© Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved by 3NUM Inc.,
Chris Boscolo, the founder of 3NUM and inventor of the world’s first Web3 Mobile Number “cut his teeth” on Web3 back in 2016 when he began ideating and building lifeID. After reading the Ethereum whitepaper, he became convinced that this new technology was the perfect tool for solving the world's problems around digital identity, authentication, and data ownership.
A global registry, controlled by no one but accessible by everyone, utilizing cryptographic key pairs as identifiers was, at a high level, primed to solve major consumer pain points such as usernames/passwords and the unending stream of fallout created from data breaches (Cambridge Analytica being the dominant example at the time).
Chris went all in on tackling the problem, officially launching lifeID in early 2017, which participated in pioneering many of the initial “decentralized identity standards” (namely at the W3C).
The results for lifeID and others who embraced the initial self-sovereign identity narrative were frankly less than stellar - but the lessons learned served to be vital “on-the-job training” for how Chris and part of his core team at lifeID are now building 3NUM.
“Identity” is a nebulous term that gets thrown around frequently in the Web3 space. Most of the time when people talk about “identity” they are really talking about a collection of individual “identifiers”. This subtle semantic difference is vital because it frames how users will continue moving throughout the world even when everything is “web3 native”.
One component those of us spearheading early Web3 identity efforts got wrong is that building a new identifier in isolation, despite all its potential promise, is a losing proposition.
1. Accessing something of value, generally in a better way than what exists
2. Utility created from participating in an ecosystem or network with others accessing and exchanging this value
ENS names are the best and most successful Web3 case study of this premise manifesting in the wild:
1. Accessing/interfacing with a blockchain requires a wallet address. Because wallets aren’t human-friendly, an easily readable and memorable name greatly improves the Ux.
2. As more people look to interface with a blockchain, the value of these human readable names grow exponentially
What makes ENS so exemplary here is that they weren’t created explicitly to be a new user-owned identifier, but rather to solve the problem of improving wallet Ux, and have since transitioned into becoming the way Web3 users choose to identify themselves in a vast array of instances.
What continues to make Web3 identifiers promising, despite the fact they can’t be created in a vacuum, is that they provide major benefits over their Web2 counterparts including:
One of the primary tenets driving 3NUM is that we can deliver the benefits unlocked with Web3 identifiers, but packaged in a way that is familiar and already used by billions.
While there is always room to create the next “Facebook” that provides users with a new Web3 identifier (Farcaster is arguably the most notable current example), bootstrapping network effects is insanely hard. Our team has concluded that starting where users are at and giving them something that feels familiar and seamlessly interoperates with existing infrastructure while solving major existing pain points has a much higher chance of success in converting the masses and mainstreaming the adoption of web3 identifiers.
Ironically, despite representing the largest social graph, phone numbers are objectively the “least capable” identifier making them ripe for innovation which 3NUM is realizing by transforming mobile numbers into DID’s.
Our belief remains that Web3 identifiers will become the norm, and the vision at 3NUM is to expedite this transition through solving problems affecting billions of users who make up the world’s largest social graph.
If this future excites you, join us!
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© Copyright 2023, All Rights Reserved by 3NUM Inc.,