The Web Needs a Single Login

Plus: Korean banking giant gets into custody, Ghana plans CBDC pilot and more |

What you need to know today in crypto and beyond  July 12, 2021 Sponsored By:     Welcome to The Node.   If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.   Questions? Feedback? We'd love to hear from you! Simply reply to this email.   –Daniel Kuhn Today's must-reads Top Shelf INSTITUTIONAL INTEREST: Fidelity Digital Assets plans to increase its headcount by around 70% in anticipation of growing institutional demand for crypto services. The asset manager's president, Tom Jessop, said the firm is looking to add around 100 staff in Dublin, Salt Lake City and Boston to develop new products and expand its services beyond bitcoin.   SOUTH KOREA: One of South Korea's largest banks, Woori Financial Group, is getting into digital asset custody through a custody joint venture with bitcoin exchange Coinplug. Woori follows other Korean banks like KB Kookmin and Nonghyup Bank into the crypto custody space as South Korean lawmakers draft tighter crypto regulations.    GHANA'S CBDC: The Bank of Ghana (BoG) is looking to pilot its central bank digital currency in two month's time, BoG First Deputy Gov. Maxwell Opoku-Afari said. Ghana's central bank is working with digital transformation consortium Emtech to sandbox potential blockchain-based solutions for the "digital cedi." Opoku-Afari also was sure to call the fiat CBDC "cash on its own," not crypto.  HASH DASH: Cryptocurrency mining company Hive Blockchain has purchased over 3,000 bitcoin miners, which is expected to increase its operating hashrate by 46%. The company predicts the purchase will generate an additional $80,000 in daily income. Meanwhile, Compute North, which operates locations that host bitcoin minings, also announced plans to expand its capacity by 1.2 gigawatts.    SOLANA > ETHEREUM: Australian-based blockchain company Power Ledger is to migrate to Solana from Ethereum in search of higher speed, scalability and lower energy output. The platform's POWR tokens will still be used for existing clients and remain on the Ethereum network.   –Helene Braun  A message from Nexo Your digital assets deserve a savings account in their BEST INTEREST. Leading crypto lender Nexo treats you, your crypto and your fiat to industry-best Crypto & Fiat services, featuring:    * Up to 12% interest on digital assets, paid out daily! * Yields available on BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, XRP, XLM, EOS, TRX, LINK, BNB, PAXG, USDT, USDC, TUSD, PAX, DAI, HUSD, GBP and EUR. * No minimum or maximum limits on funds deposited, offering infinite opportunities to earn. * #ZeroFees on all transactions. * Military-grade wallet security and top-tier insurance on all custodial assets with SOC 2 Type 2 certified crypto custodian BitGo.   Get started at nexo.io "We welcome thoughtful, proper regulation, and I think that's been missing."   –Asheesh Birla, Ripple's general manager of Ripplenet, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover" A message from CoinDesk The Investor's Perspective on the Bitcoin Taproot Upgrade Taproot is a bundle of three upgrades to Bitcoin aimed at improving network security, privacy and scalability. At the same time, it poses some potential drawbacks to Bitcoin including risks of low adoption, unintended privacy shortcomings and Bitcoin community disappointment and fracturing.   CoinDesk Research's newest report dives into the economic impact and investment implications of the Taproot upgrade. Download the full report. What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals   Why cryptocurrency mining is a challenge in India (QZ India) Ethereum 2.0 isn't likely going to attract mainstream adoption, reports Cointelegraph Alipay is minting Cristiano Ronaldo's "Top Scorer" trophy from 2020 as a "digital collectible"  (Decrypt) –H.B. Death of Doge? How do billionaires and hedge funds invest outside the market without touching scam coins or meme stocks? They stash millions into an overlooked asset class that's projected to grow by over $1 trillion by 2026. Unlock this investment with this private Node link.*   *See important disclosure.   *This is sponsored advertising content. Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway We should sign on to the web, not to websites I recently moved. This means I've needed to go into a bunch of different accounts and update my physical address. This has involved a lot of bouncing around in my password manager and the odd reset for accounts I hadn't properly logged.   It's aggravating, but I'm pretty good at this. Members of my family have an existential crisis each time they are threatened with needing to keep track of one more password. And if it were possible to know how much time we've all spent logging into websites, it would surely shock each one of us to the core.   The next version of the web needs to have a single sign-on (SSO). The vision should be that you sign into the web itself rather than each website. Imagine: You fire up your browser, do one sign-on and then you're good to go on every website you visit. If you visit a new site, you just give it permission to use the identity you have running already.   How much time would that save?   "I think blockchain SSO is the future of identity management for the internet. We have this situation where cryptocurrency, bitcoin, has encouraged everyone to get a private public key pair," Matthew Gould, the CEO of Unstoppable Domains, which makes crypto-powered web addresses, said in a phone call. "I think it's a huge opportunity." SSO is at the heart of the vision for Web 3.0, putting identity back into the hands of users rather than the centralized services.   Re-orienting identity   Anyone who is a decentralized finance (DeFi) user is already familiar with the concept. You have your MetaMask wallet running in your browser. You can use that to access any of the various DeFi apps. A click or two of verification with your active wallet is all it takes to get inside.   And it's important to think about what's happening here. That website is looking at public data about your wallet that's kept on the Ethereum blockchain. That's data that you generate and you can see as easily as that app can. This is a completely different framework from the web as we know it.   On Web 2.0, the sign-on is controlled by the website and as soon as you start using it you're generating data in their servers, not your own. You can't edit it. You can't copy it. You can't even see it.   "Data portability is an important thing for people to understand, being able to bring your own data to an app," Gould said. Case in point: I've used a lot of music apps over the years and wish there were some way I could aggregate all my favorites from each app.   Unfortunately, each time I join a new one I start from zero once again. No doubt I've lost track of dozens of bands I've liked this way.   You own you   There's another upshot of this: In an SSO future, it's harder to kick people off websites. Even if a website does blacklist an identity, it can't take that identity away.   "It's fundamentally irrevocable and in many ways unblockable," Matthew Hendrickson, product lead at the developer of a Bitcoin-based decentralized internet, Hiro Systems, wrote in an email. If a pseudonymous Twitter user is known by a handle on Twitter that gets booted, the user is just gone forever. There's no way to really prove you are you on another site. Not so if Twitter were using an external identity; Twitter could boot the user but he or she could still prove who they were on another site.   "The user is given complete, independent control over their credentials that work over a wide range of sites and apps, as well as control over their public identity as they decide to layer onto those credentials," Hendrickson said.   Hiro is the new name of the company previously known as Blockstack, which garnered a patent for its SSO product last year.   Inventions   Of course, there are SSO standards on the web right now. The classic is OAuth, but more and more Google, Facebook and (recently) Apple want to be the chief way to sign into websites. Not only does this give those giants more visibility into your online activities, but it allows them to control what can and can't be built.   A blockchain SSO world cuts out the third parties. "The key difference with this system over a traditional OAuth solution is we move from a three-party system to a two-party system in terms of privacy and tracking of data," Vinny Lingham, the founder of decentralized identity startup Civic, wrote in an email.   Gould predicts an open-source core at the heart of a few different decentralized SSO standards, and then lots of startups will build applications on top of that core. These applications might do interesting things, like enabling users to prove what age they are or where they live or the fact that they are elite players of Fortnite.   When identity is built in the open, works across the whole internet and no one can stop anyone from building on it, entrepreneurs are likely to get very creative.   "I think there's going to be a lot of unique inventions," Gould said.     –Brady Dale The cryptocurrency movement has never been so sprawling, reaching every corner of the planet.   Crypto State by CoinDesk aims to connect with local communities to explore this movement of financial disruption and how it trickles down to every corner of the globe, from DeFi investment opportunities to alternative ways to transact and store wealth.    We're making virtual stops with audiences in Nigeria, the Middle East and Southeast Asia this year. Register for the Crypto State virtual tour. The Chaser... 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