Marek Olszewski

And what's really cool about this, what makes these things biometric is that they effectively have a signature through kind of a certificate authority chain

leading up to countrywide certificate that basically attests by your home country that this ID is valid.

And so a few people know this, but modern passports today, they have this little biometric passport logo on them.

It's a little rectangle with a little circle in it.

That means that there is a microchip in your ID.

You have this also for national IDs increasingly.

And that ID can be read by NFC.

And the data that you read by NFC includes a signature that basically proves the authenticity of your ID.

And so what Self is, is it's a ZK passport protocol effectively that proves on chain that you have a valid ID.

And what's cool about this is you can take the third party out of ID verification, right?

Usually when you verify your ID, you're signing up for Coinbase.

Coinbase has some third party that they use and you're kind of giving your ID information to some third party.

They're looking at it.

They're saying, does it look like it's forged or not?

If not, then they attest that you have a valid ID.

Well, now with smart contracts, you can do that on chain without that third party.

You can just verify the correctness of the signatures in a smart contract.

And that's pretty cool because you don't have to give your data to someone who, you know, might lose it, might get hacked.

You know, we've seen just an incredible amount of KYC data hacks lately that honestly, truly frightening in many ways.

But even better than that, you can do it in ZK.