Data Ownership Protocol is proud to announce a brand-new collaboration with zkMe, which offers fully decentralized Know Your Customer solutions.

 

DOP is the home of selective transparency — giving all of our users full control over the information that’s publicly available about their crypto balances and transaction histories.

 

We’re doing this while ensuring compliance needs are still met, and zkMe’s technology plays a starring role in making this happen.

 

Using zero-knowledge proofs, zkMe verifies user credentials while ensuring that their information isn’t disclosed to anyone.

 

Personal data is processed on their own devices or through a decentralized oracle network — meaning it never comes into contact with regulators, third parties or zkMe itself. This eliminates the use of centralized servers that can be prone to devastating data breaches.

 

There’s encouraging synergy between both of our projects. Just like we champion selective transparency, zkMe prioritizes selective disclosure by ensuring that precise details pertaining to someone’s identity remain protected at all times. Let’s imagine that you need to prove you are over 18 to buy age-restricted products. In the Web2 world, this would involve submitting identification that reveals your date of birth. But through this cutting-edge infrastructure, the counterparty requesting verification would simply be told that you were over 18. 

 

zkMe also transforms how data is shared. If a user wants to stop a company from having access to their data, permission can be revoked at the tap of a button. This is a refreshing contrast to the status quo, where consumers need to email firms to request data is deleted.

 

At the beating heart of the verification process are decentralized identity oracles powered by a network of node operators. zkMe says that its approach is fully compliant with recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — as well as anti-money laundering regulations put forward by the US and EU. KYC documentation can only be decrypted if a government initiates “bad actor” proceedings, in what zkMe describes as being “verifiably anonymous until proven guilty.” 

 

Looking under the hood, zkMe says that all of the algorithms powering its ecosystem are open source and audited regularly, enabling additional use cases to continually emerge.

 

Decentralized identities are a vital piece of the puzzle in our quest to tackle the “all-or-nothing” approach to privacy that’s currently holding blockchains back from achieving their full potential. Our collaboration means that DOP users joining our mainnet can successfully complete KYC, safe in the knowledge that details about their identity will remain confidential. From here, they’ll be able to use our powerful infrastructure to encrypt and decrypt their assets in a tap of a button — and send them to others.

 

This is hot on the heels of an exciting collaboration with Chainalysis, who will be checking transactions making their way into the DOP ecosystem to ensure funds aren’t from tainted sources — creating a safe environment for users.

For more information, read our Medium Article.

Stay tuned to our socials — and join our Telegram group — for further updates as we prepare to launch our mainnet. There’s a lot to be excited about.