Woj, founder of Mazury, explains how Ethereum addresses could replace Google login as decentralized digital identity. Unlike Google's single sign-on, where one ban locks you out everywhere, crypto wallets let you create separate identities for gaming, work, or anonymity. The risk: developers might tie these to your legal name, defeating the whole point.
One thing I wanted to talk about today is identity, which is the first topic. I saw on your website that you write very clearly, your ETH address is your digital identity.
It is.
What does that mean?
It's your full identity. So we're building Mazure with this vision that we have a new way of authenticating yourself on the internet. Our lives on the internet right now are very scattered between different places. And usually they're very much owned by one single identity provider, whether that is Facebook, Google, Amazon, or any centralized or Web2 provider like that. And with Ethereum or any blockchain wallets, we have now this opportunity to authenticate yourself only by a fact that you know your private key, you know your mathematical formula for authenticating yourself. It's very nicely abstracted in the UX and you can use this one login across all other websites. And then you have parts of this with blockchains, with data immutability or with open APIs.
Right.
I would love to talk about in a moment as well. But yeah, in general, I'm really excited about this. this new perception where one application that is only owned by you, like MetaMask or whatever, is the source of all the stuff that you want to do on the internet.
But what does it mean in terms of identity itself? Because right now we think identity is your name, what you do, who you are, and all the things about yourself, right?
Yeah.
Now with Web3 credentials, with Web3 in general, you're saying that you have a centralized point of entry for how you interact with the digital world that basically says everything about you.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that's your sort of identity. So basically the blockchain allows you to retrieve all this information about yourself, and it's your point of access. But you can have multiple wallets. You can have multiple points of access. Does that make— what does it change in terms of definition to identity?
Yeah. So we can start with the definition of identity. There are some definitions that you also mentioned in preparation for this. It's a history and track of what you did, your experiences and your features. But yes, you explore internet in different contexts. You are a professional self.
Mm-hmm.
You go on LinkedIn, Twitter, you're a professional self. professional human being that just wants to share your insights about what you do. But also you can game. Probably you don't game at your legal name. You have your own username that you're not going to even say on this podcast right now because you want that to be in private and et cetera. And yeah, you can have your shitposting identities, et cetera. There's always different contexts. And what's a fun thing that Web3 authentication allows us to do is that you can actually now, one, have these multiple identities in places that you want them to be separated, but at the same time, you can reuse any single one of them between different places.
Okay.
If we compare that to how logins and identities on the internet work right now, I would say it's mostly like you have, for convenience sake, you probably have, you log in everywhere with your Google login. Everything depends on this Google provider or on this Google SSO login provider.
Right.
Once they ban you, you're banned everywhere, which is a problem. And it kind of is movable between websites, but at the same time, just because in Google you probably use your legal name, there's a lot of personal identifiable data and these websites can't really talk to each other because there's some privacy breaches. There's some—
Is it in their best interest or do you think they're just trying to— seclude themselves.
No, it's even legal interests.
They can't.
Yeah, essentially, I cannot retrieve any data from Google about you because you have your privacy rights, especially in Europe. You don't want some bad actors to get to know everything about Michelangelo. But you may want to have your, let's say, gaming achievements from one website to be immediately reusable somewhere else. So you want to flex your League of Legends scores. Let's just start with the playful examples. You want to flex your League of Legends scores in Reddit somewhere where you comment on stuff or You want them to be visible on Twitch because it allows for just more seamless integration.
I like that. What kind of— do you think it will be super verticalized? So the type of identity that I have is depending on the specific vertical in which you're doing, or do you think we'll have also a macro identity that collates all of your little pieces of information? Because it's like, yeah, cool. You can see my League of Legends score. You can see my game's achievements and everything. But maybe I also want to insert a little bit of info about myself. Otherwise, it's just—
Yeah, it's already very verticalized. And as I mentioned, you can have your gaming identity, you can have your professional identity, you can have whatever identity you want to create. In this paradigm, creating a new identity is as simple as just generating a new pair of public and a private key. and using it with your wallet. And you can spin up a new, totally anonymous identity that you will use for different purposes. And you visit different websites, you will visit different stuff. It'll be totally disconnected from your gaming identity or from your previous identities. But at the same time, now within this new spectrum, all the apps that you are using can talk to each other and can display Your past achievements, your past interactions, your past social graphs, et cetera. So yeah, I believe—
And do you think we'll ever come back and sort of get to a central— are we ever going to have a central piece of identity that is bounded to you, whether it's government enforced, hopefully fuck not, or whether it's something else? Is there going to be a—
So we have that by default. You have, let's not even talk about Web3 and such right now. It's just you have your government-issued identity. I refer to that as your legal name and some legal identity. When I was buying you the birthday gift, I had to show my ID in the shop. And we have that. You are born with the government identity already. And the question is whether And right now, how the internet was working since the beginning and how it's still going towards, where it's still going towards is that you are using your government-based identity on the internet. You create your Facebook account, you create your LinkedIn account, and you're using your legal name there. And I think it's going to It's going to evolve in the next 10 years. We'll see whether legal identity will blend into Web3 world. I personally hope not really. And we'll be able to move autonomously. We will be able to use zero-knowledge proofs to prove legal data wherever necessary.
Right.
And we can also jump into that in a moment. But yeah, in general, I hope That's not going to be the case.
So you hope that we're going to be able to choose what identity means to each one of us so that we're free to decide my identity is only these pieces of information. It's not that.
If we get it right, this is how it's going to evolve. One of the risks is that developers and entrepreneurs just like me, will get this shit wrong and it is connectable to your legal identity.
All right, let's dive into that.
