The Kuwa Foundation (http://kuwa.org) and the University of Massachusetts Center for Data Science (https://ds.cs.umass.edu/) hired five brilliant MS students to develop a decentralized identification system that could work for anyone (not just rich people) and a crypto UBI faucet. They succeeded.
2. Why?
● 700 million people live on < $1.90/day*
● Best way to end poverty is give money
● Why crypto?
– Not controlled by any one entity
– Corruption-resistant
* World Bank
3. “Eat a live frog first thing in the
morning and nothing worse will
happen to you the rest of the day.”
- Mark Twain
Why Focus on Identity?
Meaning: Do the hardest stuff first.
4. The Kuwa ID Platform
● Decentralized
● Permissionless
● Borderless
● Open source
● Community-governed
● For Users: voluntary, self-sovereign & minimally-intrusive
● Requirements: one human gets one account
5. The Development Team
Carlos Daniel Mondragon Chapa Hrishikesh Kashyap Jim Flynn
Jun Tzou Manush Gupta Priyadarshi Rath
9. Poker Players
● Kuwa Sponsors
– Facilitate and pay for registrations
– Any type of entity
● Kuwa Registrars
– Independent, selfish, profit-seeking and rational entities
– Must “stake” (risk) a large value in KuwaTokens
– Vote on the validity of Kuwa IDs
● Implementation is up to the Registrar
10. Kuwa
Registration
Smart Contract
+ video & social graph
Registrar #NRegistrar #1
Simple Example
Registrar #2
User generates a key pair, uploads
video & social graph
Sponsor contributes a KuwaToken
Registrar #1 bets a KuwaToken -
one-hour voting period begins
Registrars #2 to N bet KuwaTokens
Voting period ends - all Registrars
reveal votes
Losing Registrars “fold”
Winning Registrars split the “kitty”Sponsor
11. Results
● Alpha demo site
– Basic income registration app
– Sybil detection using face and voice recognition
– First implementation of the Poker Protocol
– A basic income “faucet”
– Admin interfaces for Sponsor, Registrar & Directory
● White paper
● Open source on GitHub