Tangle Labs — The new big player in IOTA identity | by Linus Naumann | Dec, 2021

Tangle Labs — The new big player in IOTA identity

According to IOTA co-founder Dominik Schiener, digital identities (DID) are “the key to the first million users of IOTA”.

His reasoning is clear: Every human needs to identify themselves almost daily, both online and offline, in order to use hundreds of important services like online-banking or age-restricted media. As of today, proving identity, including ownership of certificates, diplomas or even citizenships, requires lengthy and expensive “know your customer” (KYC) processes that need to be repeated for every single service individually. This poses a large barrier-of-entry for new customers and a huge cost-sink.

The new technology of digital identities aims to drastically change this: Any DID can get enriched with so called “verifiable credentials” (VCs), which resemble verifiable statements such as “The owner of this DID is over 21 years old” or “… earned a master´s degree in international law from Harvard university”. These VCs are signed by issuing entities, such as governments or universities, and are permanently stored on a distributed ledger.

The scope of DIDs is vast: From managing access rights to certain areas, buildings or websites to “proof of humanhood” or memberships in all kinds of organizations, DIDs can quickly develop into a real “super-tool” in handling all identity-sensitive use-cases.

Tangle Labs — the first big player of IOTA identity

More infos on https://tanglelabs.io

A recent, explosive release of IOTA DID tools and solutions brought a new project out into the eyes of the public: The IOTA-identity focused company and open-source provider Tangle Labs. Starting as a team of five core team members and an additional hand full of specialized free-lancers, they have built and released an astounding portfolio of early releases in just under one year of dedicated work. Currently, Tangle Labs is publicly represented by the two very well-known IOTA community members Adamsky and Merul.

Tangle Labs first batch of open-source DID tool releases

The team at Tangle Labs remained largely in stealth for the better part of 2021 and only recently went fully public. They released the alpha-version of a complete open-source identity suit on Github, for everyone to try out and play around with. It includes a versatile collection of tools like the identity wallet Vira, a web-client for organizing identities, Certify and a Verifiable Credential cloud storage system called CloudVault. All digital secrets are secured using IOTAs stronghold technology, which is also used in Firefly and future IOTA wallets.

On top of that toolbox, Tangle Labs revealed Individni, an AI-based human-verification digital identity verification provider, that is currently developed with support from a partner (details about that soon™).

Last but not least Tangle Labs released Tixit, a VC-based ticket management system. With Tixit vendors can issue tickets in the form of VCs to any customers DID, which they can then easily show at the entrance of an event before they enter.

Release overview:

Identity suite — A playground for devs with IOTA identity tools

The Identity Suit is a set of interoperable identity tools that are detailed below.

Link: https://Identity.tools

Github: https://github.com/CroplyOfficial/identity-suite

Video demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u3Ky7HRrl0

Vira — Your self-sovereign identity wallet

Vira is a mobile-wallet for securely storing and using digital identities and VCs, to easily share with others. This is achieved with selective disclosure, that allows a user to only reveal the information they wish to share, withholding their sensitive information that does not need to be shown to the verifier.

Github: https://github.com/CroplyOfficial/vira-wallet

Certify — Server-based web-client for organization identity

With Certify you can issue and organize digital identities and verifiable credentials in a well-arranged setup that also includes DVID (Domain Verification of Identity) for secured access to websites.

Github: https://github.com/CroplyOfficial/certify-client/tree/10e851462e5298667d6a36963e98c55f577307fa

CloudVault — cryptographically secure VC cloud storage system

With CloudVault you can store your encrypted VCs on a stronghold-secured cloud server for selective sharing with permissioned domains.

Github: https://github.com/CroplyOfficial/cloudvault/tree/9070ed1d2ad78edd2005e831264708132cf14ef4

Individni — Human identity verification and GDPR compliant KYC-VC provider

Individni helps you to prove your human identity on the internet. It utilizes an AI-based video-verification system that automatically assesses video material of you and your documents, in order to send out a “proof of human identity” verifiable credential to your DID.

Website: https://individni.net/

Individni will automatically verify your human identity based on video material of you and your identity documents and reward you with a human-identity VC that you can use to prove your human identity on the internet.

Tixit — DID and VC-based ticketing solution

Tixit is a DID-VC based ticketing solution. Instead of sending out QR-codes, which can easily be stolen, Tixit issues ticket-VCs to the DIDs of customers. These VCs can then easily be verified at the entrance of the event site.

Website: https://tixit.cc/

“First one-million users” — what does this mean for IOTA tokenomics and price?

Digital identities belong to the class of “zero-token use-cases”, which I recently described as the “hidden goldmine” (article link). And for good reason: On first sight, zero-token use-cases do not increase buy-pressure or lock up any IOTA token. However, this is only true on first sight. DIDs and VCs will introduce lots of traffic on the IOTA Tangle, thereby using up its bandwidth. This bandwidth in turn will soon be directly tied towards the scarce resource “access Mana (aMana)”, which can only be generated by holding mainnet IOTA token. This means that every DID or VC provider will have to either hold IOTA tokens themselves or pay others to do so on a mana-market, in order to ensure reliable access to the Tangle.

On top of that, identity use-cases will strengthen IOTAs node-network, since all providers will run their own node for full control over their access to the Tangle, further decentralizing the network.

I also want to mention an often overlooked effect of what it means to have “the first million users” on any given platform: Long-term success of any crypto-project will be determined by its valuation in mainstream society. The crypto-space needs societal and political recognition in order to transition from the current zero-sum speculation and meme-market to an ACTUAL adoption-based market. A market based on bringing added value to the lives of people. The rewards of this transition will dwarf anything we have seen in the self-contained speculation market as of today.

Or, as Adamski from Tangle Labs formulated it recently on the IOTA Discord:

“The art of adoption is to get people to use the technology without them knowing that they are using it. Download an app from the app store, buy tickets online…everyone does this. But now, they can do it with IOTA as the foundation of the tech and it be more secure than previous systems. Just think of the number of ticketing systems or identity onboarding systems there are in the world today. Just 1% of this and we’re talking billions of identity transactions a year, all on the IOTA network“

Early investors can join Tangle Labs NFT crowdfunding campaign!

On top of their many tech-releases, Tangle Labs also just announced their community NFT crowdfunding campaign, which aims at raising funds and to create an exclusive community for the upcoming Tangle Labs DAO. This will include early access to inside information and future airdrops.

According to their website https://nft.tanglelabs.io/ there will be 2500 unique and animated NFTs which will be sold at a price of 100 Mi (payable only in IOTA token. Requires a Metamask browser wallet).

Figure 2: Preview of Tangle Labs limited, animated NFTs

Last but not least: Tangle Labs is hiring

If you feel intrigued by the technology and scope of this project, consider joining the team. Open positions include:

Business Growth and Partnership Lead

– Tasks include new business partners onboarding and generation as well as project oversights and partnership liaisons.

Frontend developers:

– Tasks include web and mobile application and website development and maintenance based on the MERN stack.

Marketing Assistant

– Tasks include content creation as well as managing social media and press releases.

If you are interested in joining the team, please reach out to Adamski on Discord (adamski#0458).