What has happened to Trust? In the wake of stolen identities, fake news and algorithmic manipulation, it’s mutated like some incongruous beast into something ephemeral, like a glitch awaiting repair. Trust, in short, is broken and governments and banks need to earn it back.
Poor Trust. However, it’s a just consequence of our times; online information isn’t even reliable and with the advent of GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) it’s hard to tell apart a real photo from a fake, real audio from fake and real text and so on and so forth.
We’ve lived and are living through a wave of misinformation warfare, facing myriad truths with myriad platforms to express and promote them. It’s apocalyptic.
Trust, thanks to its new ephemeral status, has become something of a much sought after and necessary commodity. Commodity, also because we want to introduce this idea of trust being tangible. Is it possible to replace the moral notion with a concrete, physical proof of trust? I.e.
Can tech make Trust physical? We believe so and at Tangem we make it our mission to set the right technical conditions to bring about a new era of trust; a socio technical solution that aims to impact both society and business.
First, let’s have a look at the trust shift in society through history to get a better idea of our solution in context and why we’re passionate about it. Trust has evolved, arguably, in four significant phases; local, institutional, platform and distributed.
The concept of trust in business isn’t new, it’s been the linchpin of any commercial relationship. Trust was first built in tight knit groups, it was local and accountability based, trust was face to face; friends, family, peer groups. But when business was physical that trust relationship was much easier — trust could be earnt by seeing, talking, touching — it was all a bit more, well, tangible.
This is evidenced in stage two: institutions. Institutions are the product of humans, created to lower uncertainty in exchange by defining rules and standards and hence to foster trust. Take ‘The Bank’ for example. To first establish an image of trust and reliability they created impressive, expensive ‘safe’ buildings in central parts of cities.
The solidity and grandness of their structure being the ideal metaphor for their reliability and endurance — ‘A safe haven for your money’.
Then comes stage three, where you see the economic trust of the internet evolve significantly as people put their faith in platforms to perform economic transactions, for example through peer reviews, cue the on demand economy. Poster boys of this stage include: Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Postmates, Taskrabbit — all eclipsing the old guard such as Craigslist.
Their ubiquitous adoption relies on a backbone that is fundamentally trust. It’s worked and it hasn’t; Uber has a terrible track record when it comes to keeping both its drivers and passengers safe, which has led them into a biometrics and accountability argument with the likes of TFL.
Rewind the clock to the ancestral days of the Nokia 3310; simplicity, functionality, week-long battery life and Snake — the game that trained a generation of thumb muscles with its heart rate increasing 90 degree turns.
The concept of hailing a cab via an app would have been futuristic, the concept of banking or shopping on your phone, laughable and untrustworthy. But now 14m Ubers are ordered every day. We’ve come a long way from Stranger Danger; we trust complete strangers: we sleep in their beds, get into their cars, entice them into our homes and ask them to help us make IKEA furniture. The system is highly dependent on our trust.
The thing is in a mobile-first world, trust isn’t so easy to establish, but it’s even more important than ever before. As the boundaries of the digital world are expanding, so is people’s distrust.
The problem is people are both increasingly dependent on, and distrustful of, digital technology. In fact people are using tech tools more intensively in all aspects of daily life. Collective unease is building up amongst diminishing privacy and the rest.
Disturbingly, a new species of digital fraud and deception comes to light weekly and it scales quickly. According to ReviewMeta, an independent site that tracks the veracity of online feedback, claims of fakery on Amazon might also be fake.
On Amazon, you can’t shop for suncream without encountering reviews claiming the product is counterfeit. But maybe the review itself was fake, planted by a competitor? Then of course let’s not forget Oobah Butler’s infamous fake restaurant ploy to hack TripAdvisor that saw his shed become the number one rated restaurant in London.
The point is the internet has become a low trust society — you expect things not to be what they seem, you expect processes to be laborious and you expect to be conned. It’s difficult for markets to function and economies to develop in this cold climate.
It’s harder to find or extend credit, it’s risky to pay in advance, transactions are slow and authenticating goods is challenging. We have let it get too far.
How do we adapt to this trustless society? This is where stage four comes in; we are now seeing trust enabled through blockchain technology. Blockchain eliminates the need for a trusted intermediary to facilitate the exchange.
For the first time in history, trust will be established not by economic or political institutions or intermediaries, but by technology alone. The problem is blockchain brings a lot of promise, but it also needs to earn trust first from, well, you. Mainstream adoption is limited by a steep learning curve.
Only few privileged literates can afford to manage their own keys securely. We wanted to leverage the historical concept of tangibility and simplicity issuing trust and bridge the digital and physical by creating tangible trust once more. And a tangible trust that can be applied to multiple verticals.
This is our solution. It’s a physical smart card, which allows safe and unforgeable storage of digital assets such as cryptocurrencies contracts or certificates on a blockchain.
The key is the card, which is an elegant solution to the thorny problem of key management. It’s designed for everyone; it’s physical on-boarding with zero learning curve.
There’s no need to be tech savvy. Just tap the card on any NFC device and instantly verify key ownership and blockchain asset balance.
Our first application of the cards was a proof of concept for cryptocurrencies as self-custody instruments, however our chip to chain technology unleashes limitless possibilities in other verticals; security, fintech, identification, loyalty, anti-counterfeit.
It could transform industries such as luxury goods and pharmaceuticals, passports, events, logistics, anything that requires blockchain based proof of authenticity.
These cards can certify that your trades are legitimate and your products aren’t counterfeit, and that you are exactly who you say you are.
Our aim is to be a physical implementation of trust, by bridging existing use-cases for blockchain with practical, tangible products.
It may be considered anachronistic, a return to the analogue in such digitally advanced times, but we believe a rejuvenation of an old format, a physical card, with all the tech inside, encourages simplicity and ironically transparency though its opacity — there is still very much a realness to analogue life!
As we have seen trust shift from local to centralised to distributed, thanks to advances in technology, we have now done a virtuous circle and we believe the analogue and digital are meant to mutually reinforce one another.
If trust is the currency of life its ingredients are efficiency, ease of use, low cost, high security and tangibility. With these ingredients we can create a new basis of trust for business transactions that could contribute to a considerable simplification and acceleration of the economy.
The disturbing oxymoron of our times is that investing in our trustless economy is about the most trustworthy investment to make today. We believe however and hope that we have found a way to beat back the tide of deception by building the right technical conditions to create a new era of trust that leads to fair, prosperous and open societies.
Our technology augments trust, because the trust is established by the tech alone and ultimately no society or organisation runs smoothly without trust.
Coming up. ‘Tangem in action; how it works and what’s inside…’