In Web3, we all know how important private keys are to maintaining our wallets. We are unique amongst technology users in that we know what it is like to have sovereignty in the digital space. The combination of a clunky user experience and the confusing and somewhat alarming process of backing up a seed phrase is, in our opinion, the main limiting factor stopping the vast majority of technology users from onboarding to using sovereign technologies, including but not limited to cryptocurrency and blockchain.

With the rapid advancement of generative AI, it will not be long until it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between what is AI-generated and what is actual reality online. Unless the general public has access to self-custodied private keys that can unilaterally make signatures that verify authenticity and make data verifiably tamper-proof, we will rely on authorities to tell us what is real and what is not. Authoritative models are generally efficient and have worked very well in the past. However, the trust in our public authority system has been eroded over the past 30 to 50 years. And, especially in the digital space, the intermediating authorities (social networks etc) are not beholden to the good of the individuals; rather they are legally obligated to maximize shareholder returns. This means that any and all strategies, including psychological manipulation and misinformation, are justifiable under that questionable logic. Generative AI enables whole classes of subtle psychological manipulation that were previously unthinkable. User-owned keys let us self-generate identity, and sign everything we publish so it becomes self-verifying proof-carrying data, directly encoding information about provenance (source of the data).

At Identikey, the solution we are creating is to provide a trust-minimized and resilient recovery method for private keys that is non-custodial and has no single point of failure. This is our “Guardian Key Recovery System”. We have just open-sourced our library (not yet production ready) to perform threshold encryption across a blinded group of guardian peers holding partial key shares. All cryptographic protocols that fundamental security relies upon should be open-sourced, and this is no different. We provide this library and the rest of our future open protocols with the hope that the industry can more easily have an increased level of security, and we can increase the freedom and sovereignty of individuals and collectives on the whole. And perhaps save the world from the crisis of sense-making.

We have some incredible designers in the industry, including design and branding leads for such hybrid crypto/tradfi projects as Good Money Bank, who are working with us to develop a top-notch user experience for onboarding the general public into key custodianship regardless of their technical ability. We will be releasing a cross-platform mobile application in Q4 2024 that brings key custodianship, self-sovereign identity, enabling cryptocurrency wallets, and collective formation and voting — what we call DAOs in the crypto space.