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Is the next level of security in Blockchain to remove smart contracts?
Recorded: April 3, 2025 Duration: 0:18:51Space Recording
Short Summary
Concordium is a new blockchain project that integrates identity verification directly into its protocol, offering a unique approach to accountability and privacy. The project emphasizes cryptographic verification and legal procedures for identity disclosure, highlighting its technical and legal framework. Concordium's potential for growth is evident in its plans to expand identity layer functionalities, aligning with trends in blockchain governance and ethics.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Can you hear me? I can't hear your response.
Can you hear me?
Huh?
Okay, well, why don't you do that so that we can tell?
Okay, so...
Okay, so...
Okay, well why don't you do that so that we can tell.
Okay, so.
Hello? Hello? Thank you. I host I only get static from you Thank you. So what's happening?
Well, I can't hear anything either.
Okay.
And your speaker is on.
Oh, there I hear somebody.
There you go.
Hiya.
Can you hear me?
I can.
It sounds like we might actually do this. We might be able to pull this off.
Yeah.
It's a lot of click, click, click, click to get through, but I think we got there.
Yeah, I'll hear you now.
How are you guys doing? I can't complain too much.
We're having flash floods here, so that's exciting.
Oh, wow.
You guys all right?
Oh, yeah.
No, we're fine.
We got the high ground, so we're not worried.
Okay.
Okay. we're fine we got the high ground so we're not worried okay okay the Stephanie
is still trying to make her stuff work Gracias. Thank you. E aí Okay. Peter, can you hear me?
Yeah, I got you.
Excellent. Okay. Well, let's start. Let me introduce our speaker. This is, I'm going to probably butcher your name here. Mario Sanz. Is that close?
Close enough. Mario Sanz is good enough. working on an interesting project called Concordium.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and about the project?
Yeah. My name is Peter Marosden.
I'm the CEO of Concordium.
My background is well, IT and computing ever since I was six.
I grabbed a magazine and copied about a thousand lines of code
out of there into my father's rubber key spectrum so that gives my age away a little bit
it took me about an hour to copy the code and about four hours to find the comma that stopped
everything working uh i thought that was fascinating and i never really looked back
everything working uh i thought that was fascinating and i never really looked back
past a few years i've kind of done everything you can think of in in the technology space
um i ran my own company for about 25 years looking after the the networking needs of
small businesses and then i joined total gas and power uh for 15 years and i did um kind of every
role you can think of in the it department
and worked up my way in the corporate ladder all the way up to running the center of excellence
for europe where we did all the development work for the european subsidiaries left the corporate
world because once you get that high it kind of stops about being about the job and more about
the corporate politics um and this is now i think think, my fifth startup where I join, I kind of build a
team up, get the product out, build the MVP, launch it, get it to a successful place, and then move on
to the next one. And now I'm here at Concordium. I'm very excited about the project. Okay. Wow.
That's a pretty impressive career. Sounds like you're both obsessive and easily bored.
Pretty impressive career.
Sounds like you're both obsessive and easily bored.
It all depends on the project, to be honest.
I'm not one to give up, that's for sure.
But I'm also one to kind of keep pushing forward.
Okay, well, great.
Well, tell us about the project then.
Yes, so look, Concordium, one of the reasons why it kind of attracted me very much is they're doing something very different amongst all the other chains.
And the key thing being the fact that we've got identity kind of based into the protocol itself.
Right. And we will go into more detail if you like a bit later on.
But what it allows you to do is not so much Big Brother watching where, you know, we can see what you specifically are doing, but
it's more about accountability, right? So the way it works is in order for you to create an account
on the chain, you have to go through an IDP that's associated with the chain. And that's just your
normal kind of take a photo of your identity document, send it to them, then do the selfie.
They verify that you are indeed the person in that document
what they then do is they take the information that's like in your passport or driving license
they sign it with their keys and they send it back to you and that information is now held
in your device whether that's in your mobile or your browser wherever it may be at that point you
have all the information you need
to be able to then create an account on the Concordium chain.
But what that means is not that your information
is on the chain itself,
so your details aren't held anywhere else
apart from your device.
But what is on the chain is all the cryptography
that verifies that information hasn't been doctored.
It is indeed what the IDP sent.
And there's commitments,
pitiful commitments on the chain that allow you to then do zero-knowledge proofs
against your identity that's held in your wallet, basically.
From that point onwards, it's like any other chain.
You have addresses, transactions happen between addresses.
You can create more accounts based on your identity.
Nobody really knows those identities are,
those accounts are linked with the same identity.
But there is a identity disclosure process.
So should you misbehave,
should there be a legal reason where the authorities want to kind of say,
who is this person who is potentially doing something that they shouldn't be?
You can approach a Swiss court, get a warrant,
take it to the lawyers that we have on the chain.
They have a special key that allows them to kind of open up the commitments which are on the chain.
Now, when they look inside, all they see is a unique identifier of an ID.
They still don't know it's you. That has to be then taken to the identity provider,
then is that the point where your information is revealed?
So it's more for accountability than anything else.
There is a process where you can be known,
but it's not there for everybody to know or big brother
watching as to what you're doing.
Does that make sense?
It does.
It does. The root of trust is this, is this a real world identity provider. And they're there, I suppose they are
somehow certified or endorsed by who, by governments, by what is, what is their,
I mean, this is their bread and butter, right? It's the same thing as when you go to a bank and
you say, I'd like to open up a bank account, they'll do KYC on you.
Or if you go to an exchange, they'll do KYC on you.
These are all the providers that are out there at the moment that follow this process
of taking your documents,
making sure it's an actual document,
not like a fake document,
then take a selfie of yourself and kind of verify the information is on there
no understood but there that's a fairly high trust uh high stakes um activity so so you would i would
imagine that you know the u.s government might not want to trust one in who knows russia or england
because they're they're under different so you you'd have to know that, that they're somehow endorsed and
certified in whatever jurisdiction you're working in.
Correct. So at the end of the day, we are a distributed chain
as well. And we know, we know, we're not kind of trying to
dictate everything either. So there is the possibility of
bringing different IDPs onto the chain and it is also uh kind of available
for you to find out which idp has brought you onto the chain so again if you don't want to interact
with someone whose idp you don't trust you have the ability to kind of say i'm not going to
interact with you that that's not someone that i verify right but but for compliance i would have
to for example if i was wanting to look for investors i would have to for compliance, I would have to, for example, if I was wanting to look for investors, I would have to, for compliance, make sure that the endorser of, say, sophisticated investor status was somebody that the U.S. government.
That you trusted. Sure.
I don't care. Who does the government allow me to trust or allow me to accept certs from?
Well, I guess it depends on what you're doing and who you're interacting with more than anything else, right?
So if the company that you're interacting with has a certain level of requirements, then yes, that company would kind of say, look, I need to make sure that you're being verified with somebody that I hold at that level.
hold at that level. Right. So, so, so it's, that's not,
Right.
doesn't take special effort to find out who it was that gave the endorsement.
That's part of it. No, you can see who's,
who's done the endorsement on that account. I see. Okay. Very good. And,
and also I just like to make trouble. I'm sorry.
That's okay.
I like to see where the flaws might be. I had also imagined that,
uh, maybe there's much more uniformity than I'm, I realized, but, um, uh,
it, it,
it would seem like you might have different degrees of,
of, uh, certification and what kind, you know, for example, it might be that in some jurisdiction, you
were forced to submit income tax returns to show your financial status.
In other words, others, you make a declaration or have a bank letter.
So how do you know?
So this isn't a kind of silver bullet to solve all problems.
This is kind of phase one and the beginning of of trying to create that
link between an individual identity and and kind of the ability to be able to be held accountable
as to kind of who you are um if we strike going down all the use cases where for example i don't
know in order to do something you need to shoot show two proofs of address and and then you know
a valid license for example as opposed to an invalid license and things like that.
Yes, the use cases can grow and the chain can grow
and we can make changes to the identity layer
to add the additional functionality that we need.
Right now, it's a simple case of just making sure
that we can kind of say your behavior,
you need to be accountable for
because there's a way of somebody finding out who you are.
Okay, all right.
So accountability, I guess there's at least two kinds of accountability.
There's the legal accountability where I take you to court and hopefully you're in my jurisdiction
and it makes it possible. Even if you've got a verification and the Swiss court allows me to
see who you are, if you're in Iran, it doesn't do me a lot of good.
Correct, but that's assuming that I can onboard you with my IDP
with your Iranian passport.
Right, but I mean, there may be jurisdictions in which it may be impractical.
Like suing the U.S. is very expensive, and other countries are...
Anyway, but there's that level of accountability,
and then there's also a chain level of accountability. So you might find that if somebody has behaved in a way, I guess you'd have
to say, what constitutes bad behavior on a chain? Correct. In a sense, there shouldn't be bad
behavior because anything that's permissible, that's possible on a chain should be within
protocol. So how would you behave badly within a chain? Well, I guess that's permissible that's possible on a chain should be within protocol so how would you
behave badly within a chip with on it well on a chain well i guess that's that's up to someone
to do a bad behavior i mean what's your definition of bad behavior well i mean you're looking for
protocol level punishments um then you have to define bad behavior at the protocol level if
you're saying on the other hand that i I don't think you behaved ethically,
I'll just not deal with you anymore, of course.
And that's more of a, you know,
a person to person kind of punishment.
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, look, I'm assuming when you're talking
about kind of behaving badly on the chain,
it's kind of, you know, trying to manipulate a block
or trying to kind of run over the consensus
or challenge it or something along those lines.
Is that- Well, so no, well, I i guess i guess there's maybe more levels than two um challenging cons Thank you.
