In this TechNode Global Q&A with Quah Zheng Wei, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Accredify, we learn about how trustless verification is paving the way to improved access to services via Web3.
We’re extremely excited that Web3 technologies are finally being recognized as a sustainable and efficient enterprise solution. We’re always looking for new applications of TrustTech or to work with more entities that wish to benefit from this technology. Please do reach out to us at https://accredify.io/request so we can collaborate on new opportunities.
Can you share a brief background of Accredify?
Accredify enables businesses to build trusted engagement with their users by harnessing Web3 verification technology, which we have coined TrustTech, to create and issue verifiable data and identities. We’re pioneering a trustless future — a future where trust is guaranteed in every interaction between entities and individuals in a global village interconnected by verifiable data. That’s why our mission is to accelerate the world’s adoption of verifiable credentials by providing secure ways of sharing trusted information at every stage of a person’s life.
To date, we have processed over 12 million verifications on 2 million issued documents, which we call “Accredified documents.” All Accredified documents can be instantly verified by authorized third parties with a simple QR code scan or using a drag-and-drop verifier portal. By enabling automation and secure information exchange with verifiable data and documents, Accredify has empowered nearly 600 users in nine markets to simplify complex processes, discover new frontiers of efficiency, and build trusted engagements with their stakeholders.
Accredify’s industry-agnostic TrustTech solution is currently being used in five industries (Education, Healthcare, Corporate, Aviation, and Defence), and we have plans to introduce TrustTech to other sectors so that the benefits of verifiable data and Web3 technologies can be fully realized in the region and beyond.
How is Web3 driving innovation across industries?
We have seen organizations digitally transform from being a Web2 enterprise to a Web3-ready enterprise with Accredify’s TrustTech.
With just the simple adoption of digital, verifiable documents, secured by blockchain technology, our clients have innovated and improved their business processes significantly by ensuring greater data security, process integrity, and operational efficiency.
One example of process innovation is the adoption of TrustTech by educational institutions to enable the issuance of instantly verifiable, tamper-proof education transcripts and certificates.
By digitally transforming paper-based credential management, our clients in the education sector have reported saving up to 50 percent in manhours spent on credential management. Perhaps more importantly, our clients can now rest assured that their reputation is protected by TrustTech, as their brand can never be exploited for fraudulent activities such as fake certificates since TrustTech ensures that every document issued by them is instantly verifiable with just a simple QR code scan by anyone with access to the document.
Accredify’s TrustTech also provides recipients of verifiable documents to securely store, access, share, and manage their verifiable documents conveniently on a secure Verifiable Digital Identity Wallet web app, called Accredify Passport. Blockchain-based verifiable documents open up the possibility of returning true data ownership back to individuals, and with Accredify Passport, individuals are now also able to decide what information to share, with whom, and for how long, much more easily. To add a benefit that is familiar to most of us – individuals also never have to worry about losing or misplacing paper-based documents again with digitally verifiable documents.
Coming back to the use case of TrustTech in the education sector – this means that learners now enjoy greater learner mobility as they are able to securely and easily share their education transcripts and certificates with any employer or institution. This creates new ways of authenticating candidate information – whether for a job interview or for course intakes. In this way, not only have our clients in the education sector transformed their own internal processes, but have also set in motion ripples of digital transformation that spreads far beyond their own four walls, across industries, sectors, and even international borders.
How does Web3 contribute toward sustainability? What impact will this have on industries?
Web3 technologies such as verifiable data enable organizations to bridge gaps of information asymmetry in sustainability reporting.
Verifiable data enables this through the creation of an audit trail that spans from the start to the end of any supply chain, regardless of how complex it may be. Since verifiable data is tamper-proof and traceable back to the source, businesses and governments utilizing verifiable data for sustainability reporting will have a greater ability to ensure compliance with sustainability policies. This can be done through more effective and accurate employment of carrot-and-stick approaches to enforcing sustainability practices, for example.
In sum, ensuring that sustainability reporting is based on verifiable data means that organizations are able to accurately track the performance and behavior of entire supply chains and keep stakeholders accountable for their business practices.
The impact of this will be significant. From an operational point of view, businesses can redesign processes to ensure verifiable data is used to power key points of information exchange and data logs. The benefit of having verifiable-data-driven processes is the potential for a higher level of process automation and efficiency.
From a marketing and communications point of view, sustainable practices can become a powerful branding tool, now that consumers can truly believe that an organization “walks the talk” – this can be a competitive advantage for organizations playing in industries where green practices are highly valued by the customer and authorities.
What are the three (3) key challenges relevant to building Web3 products? How is your team able to address these challenges?
The first challenge to building a Web 3 enterprise solution is with regard to the private and public key management on the blockchain. This issue posed a huge problem for our enterprise clients to be able to securely manage their own key – but at the same time, if we were to have full control of their private key, the architecture would be much less secure. Our team built a proprietary multi-signature structure to balance the maintenance of security and ease of usage for our clients – 2 of 3 keys are always required to transact with the blockchain while a third key is kept in cold storage for emergency purposes like retrieval of the wallet ownership.
The second would be blockchain network congestion – when there’s a spike in blockchain activities, our cost to transact and the time taken for transactions to go through (or time taken for the documents to be issued) would increase significantly. This may impact our clients especially when there’s a time constraint to the document that they are issuing, for example, verifiable COVID-19 test results required by a traveler to fly. To overcome this, we deployed a hybrid on and off-chain mechanism for transactions by using the on-chain public key infrastructure and off-chain private key pairwise Decentralised Identifier. As such we attain near-instant transactions at negligible cost.
The final key challenge would be the reliability of L1 protocols – as we are still in the early days of most blockchain-driven deployment solutions, enterprises are unsure of the longevity of these networks. Products built on the wrong blockchain may completely collapse overnight if the blockchain is compromised as seen in the case of Luna. While we build primarily on Ethereum, our platform is blockchain agnostic, allowing us, when necessary to adopt various mitigation measures such as multi-chain support or using a secondary chain as a backup.
Please share any case studies, success stories, data, or industry insights that can highlight these.
When Accredify started in early 2019, the user experience for Web3 products was difficult for non-tech-savvy enterprise users to handle. As an example, when we met clients that were experimenting with the usage of blockchain, the simple act of appending a transaction onto the blockchain can consist of all of these steps:
- Installation of Metamask
- Purchase of Ledger Nano
- Setting up account on cryptocurrency exchange
- Purchase of Ether
- Sending Ether to Ledger Nano
- Creation of hashes
- Estimation of Gas Fees
- Signing of transaction using Metamask and Ledger Nano
- Sharing the Ledger Nano with different users within the organization
Most of the clients that we met were at their wit’s end before they met us. Accredify instead, combined all of these steps into a single click. All these steps are executed by our issuance engine, providing a higher level of convenience and an improved user experience for our users while maintaining the highest level of security.
This TechNode Global Q&A is part of the ORIGIN Innovation Awards 2022 series. Accredify is a winner in the Startup Leader of the Year: Web3 Disruptors award category.