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Community Connect
Recorded: Dec. 5, 2025 Duration: 0:29:39Space Recording
Short Summary
Ontology is at the forefront of the decentralized identity revolution, with significant growth projected in the sector, bolstered by the EU's digital identity framework and a robust KYC compliance landscape. The launch of a new node campaign further emphasizes Ontology's commitment to community engagement and innovation.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. so
GM, GM, happy Friday folks.
I don't have as many people on the call this morning, but that's okay.
It's, I mean, it's an early Friday morning, so I can understand.
I'm just going to kick things off.
What I'm going to do this week is something a little bit different,
like I did last week, is kind of go through everything that's,
can kind of link back to ontology.
So we're going to kind of look at everything that we're building, then we're going to zoom out
and look at what's happening around us in terms of identity and reputation, then obviously connect
it back to what we're doing around ontideen reputation. And we did this last week and I did
this the previous week as well, where we created an article and we linked everything from my research into that article.
And I have another article ready to go after this call.
It's a bit more of a deep dive, but longer than the other article.
But again, it focuses on identity, reputation.
And we're also looking at some key events that would be interesting for ontology.
And then we're going to do a quick look back at 2025 to touch on that
and then I will do a much longer call around 2025. So four of the main areas that we're going to look
at is how fast decentralized identity is growing as a market, how digital identity wallets in Europe
are moving from planning to kind of these real deadlines, as we'll put it, right? Also, how regulators and KYC are changing expectations around identity and risk.
This is a huge topic.
We keep going back to this as well.
And then how identity is spreading into everyday devices and apps,
not just Web3 wallets.
So after we talk about that, as I mentioned,
so we're going to be looking at upcoming identity-related events,
potentially why they matter to Ontology. I'll also be sharing that list with the team because
we're doing some planning for 2026. Then we're going to do a quick comparison between today's
topic to the identity article then that we had published recently. And then as I mentioned,
yeah, finish with a short recap of the Web3 landscape in 2025, a teaser for next year and
into a deep dive.
So I see more folks have joined at a good time.
You haven't missed much.
So yeah, at every step then, I will bring back why this is relevant for Ontology,
for OntID, and for reputation as well.
So three main things, decentralized identity with OntID,
portable reputation and credentials that can move across apps and chains and then
privacy preserving verification right so this is so folks can prove things about themselves
when they're handing over all of their information all their data every single time you want to fill
out a form or open an account or do anything right it's very irritating so so whenever you
hear news about identity KYC wallets a reputational web tree i think we always kind of come back to these questions where does it
or decentralized identity fit where do verifiable credentials fit and then like what really is how
does reputation link into this right so how can we make this smarter and safer so if you look at
the big picture so i've been looking at recent markets. There's a couple of really cool analysis that came out recently that puts decentralized entity market at roughly 4.9 billion US dollars in 2025.
So do quote me on that. I think I found a correct resource for that.
But I mean, feel free to let me know if you found something else.
I always love to do a little bit more research.
to do a little bit more research. And then forecasts are heading to more than 41 billion
for 2030. So that's going to be really interesting to see how accurate this data is and to see how
this develops over the next four years. So this obviously means that decentralized identity
isn't a niche anymore. I think that has quickly changed. It's definitely becoming a part, like a really core feature within this
whole like digital infrastructure, right? So at the same time there are well over
1.6 billion blockchain wallets globally. Wallets are increasingly treated as
identity containers so it's not just places where like these keys live and
then also a lot of research in the last year has been talking about decentralized identity and self-sovereign
identity as foundational for users uh control data in a world obviously of like constant data
breaches and ai driven scams so this is going to be really a practical angle i think around
financial inclusion and if you look at traditional credit scoring leaves a lot of people out, like plenty of people have strong digital footprints but then when
you consider that there's a thin or non-existent formal credit histories and
then also others work in like say informal economies or in markets where
banking rails are weak and so the idea around portable verifiable identities and
reputations then become an even more important part of this and really
help to close that gap. So you look towards to prove reliability and activity without this whole
idea around legacy credit, without a legacy credit file, speed up KYC while cutting manual
checks and fraud, and then open up both on-chain and off-chain finance to folks
who maybe would have been previously locked out.
So I think from a sector point of view, this is really interesting to,
if we summarise it into a few things, that identity is turning into infrastructure,
not just feature. Wallets are slowly becoming, well, I mean, I guess it depends on who you ask,
but either are slowly becoming or have become identity hubs.
And then DIDs and verifiable credentials are being treated as tools
for better access to finance as well so these aren't just things that are for crypto natives
that should be easier to access for everybody and then our next topic so if we consider Europe just
a digital identity around wallets and how they're moving beyond or into kind of more this phase of execution.
So European Union, this will be interesting.
So 2.0 regulation, sorry, the EU is rolling out a large scale digital identity framework.
Sorry, I need to slow down, I'm running through everything. I'm rolling my words all together. So digital identity framework, that's being rolled out by the EU. So if you look at this law, yeah, I think it was originally enforced in May 2024. And then the latest guidance has kind of set out this guideline or timeline, I should say. So the claims were that by 2026 every member state
must make at least one EU digital identity wallet available to citizens and to businesses
and then through 2025 there was a bunch of different milestones around features and
all this like technical readiness and due diligence and then by 2030 then I think the
overall goal was to have about 80% of EU citizens actively use some form of digital
identity wallets. So it's interesting to take a look back and to see where the progress has been
made. So the idea here was obviously that we'd have these wallets that weren't just ID cards on
phones. They're supposed to be treated as containers for verifiable credentials as well.
So official material was highlighting like privacy
by design, selective disclosure, so you only share what is needed, and then interoperability across
borders inside the EU. So I mean, they're all just the same. It's just the same outline, but we're
kind of phrasing it in a different way. So this is another angle. So this is the economic angle. So
then if you look at European institutions, we expect these rules and wallets obviously to save. Well, the idea here is that they're going to save billions of euros over time because they want to start cutting paperwork. So if you look at like in at least one large member state, a ministry recently apparently brought together more than 75 companies
in a memorandum, I think of understanding to speed up adoption.
So there was a survey available that showed that there was about
more than 80% of mid-sized and large firms actually expected to use the wallet
once it was live, although there's still a lot of work to be done behind the scenes.
There's a lot more information around deep dive into policy makers and industry.
They're also meeting around the theme of trusted EU digital identity
and the next steps for rolling out these wallets.
So I'd love to hear from any folks that are based in Europe
or that are interested in following this news,
what they've seen maybe in their own countries or if they've seen anything released,
feel free to drop me any links to any articles.
I'd be happy to kind of include these references in any content
or use them as topics for any of the calls going forward.
So I think, yeah, from a sector point of view, if you look at this analysis,
we can kind of come to the conclusion that digital identity wallets are definitely moving from concepts to real deadlines.
Governments are building population scale credential wallets.
And also then if you look at companies are already planning on how to plug these wallets into onboarding and login flows.
And also just to take a second, I will be putting all this information into a quick article that I'll be publishing after the call.
It won't be directly after the call.
It'll be, for me, it'll be early afternoon.
So depending where you are in the world, it'll be the same time
or it'll be early morning for you or into the next day potentially for some folks.
Okay, awesome.
Okay, so we just went into, okay, awesome. Okay, so we just went into...
Okay, perfect. So we wrapped up with the sector point of view.
Okay, great. So what can we include here when it comes to ontology?
So we need to look at our role in Web3 is kind of not just to replace
what we're referencing here around digital identity wallets,
our role is to connect with it.
So if you look at AntID and credential formats
and our reputation systems can kind of all be plugged
into this wallet-based world.
So if you want to support for selective disclosures,
strong privacy guarantees, and then obviously then the ability
to bring proofs from a government wallet into Web3 interactions
without kind of revealing more than what is needed.
So if we could imagine a future, right,
where our national digital identity wallet holds core government-issued credentials,
and then also then you've got your ontology-based identity tools
holding your Web3 credentials and on-chain reputation.
So do those stay separate or do they talk to each other?
Are they very close to each other? If they like, are they very close to each other?
If they do, then I mean, how should that work?
I think they're really interesting questions and definitely things that we're going to have to be answering pretty soon.
And apologies again.
I keep mixing my words together this morning.
I've had a lot of calls this morning, so I think I'm on a bit of a roll.
Okay, great. So topic three, we touched on this last week as well. So you're looking at regulators,
KYC and identity, but let's consider this around risk management. So it's regulation and KYC,
as we said. So if we look at Europe as well, we can see that there's like finance ministries,
they're kind of asking central banks and regulators to carry out like in-depth reviews of what they consider crypto risks.
That should be interesting, especially for retail investors.
So I think the concern that I've seen here, let's just base this on the reports that I've read recently, that crypto connects more tightly with traditional finance.
The potential impact of failures and scams grow.
So at the same time, compliance teams keep repeating a simple message.
Serious exchanges do not avoid KYC, apparently.
And then identity verification is now a standard step before full features are unlocked.
So these are just a few messages that I've seen.
Again, this isn't like really an opinion based piece, but these are just pieces of research that we found.
And then recent figures show that about 92% of centralized exchanges are now fully kyc compliant overall market kyc
rate is close to 80 and then strong kyc is one of the key requirements for a lot of institutional
money uh where it's like tied in like lower fraud so i think if you look at some of the analytics
and compliance tools there's also um they're doing a lot more kind of blockchain data as well.
So if you look at this on the sector view, this really means that regulators care a little bit more about who's participating.
Exchanges and service providers are expected to kind of have strong identity controls and then risk is seen as ongoing.
So again, this links back very tightly to ONTID and verifiable credentials, kind of KYC, as we mentioned,
filling in all these forms where your credentials are being held and how you prove that.
And then obviously on top of that, you build a picture of on-chain behavior over time.
So I think the challenge here we could consider is to design this so that it respects privacy
and user control, but still gives regulators and platforms the reassurance they need.
Okay, and then an additional topic is everyday devices and global apps.
So we had actually touched on this um late last year
and it's a bit early this year um and i was really i was really um looking forward to kind
of going back to that so we wanted to take like a quick step kind of outside of of web3 and go
through a few of these examples that i have so for example like in the wearable space you've got some
smart rings and similar devices that are being pitched as biometric keys.
So we've been seeing that a lot more.
Also wallets and identity tokens.
So the idea is that you can unlock a bunch of different services, prove presence both
online and offline just by wearing the device.
So and then also in the public sector, you have like large countries are launching kind of new digital identity apps that act as compact wallets for national ID systems.
Again, we've just touched on this, but they give users kind of better control over which data fields they share, support multiple profiles on one device and then make digital ID something you use regularly, right? And then also regions like...
Yeah, working on cross-border identity wallet, cooperation and other partner countries
kind of are aligning their laws and EU identity frameworks so that they can just plug
into the wider digital market so definitely we can confirm and agree that
identity is becoming part of things that you already carry and where
governments are turning to identity apps and then regions are kind of stepping
out and coordinating to make identity work across borders. Okay, awesome.
So let's do a quick look ahead at some upcoming identity events
and what this means for ontology.
Please feel free to drop me any links to any events
that you think we should be going to
or any content that you think would be a good reference for us.
So, okay, great. any content that you think would be a good reference for us.
Okay, great.
Yeah, so I'm going to look at identity and security events.
So these are going to be some agendas that I found. So for like major identity security and Web3 conferences
that are all kind of happening next year.
So if you look at, there's a lot of full tracks on identity,
decentralized identity, verifiable credentials and digital wallets and a
lot of them mentioned like EU digital wallet or identity wallets, KYC and AI
driven fraud as core topics as well. So we have like Web3 events put
decentralized identity reputation and civil resistance kind of next to
sessions on DeFi or WA's, L2's and AI agents as well.
So what we're really looking for is the idea that like decentralized identity is no longer obviously going to be any side panels, but obviously going to be a main show.
So security stages alongside zero trust and then also compliance stages alongside AML and sanctions.
And then obviously Web3 stages alongside DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi, and infrastructure.
I think we've already been seeing this develop as well.
So if you look at like show really,
if you're showing real decentralized entity reputation to non-crypto audiences
and with the events that are available, if we can consider what this means.
So first it gives us kind of a chance to show real working decentralized identity and reputation to people who are not kind of living in crypto day to day or don't work
within the space. So if you look at security teams, risk officers, and then obviously enterprise
architects, there's a bunch of similar questions that I came across. So how do they share less
raw data but understand these risks? How do they deal with deepfakes and AI-based scams?
And how do they reuse KYC and KYB safely without repeating itself? Again this circles the whole
way back to ontology where we're talking about OntID, fair file book credentials and reputation.
And then there's this consistent topic that's connecting identity to EU wallets digital policy as we touched as well.
So consider positioning like ONTID and credential tooling as like Web3 ready counterparts that can kind of talk to EU style wallets,
kind of joining more discussions about how on-chain credentials and reputation can complement government backed wallets instead of competing with them,
and then keeping track of how these policies and standards kind of evolve as they stay interoperable as well. So also the final
kind of thought on this is within like helping Web3 teams kind of ship identity like identity
aware products. So Web3 specific kind of conferences that really feature decentralized
identity and reputation are generally full of teams who already know
that they need better civil resistance
and better ways to reward real users.
They often look for simple building blocks,
not just super long research projects.
And this, again, is something that I think
is going to be super important,
that if we're talking about upcoming events and conferences, this is exactly what we're looking for.
We're looking for visibility, for not just visibility or PR.
So if this is a signal that decentralized identity and reputation kind of are now part
of the mainstream security and infrastructure conversation and chance for Ontology to put
all of these real solutions in front of people who are actively looking for them.
So do make sure that if you're coming across any events that you think kind of fit into what I've just gone through,
please do let me know.
We're planning for 2026.
The team is going to be coming together to put all that structure in place,
which I'm very excited to do.
No, I understand that I've gone through things quite quickly this morning.
I do apologize for how fast I speak at times, but I will be putting
an article together that's much more of a deep dive into this, kind of our thinking for events
next year, having a quick look back at 2025 in general, also touching on topics that I found to
be trending in the past week, and the ability to kind of circle all those back to ontology as well.
I just wanted to take a second to kind of do a quick comparison between
last week's article and then what we've just gone through together. So I'm going to do a full recap
as I promised last week. So I think it's really useful to look at like today's brief conversation
and then to the identity piece that we shared on the blog. So I think it looks at more of like a
general or evergreen view of Web3 identity.
We did focus on the big, big themes, right?
So you got regulators moving towards reusable privacy, preserving identity, social platforms and wallets using DIDs to kind of fight bots. reputation in DeFi and GameFi and then growing enterprise appetite for decentralized identity
across sectors like supply chain, education and healthcare. I wanted to try to focus on something
a little bit different rather than repeating those narratives. We wanted to look at some data
around showing decentralized identity as a multi-billion dollar market and also wanted to
talk about some of these timelines that have been released from the EU
around digital identity wallets and then this goal that they have having 80% usage by 2030
then also to look a little bit more granular at the regulation around KYC in practice
and then also spreading identity into everyday devices. So if you can think of the difference
like this so the earlier piece,
we kind of set out to do a big kind of longer term story
of why identity and reputation matters,
whereas today we looked at kind of the more immediate signals
and kind of market data.
So obviously this has all been good news for Ontology
as it links back to everything that we've been building
for the last eight years.
And then the world kind of, I think, around us
is moving in the same way.
So you're seeing a bigger development in these budgets and dedication towards essentialised identity,
real regulations and also real products. So that is super exciting.
And then just as a quick teaser into what I'll be working on for our next chat or next connect is like this idea of 2025 web3 landscape recap
and then yeah it'll be kind of our full end of year session so I wanted to see how everything
has been developing if we look at like from in infrastructure up I'll be looking at L2s modular
stacks and deep in so L2 layers on Ethereum, for example, and other chains have
become essential for scaling. There's a strong move towards modular blockchains that split
execution, data availability and consensus. We'll take a quick look at the Bitcoin ecosystem,
how that's expanded, ordinals and L2s bringing together kind of programmable activity and the
D-PIN. So which means obviously decentralized physical infrastructure networks have turned into
kind of this serious vertical with large value and hundreds of projects kind of contributing
compute. So this has been such a big topic for 2025. For ontology it obviously means kind of
more modular multi-chain world that really needs
identity. And then we're going to look at like how DeFi has grown like RWA stable coins and what
institutional money means. So it's really been, I think DeFi has really been maturing in 2025.
We're going to take a quick look at tokenized real world assets like treasuries, real estates,
quick look at tokenized real world assets like treasuries real estates uh jump into uh rwa's
real world assets tokenization kind of treating these as like pillars of um future financial
systems right and then also stable coins what this means to regulation that they're front and center
um have there been any updates around jurisdictions uh around stablecoin rules as well, linking this back to ontology as well.
And then AI and Web3 convergence.
Let's talk about agents.
Let's talk about more data.
Data is something that I think is really important.
We always try to have this data-led approach in ontology.
So it's interesting to see this on a much broader scale.
So another big theme, obviously, is the collision between AI and Web3. Everybody's talking about it so let's
take a look back at how that's developed in 2025 and how we can link
kind of AI linked crypto assets are tracked as their own narrative. And then
obviously last but not least I'll just do quickly, I'll quickly touch on these
social gaming creator economies as well there's been huge developments
across NFTs regulation and geography from kind of uncertainty into super clear rules as well
so we're going to understand where Ontology was plugged in how we could be plugged in and where
we're going to be going in priorities for 2026. If there's any specific topics that you want me to
cover in this DeFi or in this deep dive,
it's going to be DeFi. We're going to touch on RWA's gaming, social fight, AI agents and
reputation. So do let me know. And also feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions in
particular about anything that we've touched on today. It was quite a lot, actually. I didn't
even have time to get through everything, but I'm going to wrap everything up into an article
and I'll share with you guys probably later today.
But just consider kind of the idea around the growth of decentralized identity as a market, European digital identity wallets, loads more about KYC and everything that's linking back to Ontology as well.
And before we wrap up today, it's been our eighth anniversary, which has been really interesting to look back on the year and how it's developed but don't forget that the ontology node
campaign is live so create a node during around 266 and get your operation fees
waived so this 266 is from November 2024 to December 12th to 13th. Price pool is 250,000 ONG.
Top five nodes ranked by total stake.
So we'll have their setup fees reimbursed after the round ends.
So this is pinned on our X profile.
So please do feel free to get involved.
We also have our Gaming Friday kicking off as we do every Friday.
Also, if you're looking to kind of get a good recap on what's happened in the last week
and with the anniversary,
do check out the anniversary space
that was hosted by Humpty and Jeff.
They did a bit of a deep dive
into everything that's been happening
with ontology, with the ecosystem as well.
That's also on the page.
So it's really interesting.
Listen, I think Jeff and Humpty
are always quite quite nice
to listen to as well and then if there's any topics you think we should be including or we
should be looking at for 2025 or 2026 please do let me know finally don't forget that we actually
joined the Circle Alliance program so this is really cool so this is like a global community of teams all kind of having this one goal of like more kind of linked on chain world powered by USDC.
So do go check that out.
There's an article that's also linked on our X page as well.
Also, do make sure that you're connecting with us across every other platform that we're active on with a lot of interesting content go out over the weekend.
I published a letter that was written by LJ. It was really interesting. platform that we're active on with a lot of interesting content go out over the weekend.
I published a letter that was written by LJ. It was really interesting. It was really great to see his take on how everything has developed in ontology, to see his opinion there and to get
his input. So that's a letter from a founder, which is the main piece on our blog. It was also
put out on Reddit, LinkedIn and Medium over the weekend. So please feel free to drop us any of your comments,
reach out to me directly.
I'm always happy to chat.
This was a pretty, I think I went quite quick this week,
but I will be doing a recap in an article.
And yeah, as I always say,
if there's any topics you want me to talk about on these calls,
do let me know if anybody would like to join.
Do let me know.
I mean, I have a pretty well-structured call for folks if anybody would like to join. Do let me know. I mean, I have a pretty
well-structured call for folks that are ever nervous to join. I always send questions before
you join and I don't ever really move out from them. So you can be very well prepared.
But I'll be here next week and we'll go into that deep dive around Web3 for 2025
and I'll keep everybody updated as things develop from our side but we do have some more interesting and I'd some announcements coming it's a
busy time at ontology so make sure you're staying connected happy Friday
again I hope everybody enjoys the weekend
