Credit reporting agency Equifax and blockchain-based, privacy-focused cloud computing company Oasis Labs have announced a partnership.
Together, their goal is to build an identity management and know-your-customer (KYC) solution for Web3, the so-called decentralized iteration of the internet.
Web3 companies—including certain DeFi products and services where users may prefer to remain pseudonymous—aren’t immune to regulatory compliance like KYC standards, regardless of whether users want to retain privacy.
“We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, so it’s really important that we build privacy-first solutions,” Dawn Song, founder of Oasis Labs and a professor of computer science at University of California at Berkeley, tells Fortune.
But “at the same time,” she says, “we also want to do responsible innovation, so it’s important that we are regulatory compliant and build regulatory compliant solutions as well.”
To do this, Equifax and Oasis are creating a KYC solution where “privacy technology is key” and plays an “important role throughout the full stack,” Song says, adding that Oasis plans to use secure hardware, zero-knowledge proofs, anonymous credentials, and decentralized identity management to ensure privacy.
Equifax suffered a massive data breach in 2017, but even still, Song notes that the company’s capabilities beyond KYC, like in fraud detection and credit reporting, will help bridge Web2 and Web3.
She views the partnership as a “first step” in creating a “universal KYC” that is compatible across different blockchains, companies, and communities, Song says.
