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How is Digital Identity Revolutionized by Web3 and Blockchain Technology – with Sandy Carter

December 23, 2022

Sandy Carter is an American businesswoman, speaker, and author. She was a general manager at IBM from 2013 to 2016, vice president at Amazon Web Services from 2017 to 2021, and currently, she is Senior VP of Business Development at Unstoppable Domains.

Sandy gave the example of a layer cake to explain Blockchain and Web3. The bottom layer of the cake is Blockchain as she believes Blockchain is the backbone of the whole Web3, metaverse, multiple financial services, and supply chain companies. Sandy stated that Blockchain provides ownership, which is the basic difference between Web2 and Web3. On top of the layered cake lies Web3 which gives us decentralized access and digital identity that is so powerful. There’s also a layer of a metaverse that adds AR and VR, digital experience, and then these are all surrounded by artificial intelligence. And then the real power is on both sides of the layer cake, the two-sided marketplace. You've got the creator economics on one side, which is that multi-sided value creation, and on the other, these digital networks are multi-sided consumption networks.

Sandy stated that the digital identity in Web2 space is different from Web3. In Web2, when you sign into Google with your username and password, that data goes to the company, the entity, or the country where you're using that username and password. Companies collect valuable data from users and they sell it. The research shows that as of today, Facebook and Google made about $100 billion off of data that they sold about users. But in the Web3 world that digital identity stays with you. You are the owner of your information. You have a single user ID that you log in with so the data stays with you. You decide who gets that data and how much of it. Sandy believes it’s a basic human right for people to decide who and for what purpose they want to share their data.

Regarding the use cases of Web3 and the Blockchain ecosystem, Sandy mentioned the ability to create a decentralized website using Brave or some of the other Web3 browsers. You own that Website, it's up on a decentralized Web. And so now you could launch and create content for your community or be a thought leader or advocate for a particular passion. And that information cannot be removed by anybody else. Then she mentioned the use case of email. You can use your domain to do an end-to-end encrypted email. You can send emails out to people's addresses, but you don't have access to them as they are being hashed.

How is Digital Identity Revolutionized by Web3 and Blockchain Technology – with Sandy Carter

According to Sandy, having separate business and personal digital identities is better than having a single digital identity in the Web3 space as it helps separate personal and professional life. She further added that it's important for people to link their domain or digital identity with a profile picture, an NFT. This helps in making their profile that can also be used as a digital business card. Her company is currently working with different companies to associate an avatar with digital identity. So far, they’ve partnered up with Genie, who's based on Ready Player Me so any place that Ready Player Me avatar can go you can take that avatar with you. Sandy is fascinated by the interoperability of the metaverse because users can take their avatars to whatever metaverse they want. Imagine if an avatar is built on Ready Player Me and cannot be taken to Epic, consumers will not like it. So, Sandy believes interoperability is going to be so important for widespread usage and adoption of the metaverse in the future for sure.

Discussing the future use cases of digital identity, Sandy said that it would be great if people can just use their digital identity to unlock any metaverse. Her company has already integrated digital identity with a set of metaverses, but what if it could be any metaverse or that sort of thing that would enable unlocking any metaverse with digital identity? That would be very powerful.

Talking about the future conferences in the Web3 space that Sandy will be attending, she mentioned she'll be headed out to a conference called Tech Basel in Miami. It's an event where all the Web3 companies are going to be coming out to jump into this world. Right now, she is planning to head over to Switzerland for the conference for Davos for the World Economic Forum.

In concluding the discussion, Sandy said that she has done a couple of blog posts on LinkedIn and Medium for people to explore more details about Web3, Blockchain, and the metaverse. Sandy said that she likes to call herself an educator because of all the education that still has to be done in the Web3 space.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS (see clickable version on www.cmo-stories.com)

[00:45] Who is Sandy Carter? 

[01:20] For someone that does know Web3 and blockchain, how would you explain blockchain? 

[04:47] How would you define digital identity? 

[13:03] Is one digital identity enough? 

[14:39] When you're talking about an avatar, are you talking about the metaverse or something else? 

[19:35] Are there other challenges that you see that need to improve for years to come in the metaverse web three NFT? 

[21:04] What are the next events that are coming where people can meet you in the months to come? 

[23:42] What is the best place to connect with you? 

NOTABLE QUOTES 

“I think that those, who are very curious about new things are those who are most successful because everything changes every second in web3.” 

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