Concordium's verifiable offchain Identity to disrupt regulatory Compliance?

[ataraxiaceleste]

Concordium plans to introduce an innovative identity layer that allows users to create a verifiable identity off-chain to facilitate compliance with relevant regulations, while also allowing that identity to be represented on-chain in a way that protects the user’s privacy.

The post Covid19 world has changed lives forever, Identity will become even more important now that people will have to return to normalcy in the coming months. This does not change the narrative for lax regulation, in fact regulatory compliance will only get stricter, we have seen FATF introduce more stricter provisions and asking countries to comply. Imagine having to face no regulatory hassles and slowing you down with respect to international business, travel and commerce. This is exactly why this regulatory compliance is important at a protocol level.

In the past there has usually been an extreme balances between user privacy and accountability. Some blockchains allow fully anonymous transactions without any accountability, making them vulnerable to illegal activity. Equally troubling is that while some blockchains do not provide true anonymity for transactions, allowing for transactions and accounts to be tracked, they offer no systematic way to discover the real-world identity of suspicious users.

Concordium claims to offer a workable solution by providing transactional privacy for users, along with a mechanism that allows accountability to local regulations.

This means that transactions are processed without exposing the identity of the sender or receiver, who will also be the only parties that can see the actual amount of a transaction, if the transaction is an encrypted transfer. On the other hand, where a suspicious transaction or set of transactions have been detected, the real-world identity of the user can be revealed to qualified authorities with the help of anonymity revokers and identity providers.

Moreover, if a specific real-world identity is suspected of malicious behavior, anonymity revokers and identity providers can help trace all accounts of that user.

I think this will help regulation get embedded within the protocol design. Though this might seem scary to many, it actually is safe because we know what exactly is being tracked and what is not. So that leaves very less scope for snooping by governments, malicious actors will have less leverage here and users will be protected from hackers and other bad actors.

This will in turn encourage more business to adopt public permissionless blockchains because it would be easier to shield themselves against bad actors, still provide accountability to their audience, while keeping any essential sensitive business components private and most of all they don't really have to worry about regulatory compliance.

This will truly help accelerate open blockchain environments with security and guarantees of permissioned closed environments that business' prefer.