Digital Wallet Systems: What is TRUE decentralization?

If you aren’t familiar with our mantra here’s a refresher:

Protecting personal Privacy, so people can Thrive in the World with the Freedom we all Deserve”

At our core, we focus on self-sovereign identity. What does that mean exactly? Self-sovereign identity is the worldwide movement recognizing that the individual owns and controls their own identity without the intervention of third-party authorities.

Your follow-up question may be, “So how do we achieve that?” Long story short: Thrivacy. Long story long: blockchain technology, cryptography, burning the PII (personal identifiable information) protocol, and a dedicated team of folks who are shaking up the tech world.

There are a lot of buzzwords that you hear in the tech space–like “blockchain”. Hi! Have you met us? We’re guilty of using this term, too. Frequent reactions we receive to mentioning blockchain as it pertains to our digital wallet include but aren’t limited to, “Oh so like Bitcoin?”, or “Oh… OK…”, or “<insert eye-roll here>… oh just another blockchain company.” We get it–throwing out the term blockchain may be passé or overused to some. To clarify, because we’re detail-oriented, blockchain technology is one component of many, that we employ to ensure that our product is truly decentralized–and this is what differentiates us from other digital wallets.

Decentralization vs. True Decentralization

Traditionally, blockchain technology in itself is a form of decentralization. For example, let’s explore the example of digital wallet payments using your ApplePay or GooglePay.

Behind the scenes, the technology processing your payment information is more complex than the merchant running your credit card number and having access to that, the expiration date, and CVC number. Through a secure technological process known as “tokenization”, the digital wallet requests a token to represent your form of payment and the result is a unique ID number associated that is used to make the payment. The original information is not contained within the token, and thus, the token cannot be reversed into the original, sensitive data.

The caveat here is that ultimately, there is a server/database with your PII that exists… somewhere. And this, friends, is our key differentiator. We are truly decentralized. We have in theory and practice, burned the PII protocol. This is at the heart of true decentralization.

True decentralization in the digital world means that once verified, your PII is on your phone and under your control. The data doesn’t live anywhere else. The data doesn’t reside on a server/database that can be hacked. It’s only on your personal device. Our digital wallet verifies credentials and deletes PII after every use using blockchain technology and cryptography. With Thrivacy, your personal data and credentials, once verified, are now in your control, full stop. Think about it this way, just as Bitcoin is the world’s biggest bank that has no actual cash, we aim to be the world’s largest privacy company that holds no PII data.

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Originally published at https://www.thrivacy.io.