storing private data? And then developers need identity tools that just
work across chains, wallets and dApps.
I mean, it seems to make a lot of sense.
So here's where ontology fits.
And this is kind of some of the key points, right?
So DID-based KYC, the user's control, zero knowledge proof so that you can actually prove
facts without revealing all of your data or any raw data.
We've talked about this before.
Reusable credentials as well.
So you're carrying it for wallet stats on Fiat Ramps, as I said,
and cross-border compliance.
So it's much bigger than just kind of payments.
So the bottom line, I think, overall is that we need to kind of move beyond this competition with traditional rail.
Stable coins must be more than quick.
So the focus of this is to understand the difference or where stablecoins are kind of
dropping off with this level of trust. It's a really great article. I'd recommend everybody
to go and check it out. But as I said, it's in our news section, which is the blog section.
If you go to DID and privacy, you'll find the article right there so yeah it's really
interesting read and I think it's very relevant and just before we wrap up today I just want to
remind everybody about our OntNotStarter package so this is your six loyal NFTs you collect 10 of
them and then swap for 50 ONG and you've also got 50 ONT plus 0.5 ONG for gas. So this is for 40 new ONT ID holders.
So create your ONT ID and this is what you get.
They're selected every single month.
So the idea here is that we are supporting you for every kind of phase of your journey
so that you're able to use all of the Ontology products.
So you can go to any of our communities.
Our Harbingers are there.
They work hard to support any new community members.
Go to Telegram, go to Discord, just make sure that you're introducing yourself and that it's in the Ontology English Telegram channel as well.
Just make sure as well that you're able to find the Harbinger and then they're going to support you.
But obviously then you're going to need to create your OntoID by downloading OntoWallet.
You can fill out a form and then you'll find all of your support
throughout the registration form as well,
which is going to be linked by your Harbinger.
So I really enjoyed chatting today.
It was great to be able to speak a little bit better
and sound like a normal human.
I should hopefully have somebody else joining us for our call next week.
I'm not going to announce who that is just yet.
Every time I announce it, there's always a change.
But shout out to Dave for joining today.
That was really cool.
Some really cool use cases that just kind of make sense.
And again, thanks to Barnabas and the crew for hosting that spaces
and for Jeff for representing Ontology's team there as well.
Some really
interesting insights. It was great to hear from developers from another part of the world,
from Africa. So really, really interesting. We consider ourselves obviously to be, we
are a global team, so it's always great to get insights and learnings from other developers
around the world. If there's anybody else interested in different topics, as I always
say every week, do let me know. I'm always open to changing the structure of these community
calls. This is why I try to change topics and why I try to have different folks on the
call. So you're not just listening to me every week. But I appreciate everybody's time. Shout
out to the Harbingers as usual. And yeah, any questions, don't hesitate to reach out. Enjoy
the weekend.
