Business Opportunity — Digitization and Instant verification of Documents
In this series of business opportunity blurbs, this week we will see how to help businesses verify digital documents instantly.
Problem Statement
Digitization of documents is continuing to gain momentum. Digital documents are very easy to fake. There is no way to know if a document is real or fake (except calling the issuer to cross-verify).
The issue that is yet to be solved is the authenticity of the digital document that needs to be verified for who is the issuer, who is the recipient along with its tamper-proof contents instantly.
Imagine many use cases where such instant authenticity would help
- instant employee verification
- passport/visa issuances
- instant loan approvals
- instant notarizations or elimination of the need to notarize
- payslips
- and the list goes on … especially when dealing with international documents, it becomes even harder to verify their authenticity
In today’s world, we rely on the government or a central authority to validate the documents which tend to be slow and take a longer time to validate/verify.
Let me give a concrete example, in this pandemic — to know (without exposing private info), if somebody has been vaccinated is NOT as straightforward as you may think. This is a very fundamental requirement for operations of the country (for your job, for travel, for cinema, you name it), but there is no way to verify except to rely on the individual to show their vaccination card — which is prone for faking as there is no easy way to verify.
Current Solutions
Mostly centralized solutions (except a few blockchain-based) act as the authority who can help in authenticating documents. Also, digital notarization is gaining momentum after the pandemic, and a lot of states have allowed this.
Desired Solution
At mongrov we believe this is a fundamental disruptor and changes the way workflows are done today.
We need to have a solution where
- The issuer uses a stamped mail protocol to send the official documents
- The document's integrity and metadata are fingerprinted to a blockchain and sent to recipients.
- The receiver now can forward the document to anybody as they do now (in any form, digital or physical)
- The business that needs to verify this document, can look up to check its integrity/issuer/recipient instantly anytime without a third party.
- The solution need not know the contents of the document (Privacy & Zero-Knowledge)
- Analytics to the issuer/receiver
- Optionally, a gate that would allow only authorized verifiers
We do have an end-to-end solution for this at the core level. For high-value documents, they can be issued on the Ethereum chain in a very cost-effective way. An overview of the solution can be found at https://bit.ly/authdocs
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