Fortunately for the unbanked, blockchain technology is engendering a new form of
financial identity—one not dependent upon one’s relation to a bank but rooted in
one’s own reputation. In this new paradigm, being “banked” in the traditional sense is
no longer a prerequisite. Instead of passing the traditional ID tests, individuals can
create a persistent digital ID and verifiable
reputation and deploy it, in whole or in
part, in different relationships and transactions. The blockchain endows this digital ID
with trust and access to financial services. This capability is unprecedented at a
massive scale. Joseph Lubin of ConsenSys said, “We all have reputation. It just isn’t
easy to use as social and economic systems are currently constructed. Most of it is
ethereal and ephemeral. In the best case, it is fragmented and you have to present
shallow documentation of it anew for every venture that requires it.
In the worst case,
billions of people don’t have a way of presenting reputation to anybody but their
immediate social circle.”
24
It might as well be a pig or a cow. However, with the basic
building blocks, people can construct digital identities that are not fragmented or
ethereal but universal and standardized, with robust attestations of aspects of
themselves and their interactions. They can share these digital IDs granularly—that is,
share only very specific information about their identity—to facilitate more
interactions that will likely lead to their own personal economic growth and
prosperity.
David Birch, a cryptographer and blockchain theorist, summed it up:
“Identity is the new money.”
25
Consider the possibilities: the underbanked of the world can enfranchise
themselves as they interact with microlending outfits. Potential vendors or lenders can
track their usage and repayment of tiny loans, previously unfeasible, on the
blockchain rather than rely on some credit score. “Once a previously unbanked person
pays
back a microloan, they are on their way to securing more and larger loans to
build their businesses,”
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said Lubin. This behavior, when repeated, adds to the
reputation score of the borrower. Combined with a global, frictionless payment
platform, individuals and small business owners can do the previously impossible:
pay a remote vendor
for merchandise or services, thereby advancing their prospects in
the global economy. Joyce Kim mused, “What if we could create a credit score for
women based on their household history?”
27
Economic and financial fault lines often
run alongside gender lines, making this technology a boon for the world’s
disenfranchised women. Referring to the global poor, de Soto said, “It’s not that they
don’t want to come into the global economy. It’s that the
standards and information to
bring them into the system are not in place. Blockchain is terrific because it gives us a
common platform to bring people together.”
28
What could this persistent reputation mean for global entrepreneurship? If you
have a reliable, unique, and robust identity, and you’re deemed trustworthy,
counterparties will feel more comfortable providing you with access to value. This is
not redistribution of wealth but a wider distribution of opportunity. Haluk Kulin, CEO
of
Personal BlackBox, said, “The biggest redistribution that is about to happen is not a
redistribution of wealth but a redistribution of value. Wealth is how much money you
have. Value is where you participate.”
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Blockchain can enable every person to have a
unique and verifiable reputation-based identity that allows them to participate equally
in the economy. The implications of this equality are profound. Lubin imagines a
future where the “unbanked and underbanked will become increasingly enfranchised
as microlending services will enable investors across the globe to construct diverse
portfolios of many microloans of which the usage and
repayment can be tracked in
full detail on the blockchain, using Balanc3’s [a ConsenSys portfolio company] triple-
entry accounting system, for instance.”
30
In this new future, when people repay
microloans, they are on their way to securing more and larger loans to build their
businesses.
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