Highlights of “Litentry & Friends” EP 2: DID in Instant Messaging
Introduction:
“Litentry & Friends” is a Youtube live show hosted by the Litentry team that focuses on sharing knowledge about decentralized identity. In each panel, we will invite top project partners to discuss and share their insights on the industry, the context of the collaboration, and the outlook for Web3.
In the first episode, we have invited Victoria Gavrilyuck from iMe Platform and Lilly M.Dobreva from Litentry to talk about the potential synergy between DID & Instant messaging.
Host:
Welcome to the second episode of Ten for Litentry youtube AMA series. Hope you guys have enjoyed the first episode of Litentry and friends and Ten for Litentry, if you haven’t checked it, please go to our channel. We’ve received many constructive feedbacks from the community, and we really appreciated all of them, that’s how we could improve.
Today we have Lilly, our CPO and Victoria from iMe smart platform joining us tonight. We think they have a really long term focus just like us. They are one of our ecosystem partner.
Can you introduce iMe messenger to us, what’s the basic functionality? Why is it unique?
Victoria
If I were to explain what iMe is to a child, I would say that it’s a modern way to communicate + all the “toys” big modern guys love (DeFi, crypto exchange, neurobots, translator). It’s a great tool for connecting people and letting people do many interesting things right inside one app.
The central idea behind the project is the empowerment of Telegram users through the functions of DeFi, letting people manage cryptocurrencies easily in a user-friendly and secure interface in a double click. We have a standing joke, that the idea of creating iMe came when the founder wanted to send some ETH to his Granny on Telegram. The silver of truth here is that we really strive to create an intuitive and simple interface for seamless daily crypto management that even people new to crypto could handle.
That’s how in our app we are connecting mainstream and crypto communities, and we can see it works well — with over 2,300,000 downloads for both Android and iOs in total, just within 3 months we’ve had nearly 500 K of activated wallets on our platform with over 62 K of them actively used.
iMe is developed on Telegram’s API and offers all of Telegram’s features as well as some exciting new tools and settings such as: A Crypto Wallet with integrated DEXs and the possibility to buy crypto with a card (Uniswap and Simplex services already integrated); a built-in translator in chats; a functional cloud with albums; advanced folder functions; voice messages to text; Neurobots — AI-powered assistants in chats and many more.
Using iMe you don’t have to change your messaging environment since you’ll have all telegram contacts and environment available in our app.
iMe Smart Platform is unique because it’s the first and only to introduce DeFi functionality on a messaging platform. There’re many wallet and messenger providers in the market, but no messenger has a full-fledged crypto wallet in it yet, and no wallet has an integrated messaging interface. In comparison to other wallet apps, using iMe is rather cheaper: iMe charges zero fees, so you connect directly to Uniswap (or other DEXs in future) and pay only the commissions they demand. And you don’t have to remember and copy your wallet address, and the possibility to make a mistake equals zero.
Unique is the scale of the future development and the opportunities our platform can provide its users. The iMe ecosystem has almost unlimited possibilities for integrating popular chains and services and supplying users with all-in-one solutions for daily operation.
Our nearest integrations: 1. Binance Smart Chain Integration (Polkadot in future); 2. DEX PancakeSwap integration; 3. DEX 1INCH integration.
In iMe wallet we’ll gradually add our partner’s tokens to provide yield farming options and access to some privileges. Integrating our partners’ products will significantly enlarge iMe functionality. To illustrate, integrating Litentry DID protocol will enable users to manage their identity data to get access to the services they need, participate in airdrops, or for other purposes.
We plan to widen our ecosystem in the following directions (have further integrations): 1. Insurance and lending services; 2. NFT marketplace; 3. IDO platforms; 4. Prediction sphere.
The iMe ecosystem has the potential to become an essential and unique tool for the crypto community and promote crypto to the masses, together with providing upleveled communication features; an all-in-one application that is secure and user-friendly with the widest scale of use.
What value do you see in the combination of instant messaging and crypto wallet?
Victoria
The key point here is usability. You can send crypto to anyone who has an activated iMe wallet using a telegram handle instead of applying a wallet address. All in one click. And you don’t have to switch to another website or app to make crypto operations because you can do it right inside one app where you already have all your contacts. The second point is that the Telegram basis offers wide opportunities for crypto popularization due to the great number of users — over 0,5 billion people. Today it’s one of the most popular and secure messengers around the world. The prospect of bringing new people from crypto and mainstream to use iMe is really promising in terms of constantly growing userbase.
More and more crypto currencies will be available with the further integrations that our team is working on. Such combination of a messaging platform and a crypto wallet ignites the development of a whole ecosystem around it, with plenty of handful tools.
What’s your imagination of Litentry’s decentralised identity in instant messaging & social media?
Lilly
The nature of decentralized identity is to reflect a digital self in an independent, self control way without letting a 3rd party determine who you are on the internet. The combination of DID and social media is natural, especially social media platforms like iMe which supports peer to peer communication with message encryption. A self-control identity gives users the freedom of communication, setting free from unreasonable censorship, privacy breach, or malicious tampers.
But that is not all, enabling a decentralized registration method only gives users the essential account of communication. In social networks we need more diverse characters in reflecting our digital selves. Our social recognition, reputation, credential of accomplishments, verifications in different aspects are all potentially needed. In the decentralized web when we are trying to guarantee all these identity reflection data sources are trustable, with no any centralized control risk, we will need the whole infrastructure of different service in the internet building in a decentralized way, and that is what the blockchain and crypto industry is working on nowadays.
Litentry plays a role in gathering decentralized identity data and aggregating decentralized identities based on specified identity computation algorithms. Because in a web of decentralized natures, there will be many separate decentralized networks providing all kinds of internet service, but the user data do not flow between different networks because of different data structures, system languages. With Litentry, dApps developers are able to inquire a user’s decentralized identity data in one stop, for example your DeFi tracking record, your on-chain governance behaviors, your contributions in an open-sourced software, and so on. Litentry is like a middle component of connecting all the decentralized networks for identity reflection in Web3, without it it’s hard to acquire identity data in different characters in Web3, thus limiting our characteristics in decentralized social media.
What’s your view on DID? To what extent do you think Litentry’s DID will play a role to shape the future of iMe.
Victoria
The digital economy relies on proper identification, and in the way all’s moving towards decentralization including financial services, decentralized identity becomes the most relevant aspect that will help move DeFi to their full implementation.
Today many are concerned about security breaches, privacy violations, data misuse — just remember the buzz about the data leaking from popular service providers and the regulations that followed. People want to be more in control of their digital identity. With DID a person decides:
- what to share;
- whom to share with;
- when to stop sharing.
Owned by a user, self-generated, unique and rooted in blockchain a decentralized identity is immutable and can’t be revoked as in case of a centralized service provider. DID stands for privacy + convenience, eliminating a middle-man or intermediary between a person and a Dapp or a website. It is cryptographically secure, so that even though your ID is stored in a digital format, it cannot be tampered with, duplicated, or stolen.
In the iMe ecosystem, since we plan to integrate the full range of DeFi services, DID will play a very important role in letting institutional clients enter the ecosystem and provide our users with maximum DeFi opportunities. Big DeFi players can come only if there are the mechanisms to provide stability and security, and with DID a wide array of services from lending and borrowing to international communication and bargains will come live in iMe.
To illustrate, a lending platform that is going to be integrated to iMe in the near future, can address a user’s DID to see his credit history and make a grounded decision. Or in a situation of employment, DID can provide an employee’s background info.
All service providers want to know their customers, and the number of these providers is constantly growing, so Litentry together with iMe will drive this process. Litentry can provide a ‘one sign on’ option for an easy one-off access, and the cooperation of Litentry and iMe will introduce a seamless way to get identified on different resources. With DID, service providers will have the opportunity to present relevant content to users and even incentivize them regarding their transactions history. Once passed a KYC procedure with one of the services, a person will be able to use the verification results on different resources connected to Litentry and iMe. Our future partners will need the characteristics of iMe users to better plan their interactions and reward activities. Users with DID will definitely get the privileges on our platform.
So we find our cooperation with Litentry of great importance and perspective in the context of DeFi development, since DID’s role can’t be overestimated in the reality we have.
In the partnership iMe plans to integrate Litentry into its smart messenger, as a user what can I picture for using Litentry Identity in iMe?
Victoria
Litentry integration will enable users to display their on-chain identity computation output (on-chain governance participation score, credit rating, and liquidity providing history). It can be shared with third-party dApps for preferential treatment.
A ‘mould’ of DeFi activities of a user will be available for our partners’ services and for other users by a user’s permission. In future, there can be introduced several rating systems: DeFi operations’ rating, social rating, reputation rating. Based on a user’s past activities, such ratings will represent a kind of digital “Karma”. If the rating is good, a user will have access to more services on the platform. Also, upon the Telegram’s basis we can apply accounts’ verifications like there are on Twitter or Instagram, rate channels in terms of trust (owned by a verified account), authorize influencers and others for business purposes.
As a result of the iMe-Litentry partnership, LIT tokens, the utility token on Litentry, will be supported by our wallet. As our platform evolves and we integrate more functionalities like lending and borrowing, Litentry identity data will be used to filter out risk profiles based on their credit score and activity across chains. Litentry integration will enable us to make informed decisions and cease the chances of failure.
With the growth of our ecosystem, users will have benefits of applying DID like:
- Participation in IDOs;
- Airdrops from iMe partners;
- More relevant content;
- Better conditions for using DeFi;
- Better credit rates for lending services;
- etc.
Gradually as our integration with Litentry will be in progress, we’ll be able to see more and more ways to benefit our users. And we’ll keep DID optional for those who don’t want to share any data at all.
Lilly
Link your iMe ID with your Litentry identity. After linking your Litentry identity, you should be able to display some of your public identity characters from Litentry, for example the NFT badges you will get from your historical on-chain activities or your profile information that has been verified by the Litentry validators such as email, Twitter account, Polkadot identity, etc. The display of these personal information is controlled by the user itself, that we can set the access to private or public in Litentry’s identity dashboard. As iMe is crypto implemented, it’s possible that decentralized autonomous organisations(DAO) would be derived in the platform. In this case Litentry identity can be useful in DAO discussion scenarios as we provide on-chain governance focused features like governance score, an identity computation algorithm that reflects a user’s reputation in DAO governance based on the user’s historical behaviors taken part in different blockchains.
Will Litentry support user experience like “single sign on” for social media platforms like iMe?
Lilly
Yes, this is a very good question. Single Sign On is a very useful feature that allows users to have a one-stop log in experience, it could be very interesting as well when applying to blockchain applications. Imagine logging in multiple decentralized applications with one single click on “Litentry sign in”, and then the corresponding application calls up your Litentry app or browser extension to get a login signature, and you finish signing in with your Litentry account. Your cross-chain user information can further be leveraged by the application to obtain an exclusive service based on your credit.
Similar to Google login, Litentry single sign on will be like a decentralized alternative, because the fundamental of identity aggregation is to connect different identities. What Litentry will do is to provide you a secure solution to link different self-control decentralized identities and streamline authentications. It’s highly viable that Litentry provides a Single Sign On feature. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be built by the team, it could be built by an ecosystem partner based on the open sourced protocol. In fact, a team that focuses on decentralized key management is working on top of Litentry, further details may be revealed in our DID Builders Collective program later.
How does Litentry manage privacy issues that could happen in social media? When we use a Litentry Identity to log in iMe, will we be revealing our crypto identities?
Lilly
In the Litentry protocol design, we actually did a lot of thinking in privacy protection. The protocol design hasn’t been published yet, but I can share a little bit about the privacy protection design.
First of all you get to see what kind of data is being inquired in your Litentry profile and who has access to which specific information from you. We are making the access to the user profile fully customizable and controllable. Each time a 3rd party tries to access your profile, it needs to have valid authentication from you, and if you don’t want to share your information anytime, you can terminate its access in Litentry’s identity management app. In this case, you will have full acknowledgement before any party accesses your information, so when you log in iMe with Litentry, you will have a notice of which identity information iMe is requesting and you have the choice to grant access or not.
Secondly the identity computation process conducted by Litentry network validators is implemented in TEE (Trusted Execution Environment). A Trusted Execution Environment is a secure area inside a main processor. It runs in parallel with the operating system, in an isolated environment. It guarantees that the code and data loaded in the TEE are protected with respect to confidentiality and integrity. This prevents the risk of privacy breach during the identity generation process.
Thirdly the Litentry network does not store your profile data except for your account linking relationships between different blockchains, and this data is encrypted by the corresponding user’s private key. Each time an application requests for your identity data, the Litentry network aggregates them from the decentralized web in real time and does not store the result. This will largely reduce risk of privacy breach.
In the end we try to protect user data and defend data rights in maximum efforts. It may sacrifice some of the usability but we are trying to leave the decision to the user, the most capable way of fitting different types of user with different privacy needs is to leave more options and customization space.
What is the difference between Lime token and Aicoin? What’s the reason for designing a dual token economy structure?
Victoria
AiCoin is no crypto at all, it is a native centralized stable coin in iMe. It doesn’t have any investment purposes, it will not be traded on exchanges and will have a fixed value. AiCoin is designed to be exchanged for Lime. The bridge will be actualized soon. AiCoins can be used as an in-app payment means to purchase premium features as it doesn’t include any fee at all.
I understand in terms of messaging there wouldn’t be too much privacy issue because iMe is built on Telegram which supports end-to-end encryption, but on the wallet side, how do you ensure the privacy and safety of users?
Victoria
You put it right, in iMe we don’t have access to any users’ data including names, phone numbers, conversations, and do not store and transmit it anywhere. All this data is proceeded through Telegram servers. As for the iMe wallet, only the device has access to keys and funds, so users can control this data by themselves. The wallet enables a PIN code for password encryption. No servers are involved.
Could you tell us something about your short-term plan? Anything exciting coming up that you would like to tell the audience about?
Lilly
We do have many exciting things happening in short-term. First of all we are going to bid for the Kusama parachain, followed by token migration. We have a new product announcement in June, which we welcome everyone to try, and of-course there will be reward for those early supporters. The marketing campaign for this is going to be massive. Please stay tuned. Also we are integrating with a number of brilliant projects including iMe, we are super excited to promote our product to non-crypto users. Development wise, different important pallets and front-ends are being designed by the design, product and development team. We have a robust and close communication relationship, just to ensure everything we built really suits the market demand.
Victoria
We are thrilled to announce Binance Smart Chain integration. As for the DeXs, we already added Uniswap to iMe wallet both for iOs and Android and it appears very convenient to swap right in the app with zero fees from our side (just the same as you use Uniswap on your PC). 1INCH and Pancake are underway.
At the end of this week we plan to launch our Lime token, that will boost the users’ engagement due to the numerous use cases that include but not limited to:
- Users will be offered a kind of a lifelong subscription for the extended iMe functionality only for 1 Lime token kept in their accounts. For example, having only one Lime in the account, the user will always be able to apply Uniswap in the app without the iMe commission.
- Yield farming.
- Voting in the DAO ecosystem
- A tier system
- Acquiring partners’ tokens, that will be gradually added to the iMe Wallet.
The key aspect here is that the Lime token utility with the growth of the iMe ecosystem will expand over time. iMe Smart Platform has many ways to extend the boundaries of its functionality, and we can name 4 main directions that might be really interesting for the community:
- Insurance sphere;
- NFT marketplace;
- IDO platforms (like Binance Launchpad and Polkastarter);
- Prediction sphere.
Those who already got really involved are welcome to follow our social media accounts for the official announcements. Beware of frauds — it’s only on our channels where you’ll be able to find a valid link to the trading pair.
New chains like Polkadot or Solana together with other blockchains winning the vote in our ecosystem will be added to cover the needs of the most crypto communities. We have a lot of partner projects that we continue integrating to the iMe ecosystem to provide users with proper services and solutions.
To implement all these integrations faster and move along the roadmap more rapidly, we plan to expand our developers’ team and introduce new collaborations. Stay tuned, a lot of amazing news is coming.
Live question section:
What will happen during the ERC-20 migration and how can we convert LIT tokens back to other cryptos?
Lilly
Litentry will officially run a bridge to support the migration of LIT tokens from ERC20 to our native one. Users send ERC20 tokens to the contract along with the LIT receiving address on our Mainnet. We will freeze the balance on Ethereum network and send the corresponding amount to the specified address on Litentry Mainnet.
Firstly we consider the native LIT token will be primarily performing its utility function on our Mainnet. When it comes to trading, one can always deposit the LIT token to exchanges and gain exposure to other cryptos. Also, in the next step, we will support a bi-directional bridge to allow users to convert back to ERC20 token if needed.
Litentry has been listed on Korean exchange Coinone recently, what’s your view on Korean market and community?
Lilly
We love Korean! South Korea has a really high penetration of crypto investors with many young people and adults invested in crypto. In comparison with other crypto traders in Asia, Korean is generally more sophisticated and mature. Although the players in the industry in recent years have decreased a little bit, A lot of teams including projects, VCs and exchanges have decreased in size and activities, but the major ones are still there, such as Hashed and ICON. And I think because Korea already has two popular blockchain — Klaytn and Terra, people mostly hold BTC and XRP over ETH. We are looking for opportunities to continue to grow our Korean community and list on more Korean exchanges.
Can you give a little explanation, how does Litentry tackle/control multi-identity fraud?
Lilly
Actually, Litentry doesn’t deal with this problem directly as it’s role is to organize the identity data layer for the Web3. But this problem can actually be resolved when we build up a robust credit system based on blockchain, because when we have a secure and fair way to evaluate our identity and create in the digital world, identity is gonna play a more important role in many aspects of internet services, people are gonna value their on-chain activity record, because the ecosystem will rely on it more and more. Imagine when you want to attack an identity specific service with a new address, for example a staking pool that opens higher return rate for Litentry’s regular user, it’s gonna take a cost for you to create and maintain a bunch of qualified addresses and go through, it’s gonna be harder and harder to conduct this attack because the cost will grow rapidly when the system of DID grows stronger and stronger.
How does iMe plan to attract new users, what advertising channels does it use and what does it plan in the future?
Victoria
We’ve already had a number of downloads and users, we use all our partners and resources, they are very helpful. We use publications, medias and AMAs in different markets. I can see number of community members are spreading across different countries.
What does this integration mean for iMe users or vice versa?
Victoria
In iMe wallet we can support LIT token, we have over 500k activated wallets and 60k active wallets. LIT will be available for all our user base which is growing everyday.
We can empower different services, including yield farming and other incentive programs. For example, we can have bonuses for those who staked Lime and LIT. Again we are still at an early stage, there is a lot of possibility of our cooperation.
Lilly
What we could do from our side, once the accounts are linked, we can provide on-chain governance features, using our algorithm we can compute credit scores which can help users to present their digital selves if they choose to do so. This could enable different services to be provided to them.
How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not good? Do you have a local community for them to better understand your project?
Victoria
It’s another good question for me to tell you our built-in translator functions, we run our official group on iMe based on Telegram. This allows us to communicate with different members from different language background. In some countries we plan to have local communities, we have one in Vietnam. In China we plan to introduce Wechat community. We are starting them this week.
Host
Thank you so much for joining panel discussion today. I’m sure the discussion tonight is really constructive and meaningful. I wish iMe and Litentry all the best. Don’t forget to download and try iMe messenger, follow our twitter, join the telegram community and subscribe our channel.
About Litentry
Litentry is a cross-chance Decentralized Identity (DID) Aggregator that enables the linking of user identities among multiple decentralized networks. Built on the Substrate framework and featuring a DID indexing protocol, Litentry provides a decentralized, verifiable identity aggregation service that removes the redundancy of code and the hassles involved in resolving agnostic DID mechanisms. Litentry’s DID Aggregator is compatible with all DID standards, and powered by a reliable DID data interface. Everyone can build and submit DID methods to Litentry, making identity data easily accessible in the Web3.0.
