Three Protocol builds decentralized identity for crypto payments

0:01I'm ashon Addison from the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have with us Grant Robertson co-founder of three protocol Grant welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time hey thank you very much for having me I really appreciate being here today looking forward to it likewise I'm excited to dive into a bunch of different topics in web 3

0:21including some important ones that I feel like are going to be ever more important as the years move on and as people get further ingrained into blockchain and it gets ingrained into society like decentralized identity figuring out you know what is your identity online and how does that also ingrain into the blockchain and many other products that through protocol

0:43is working on you guys have your hand in a lot of fires which is very cool so I'm excited to dive into all of that I would love to start off with sort of a high level overview on how you would explain what you and your team are working on at three protocol then we can dive into everything yeah absolutely that makes that makes sense so we will I'll start from the very top so

1:04what's three protocol what are we doing so we are building a series of fraud resistant cryptocurrency based e-commerce tools that with the aim of making cryptocurrency a global form of payment method how are we going to achieve that it's quite a lofty ambition well we're doing that through using Three core pillars of Technology the first are a series of decentralized IDs

1:28Digital IDs that we call Z DKI 3s now this is a way for users to be able to build an onchain reputation without the need for typical biometric kyc so they don't need driver's licenses they don't need passports they don't need bank accounts but they can still build an onchain reputation that's one of our elements and we're really excited to sort of roll

1:50that out in lots of different use cases across the space and even outside and Beyond interweb too the second pillar of technology is our TR proof smart contract and that's going to allow people to oh that's what's going to facilitate the transactions across each of our marketplaces and also Beyond those when it's integrated into our payment Gateway which we've called 3ay

2:12and I'm sure we'll dig into more about the triproof smart contracts later but essentially they are there to help people avoid fraudulent activities and then we've also built a neuron Network AI from the ground up which is going to allow people to move away from those like clunky keyword searches of the past where you put in keywords and you hope that you get match to the products or

2:34people that you're looking for instead people going to be able to use sort of prompt-based AI searching write an expansive search be delivered quality efficient results with justification for those results as well we're rolling all of that technology into our first decentralized Marketplace that we're launching which is called jobs 3 jobs 3 is think of it like a decentralized

2:58version of upwork or fivr that's the element of it that we've started our focus on before we expand into sort of more permanent employer employee based roles you'll be able to use all of the technology on that and then beyond when we see three pay integrated across the digital Commerce sector that's the high level that's that's a great overview Grant and I love

3:22that you've broken it down into these sections it's a it's a wonderful Vision to say hey we're going to implement cryptocurrency payments into e-commerce but there's so many different facets to making that successful and making sure that you cover all the pitfalls of it's sort of like when when you know credit cards came out and people were afraid to use them on the Internet

3:45how can we make these fail safes so that now everyone in the world is using it and I feel like that will be the same for cryptocurrency but we need to Target these specific areas into each of them the identity part specific speically you mentioned there about with the decentralized identities not actually having to do driver's license or traditional IDs that's interesting

4:09and I feel like people don't fly understand what is an identity on chain or on the internet if I'm not using my driver's license then what am I using so maybe you could explain that decentralized identity part a little bit further yeah of course so if you take your your private key this is like your identity online this is what people can use to transact review it's what you

4:30can use to make purchases it's where you can sort of you can link it to wallets to be able to hold funds and so on what we're doing is we're going to take in a simplified way we're going to take a hash of a hash of that private key which then becomes like a public key a public facing key then you can choose what you want what information is linked

4:50to that you want to share so you don't have to share all of your transactional information because that's one of the things about using an on train reputation people say well the nature of the blockchain if I'm sharing my actual private key as my identity everyone can see every transaction that I've got they can see everything I'm earning they can see everything I'm

5:11spending and that's that's not particularly great from a privacy point of view so we're using zero knowledge proofs to allow people to prove who they say they are and any documentation that they want to prove and any elements they want to prove without having to excuse me reveal that information so z3s have so many different use cases our first sort of MVP version of it is

5:37going to be linked to jobs 3 and that's going to allow people to build that onchain reputation from a work point of view so let's say that they are a freelancer and they begin to build up a reputation where they've completed one web build two web builds three and they've got good reviews and so on then people will be able to leave onchain reviews and it will build their

5:59reputation that's amazing I think when people first saw decentralized identities and it wasn't to do with their traditional driver's license passport they think okay it's my transaction history but I feel like there's a lot of flaws in that because yeah you can essentially see into somebody's bank account and how much money they currently have you

6:24know and all the transactions that they've ever made so I feel like this is the next step logical logical step of sort of having that LinkedIn resume so to say but there's a proof from the person that you did the work is that sort of the goal that's exactly it I mean no one turns up to a job interview and says here's my bank account would you like to see why I've spent all my

6:45money on for the last however long like instead like and that would be what we had to do if we were giving over sort of our identity on the blockchain in that way so using that zero knowledge proof means that we can still prove that we have have these things that we have these accreditations that it is that we are who we say we are but we don't we don't actually have to

7:08show that information and now for the millions of people that are looking to get jobs or sort of build this how is three protocol building in a way that doesn't require them to get a degree in blockchain just to start putting their job credentials and history on the Chain yeah there's a really good idea really good question s one of the main things that we're

7:34looking to do with three protocol is facilitate that on boarding so education is a major part of what we're looking to do it will it will take some time and it will take some the right resources so we're going to be building up a bank of video resources building up a bank of FAQs helping people in the community too on board but also it comes down to

7:55making that UI making the ux incredibly straightforward so I don't about you when I came into web 3 it was overwhelming to say the least like how do I set up a wallet how do I even send any crypto from one place to another what do I do and we're looking to reduce that barrier to entry so it'll be through a straightforward UI straightforward ux be that through one

8:19of our decentralized marketplaces like jobs 3 or be it through a standalone sort of app based style software down the line a bit but let's say you build a profile on jobs 3 it will be linked to your zko 3 and naturally it will build up your the reviews of work you've done the amount of work you've carried out the hours you've worked the amount of money you've even earned if you want

8:42to use that as a metric however you however you see F that's really cool and I know there's just a growing number of people that are using these freelancing sites to get work and you know it has the some reviews on there but you know they're sort of like like Amazon reviews it's it's hard to tell how how biased or unbiased it really is so with the

9:06jobs 3 Marketplace that three protocol is built what's the stage of that right now are people able to go there and start looking for work yeah so we have been in beta for the last sort of month or so and we're actually about to publicly launch within the next sort of week to two weeks so people can already go there and build profiles now so you can get ahead of the game

9:29if you want to is straightforward you can do that as a client or as a freelancer so you can begin to build up your reputation sorry begin to build up your portfolio your profile have everything in place so that as more users are on boarded you're in a you're in a great position so watch this space for sort of our user acquisition marketing push because there's going

9:50to be a referral scheme as well where anyone who is referred by you will earn 10% of any fees that they pay through your platform going forward for life so if you're someone who's connected to a lot of Freelancers it's a no-brainer to sort of bring them across to jobs free and let them find sort of the future of work there that's very cool I'm looking forward to the

10:12launch of that I'm going to check it out and now I want to dive into sort of the next stage or the next portion of the zki 3s and of the job platform for example say you have a portfolio up there now you actually want to get a job and you want to facilitate the payment between the people and you want to use cryptocurrency now how how is three

10:33protocol managing the e-commerce part of it yeah so this is where the triproof smart contract comes into play so every transaction through jobs free or through anywhere that has three pay integrated will go through our Tri proof smart contract system so most lots of people understand how smart contracts work it's between two parties we've added in a third party which is

10:58essentially our dispute regulator so let's say you would like a new logo from me you come to me on jobs free you see that I'm offering a new logo for let's say $50 and you it's cheap and you decide to hire me we look at the amount that of the contract and you essentially would put that into an

11:25escrow alongside a small dispute fee if everything goes well your your payment is released to me and the dispute fees paid by myself and paid by you are distributed back to each other normal transaction everything goes well the reason why we have this in place is because in when you're paying for something in crypto and it's a private transaction it's a bit of a who

11:51blinks first who shoots first in that jeel do I send you the assets and then you might disappear and never be seen again because it's an anonymous world or do you send the crypto to me in hope that I then send the assets to you it makes it incredibly difficult and we're relying on trust in a completely Anonymous World which is not that easy to come by and so the TR proof

12:15acts as a way of facilitating that transaction so people can easily transact now if there wasn't issue let's say the logo I sent you wasn't quite up to standard or I just didn't send it at all then you could just raise a dispute and that would go to our decentralized AI organization this is our upgrade of a dow and they would look at evidence that's submitted they would look at any

12:43problems that you might be having and arbitrate on that based on the evidence so if you could clearly prove that I hadn't sent you anything then it would be easy and the money would be refunded to you it's very interesting because it there's a balance between obviously you need to have some kind of escrow especially with cryptocurrency payments that can't be refunded but at the same

13:07time you want to enforce as much as you can some level of decentralization and not centralized ownership so this three-way smart contract I feel like that's a great it's a great fix for it I would love to see how it actually plays out over the years and I'm I'm guessing I'm hoping that the amount of disputes versus legitimate transactions would be you know in the 1%

13:32or less but it does need to be there in case something happens so when something does happen you have like a dow of sorts of real people that are in a sort of flat level organization that sort of help resolve the issue between the two people is that how it works yeah absolutely so the way that the Dow works is that we're actually basing it on our token holders so anyone

13:59who holds 0.2% of our total spy or Beyond essentially he gets access to have a seat on the doubt now dealing with disputes might not be everyone's cup of tea it might not be something that they unnecessarily want to do and so we incentivized that by they will earn a percentage of the dispute fee that's paid to sort of encourage them to participate in it so that 0.2% that's

14:26under consideration at the moment we may we may change that based on you know number of holders market cap depending on various elements like that so yeah keep that under review but those would be people who would be looking at it judging it and then working together from there the concept of Dow is growing in so many different web three

14:50startups hopefully a little bit in traditional startups and bigger companies as well eventually we'll integrate it but this is the first time I've actually heard of a decentral ized AI organization or like a DI what are is there any other functionality besides this dispute in that the Dow helps manage I'm I'm I'm interested yeah so the AI element of it

15:14is because we have to be able to work at scale if we're genuinely going to be offering three pay on a sort of global level with I mean we're talking thousands hundreds of thousands of transactions potentially per day by the time we reach if not more so the number of disputes while small hopefully are will still exist and they need to be dealt with and so the AI

15:36element to it is going to ensure that the system can't be gained so that people aren't ensure aren't sort of joining on the da and then judging in a particular way so the AI will look at the way that they have judged their past ones compare that to other members of the Dow see if there are any anomalies see if people are going against a grain as such and then it will it will flag

16:00anyone in particular that we might need to investigate we might need to look at and just ensure that we're working at maximum efficiency because that's that's how it has to be able to scale and now with the actual e-commerce platform that you mentioned 3 Bay you know the play on eBay which is cool is that just for products or is that for services is that different than you know

16:25the job service level job where I'm paying you for a job this is actually products and services yeah so 3B is n name is UN under under review because we know how touchy sort of some companies can be about their IP but yeah essentially it's it's an rwa Marketplace so people will be able to purchase products from each other real world assets from each other using 3 Bay

16:53what they it will be separate to Services as you said so we're expecting people to use jobs three for their services use jobs three for employment and so on and then three Bay will be will be separate it will be based on real world assets do you think that moving into both of these different categories at the same time is overly ambitious you

17:19know there it's a lot to manage when it's like there's a lot to do with service platforms already then you're throwing in products as well it's it's certainly ambitious I wouldn't go so far as say it was overly ambitious the reason being is that yes the platforms will look very different from a uiux perspective but once we have the technology required in

17:41place for jobs 3 we have the zki 3 is integrated we have the tri proof integrated the neuron Network AI is there that's the volume that's the majority of the actual blockchain technology which is already in place we can then build on future Platforms in front of yes I agree with you they will require their own dedicated teams they'll need people in customer service they'll need

18:06people who are managing the operations of each individual platform but it just feels like too too big an opportunity to be missed so yes I agree with you it's ambitious and we want to absolutely get jobs fre right and we want to ensure that platform is exactly where we want it to be we want it to be Del ing for users we want it to be a seamless experience much like they

18:32might have on other platforms arguably we would like it to be a lot better because platforms like Fiverr and upwork I've had bad experiences on there in the past locking up funds for no apparent reason not Distributing it that's not even possible thanks to the tri proof smart contract system because everything is held on chain we're not custodians of

18:53any funds at all so it means that it's far more transparent and far more secure mhm I'm looking forward to the jobs to relaunch especially now I'm curious on the payments or on the crypto side as a crypto nerd I'd love to know more about the underlying technology there I guess there's two parts you know if you're building the online identity or the service level

19:19Accreditations is there certain blockchain that's being used or certain coins that need to be used and then we can dive into the actual payment of the services after yeah of course so at the moment jobs 3 is going to be so we are on salana base at the moment that's our smart contract is on salana written in Rust and the transacting currency at the moment is

19:46usdc now our first move is going to be to integrate our own token which is three and if users transact using three then they will receive a 10% discount on any fees that they play pay on the platform and then we're looking at migrating our token to other chains as well we're we're looking at at the moment we're an erc20 token but we're looking

20:10at potentially migrating to the likes of salana and so on but we're we're not quite ready to reveal more information on that yet but that's that's where we're at the moment so users of jobs 3 will require a soul based wallet the reason why we did that was for the absolutely minimum gas fees associated with transactions and because there are a large number of users who have

20:36access to those wallets at the moment they're relatively easy to set up and that's part of our onboarding system as well is that we'll look to help users who haven't got soul based wallets understand how to get them and how to create them definitely I think that's a good approach I've spoken to the salana team the payments salana team I know they've integrated usdc in into Shopify

21:00to allow you know millions of stores to start using it I feel like the adoption still could be more but I feel like that's the right approach in having that base and getting people onboarded in there and now for people that they see the benefits of transacting and obviously you're going to save intermediary costs and it's faster to pay with usdc on Salon or any crypto but

21:25they're really not familiar with crypto is there do they have to get the stable coins elsewhere or can there be other fat on-ramps if you want to pay somebody how can you get more new entrance in that aren't really in crypto yeah great question so we're we're also looking at integrating a wallet based platform of our of our own which allow people to be able to

21:50transact in the currency of their choice one of the reasons why I say that is because three one of the beauties of three pay is we're working with on ramp and off rampers so that anyone who has 3ay integrated into their merchant services and as a payment Gateway they're going to be able to facilitate payments and receive payments in the trans in the currency of their

22:14choice so they might have a customer who is paying in Fiat and they choose to receive a cryptocurrency they may choose to allow customers to pay in cryptocurrency and they receive Fiat that's the that's the whole purpose of it so we're enabling crypto to be able to be that Global form of payment but people who still want to receive or pay in Fiat are able to do so but transact

22:41using our payment Gateway that's very cool well I feel like this is the freelancer's dream and just payments dream overall of being able to get a job in a decentralized Marketplace get paid in crypto and then get your the accreditation for it on the blockchain so I'm looking forward to seeing how it all plays out and get involved early on in terms of people that are

23:06actually interested and getting involved right away are the first steps in sort of going to jobs 3 and creating a profile and learning more about the decentralized identity yeah so I would say one of one of the first ways to do it would be to come and be part of the three protocol community so we have a large telegram Community also or we share all

23:30of our news and updates on X so three protocol being the overarching main entity that's our that's our primary project jobs 3 is the first of the decentralized marketplaces but yes after you part of the community and you've learn a little bit more from our incredible mod team or from myself or any of the others of my team who are there then it's it would be time to go

23:52over to jobs 3 build a profile see what you think even if you're not considering yourself a freelancer it's worth going and building a profile and just seeing seeing how it works seeing what it looks like the other way of course to purchase some three and be part of that sort of community on that side as well mhm definitely well there

24:17there's so many parts to this that to make a working machine all the different cogs is there any info you can give about sort of the road map or the time line and what are the priorities and you know what you have hoped to achieve by let's just say the end of this year yeah of course so we're actually updating version two releasing version two of our road map in

24:41the near future so we've come to the realization and we realize that we want jobs 3 to be absolutely perfect and we want it to be an incredible user experience and so we're delivering that as we speak the release of that public version should be within a couple of weeks and then it will be a work in progress to sort of add additional features to it as we go

25:04forward we are aiming to release version one of three pay and begin to look at Integrations into other blockchains by the end of this year and then early next year will be when we will look at building off our future marketplaces so the likes of three Bay that we mentioned earlier and the other ones that we have which will be like our Flagship Flagship products to show

25:29people just what we can do with the technology that's great well I'm I'm wishing you and your team all the best Grant and hoping that we can build this utopian marketplace where everyone uses cryptocurrency and it's decentralized and smart contracts resolve any disputes that come up it sounds really cool and I'm looking forward to seeing jobs 3 grow and the

25:54rest of the protocol as well I can leave a link to three protocol the T the X as you mentioned any other information about jobs 3 and the updates when the road map comes out as well can leave all of that in the show notes and would love to have you guys back on in the next quarter or whenever there's a major update to three protocol so we can continue the

26:16discussion that would be amazing I'd love it thank you so much for the for the discussion today it's been great and yeah for anyone who's who's watching recently we are we're actually dropping some some new information only today which is the 2nd of September so yeah it' be great to great to see some some new community members coming and saying hi after

26:39watching us on the Crypto Coin Show awesome thank you so much Grant thank you