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Redefining Governments Through Trusted Blockchain Applications

Blockchain technology, often celebrated for its disruptive potential in sectors like finance and supply chain, is making its way into governance and the legal system. One company leading this innovation is OriginalMy

Redefining Governments Through Trusted Blockchain Applications

Presentation at 2019 Ethereum Classic Summit, Vancouver.

Blockchain technology, often celebrated for its disruptive potential in sectors like finance and supply chain, is making its way into governance and the legal system. One company leading this innovation is OriginalMy. I had the opportunity to listen to the founder speak recently about the company's mission to streamline bureaucratic procedures, particularly in Brazil, a country notorious for its red tape. In this article, we'll explore how OriginalMy is using blockchain technology to challenge traditional norms around governance and notaries.

Battling Bureaucracy in Brazil

Brazil is a country burdened by bureaucratic procedures. With approximately 15,000 notaries operating in the country, almost every official process—from signing a document to stamping multiple signatures—requires a trip to a notary office. The physical presence and multiple steps involved make these tasks not only time-consuming but also susceptible to corruption and errors. OriginalMy aims to tackle this issue head-on, facilitating seamless, blockchain-secured processes that can replace or augment traditional notary functions.

Hack the Notaries Campaign

OriginalMy initiated a global campaign to challenge the role of notaries in modern society. The campaign received overwhelming support, with over 10,000 people around the world holding up "Hack the Notaries" signs as part of a crowdsourced effort to question traditional notarial systems. This campaign helped bring attention to the bottlenecks and inefficiencies present in current legal processes.

The OriginalMy Platform

The company has developed an end-to-end platform that focuses on authenticating people, signatures, authorizations, and digital content. OriginalMy's system leverages Ethereum Classic for its blockchain needs, particularly because of the immutability it offers—ensuring that once data is recorded, it can't be easily altered or deleted.

Real-World Impact

OriginalMy's blockchain platform has enabled people in Brazil to create public petitions for law changes. In a country where verifying one million signatures could take years, the platform significantly reduces this timeframe. Since its launch, two public petitions have even been turned into laws, marking a milestone in citizen participation.

Furthermore, the platform has been instrumental in civil union campaigns, especially for same-sex couples concerned about the conservative political environment in Brazil. Through OriginalMy, they can authenticate civil union documents, thus safeguarding their rights.

Future Prospects

While OriginalMy continues to seek investor backing, it has already earned significant accolades for its work, including being listed by the United Nations as a real blockchain use case generating social impact. It has also received recognition from the European Union as a trusted blockchain application.

Conclusion

OriginalMy is doing more than just shaking up the notary industry; it's setting a precedent for how blockchain can improve governance and individual rights. In a world where democratic processes often face challenges, solutions like OriginalMy offer a glimpse into a more efficient, transparent, and accountable future.

If blockchain technology can re-engineer these aspects of society in Brazil, one can only imagine its potential on a global scale. OriginalMy is undoubtedly a pioneer in this space, and its story is far from over.


Video transcription

okay so yes I'd like to welcome a dealsent to the stage of do not have a ohyeah that's number two number two hereokay it's okayyes okay group so yes welcome thank youvery much yeah Vancouver it's great timeso Nielsen spoke at summit last year aswell and yeah and original my were oneof the first cohort at its Cielo it'slabs for sureexcellent yeah thank you oh thank youvery much thank very much for invitingme again and last year I was talkingabout digital identities and how toapproach destroyed and its own onblockchain and this year I will not beso technical but I'll try to show how touse blockchain to try to hackgovernments and notaries and usingblockchain for people outside the cryptospace that's the thing we are doing on avery hard way and even in Brazil and whyBrazil Brazil is our main market rightnow and Brazil is a very bureaucraticcountry okay probably you heardsomething about Brazil and it's a verycomplex country and one one thing wehave over there we have a 15000 notariesit's a lot of notaries in one countryit's a massive culture but 15,000notaries is a lot and notaries in Brazilyou need to go to a notary every time toif you sign a document you need to go toa notary to stamp a document if thereare more than one signature on thedocument you need to go to each notarywhere the signature is registered to geta stamp on each signature it's painfulit's time spending needs yeah we have alot of kills and lines and a lot ofstamp is on documents it's crazy it'sabsolutely crazy over there that's whywe createyou know my trying to fight bureaucracyand every kind of bad brokers andcorruption and frozen over that then westarted a campaign of our globalcampaign about hacking the notaries anda lot of people was engaged on that hackthe notary's campaign but we did abounce program we received in more than10,000 pictures of real people holdingthe heck the notaries and it was veryinteresting campaign using around theworld the Hackney notaries and we did alot of noise about that thenwell what's original my we have aplatform an end-to-end platform it's anengineer platform for authenticatingeverything wilt indicate peopleauthenticate signatures andauthorizations and digital content andwe use the theorem class why because itis very important to usthe mutability concept it's veryimportant we at the time it all happenedwe were developing a project for signingpublic petitions on the theorem at thattime and it was a big problem to us wellreturning to original my we will be adoll someday we don't know but right nowwe are pgo we are partiallydecentralized organization we buildthings for people after we are like agateway for for blockchain and Kevin cantold me yesterday we are kind ofgatekeepers of watching because peoplewho knows nothing about blockchain canuse our platform on a very easy way weare working a lot on usability orproviding services for people who whopeople was not crypto friendly yet wewill we would achieve that goal somedaybut it's not all reality yet and oneinteresting thing on using the theoremclass we are the top d app be doingtransactions on only dream class kitsmap it on a jab direct and we are alwayson the top three on documentsauthenticity andover there on the bottom side you cansee sign documents and sometimes somesign people are signing documents evenon our platform and I'll show someexamples of that well how can we helpthe government's using blockchain forexample Jesus an NGO from Brazil theybuilt a platform for collectingsignatures on public petitions in Brazilhave a law if one percent of thepopulation agrees on a public positionit must be voted in the House ofRepresentatives or even in the Congressand the problem is collecting thesignatures they tried many times fourtimes exactly and all the time is theysend the signatures to the Congress andthey said ok I can receive but whiledate first first and how to validate allthe signatures going to notaries how togo to notaries with 1 million signaturesaround the country it's very difficultsometimes at the most famous publicpetition over there it generated twotons of paper delivered to the Congressok it was three years for collecting allthe signatures impossible to validatethen after creating new demos over thereBrazilian government has approved twolaws that was created by people andvoted by the politicians that's animprovement of democracy people arecreating the regulations and the lawsthey think they deserve and ourpoliticians must hear that that's thething and we created and another thingafter that some some people welleveryone is aware about faking newsdissemination problem on social networksand deformation online harassment andeverything like that then they ask thisplease can you authenticate that kind ofweb content before it's being deletedand to show up to attach on occasion tothe court then we created a twofor making it easier for proving thatweb content was there at that at sometime and in Brazil is also it was juttedas valid on a Superior Court on a courtof appeals over there now Brazil haslegal precedence on proofs collectedreferred to and authenticated onblockchain and why it happened becausewe provided a certificate ofauthenticity the judge or any kind oftechnician guy can see on blockchainauthenticity of the document out inscaler over there and it can prove as hesaid it can prove the veracity and theexistence of the content we did a notarypartnership so we have 15,000 notariesand we have a partnership with few onethe rest of them are trying to kill usand the thing is right now Brazilians nolonger need to go to a notary to stampdocuments it's a huge achievement on acounter on a very bureaucratic countrylike that we have a civil civil unioncampaigns in Brazil as also we have alaw if you want to it's not a marriagebut the civil union has the civil rightsit's not the same name but has the samerights you just sign a contract - if youare a couple and you have the samerights of a marriage and last year wehad a problem and the end of last yearwe have a very conservative politiciansgovern in Brazil right now and they wereafraid of losing the rights of civilunion the same-sex unions they therewere very afraid worried about losingthat rights and then we engaged acampaign over there for same-sex unionsoromë original my using original myzapad from for signing the documents andwhat happened those girls in the in thecenter one was in Brazil another one wasimport to go but they went to engage acivil union the sign of the documents orregionoriginal mine and then this year theywent to the consulate over there toconvert that civil union on a realmarriage and it was approved and theyare very happyand as I gift to us they created andprinted that t-shirts they use it thatt-shirts during the marriage in theconsulate because of what original myprovided to them and well last year itwas very interesting because the daybefore my presentation in a theoremclassic cement it happened in Brazil thefirst blockchain voting a voting overtherethe Brazilian FinTech Association usingthe original my to sign the votes of onthe new board and what happened afterthat it was a kind of public voting itwas very easy because this just sign atthe vote the vote was not secret and itwas easy to do after that we developedfor the the theorem classic the attendclass claps the cohort we wrote aprotocol the first protocol with a proofof concept and a white paper provingit's possible to have a secret voting onpublic block chains and we use a lot ofprotocols on on that the keys narcshomomorphic encryption stealth walletsfor for doing the same kind of electionthe process of an election but usingblockchain and minimizing the power ofthe people who administrates the thevoting session so there's no secretballots the ballots can be counted byeveryone but you can't see and whoop youvoted that's the the thing and you cancheck the the white paper it was areview many many times and it's workingvery very good achievement we did thisyear and the next step for for hell iswe will do some private voting becausewe need to tests a lot to challenge theprotocol a lotfor going for big big voting's bigelections and I'm launching right nowsomething who tried to solve to help Idid help it to solve a problem in Brazilthat was men in the middle frauds inpeer-to-peer transactions it's a bigproblem for any market even oncryptocurrencies and remainingcryptocurrencies probably because younever know who is the guy who weretalking and he sends the wallets for thepost in the thing but he could maybe youdon't know he could be a man in themiddle and fraud in the identity of thebuyer and then you send your crypto toup wrong haulage and you never see itagainand the thing is in basically threesteps you can prove the identity of theperson you are talking to that's thething only on the real world on ourworld owned on cryptography win justsign a message to us to some of us iseasy to sign in a match a messaging wesend some word they sign the thingsends back and we can prove cryptographywho is the guy we are talking but forpeople who are not in crypto it's verydifficult to understand the concepts orto reproduce the concept then what weare trying to do is using a very goodusability for that and avoiding fightingagainst this kind of fraud so we areproving we are working with authenticityof things all the time we use it theokra it's an improvement of rokerbecause inside the protocol we aresigning even they are the authorizationfor delivering personal data to be incompliance with some regulations aroundthe world and we did an improvement onthat and it got some awards veryimportant awards for original my and weare trying to help even a theorem classto grow and to to have to achieve morepublic only on governments andregulators to make them aware about whatwe are doingso we got the global impact challengebecause of models that project thatproject for signing public petitions wegot listing by UN as a real blockchainuse case doing social impact it was veryimportant to us it happened this year wegot a recognition by European Union as atrusted blockchain application and wellas all startups we are always runninglooking for money if you have if yourinvestor please talk to us and the mainawards and that's original mind what weare doing we are improving the democracywe really believe we are creating andand empowering people and we arebuilding a better governance to alsothank you very muchquestions please[Applause]a lot of actions I'm curious how doesthe private Keys work for the notariesso[Music]yeah at the time no we we have our ownprivate key and people send we justmanage the hashes so the hash iscalculated in the browser and we don'tmanage the documents we just receivedthe hash and sends to the smart contractsome very very simple way and on andthat thing with the notary we do almostthe same when we name it that thatproject is as a pre authentication so wepre authenticate the hash on theblockchain we send the document to thenotary the notary electronically makesthe stamp the that kind of stamp on thedocument and sends back to the customerand at that time we just we have a layerof transportation of documents we don'tstore the documents refers but we haveour own private key and just on thedigital identity the keys are storagewith the users as their personal data sothey have their keys they have theirpersonal data with them on their mobileapps started encrypting their mobileapps we don't we don't want to startanything just the metadata that's neededbut for registering the things we useown private key for Annette we are didlike a one user doing that when you cansee in the app direct that they show howmany users are registering things andsome here so you can see over thereusers using that smart contracts justtoo and that's just us okay that's thething because we are registering thethings over there but people can checkjust after if it they manage their ownprivate keys for doing that we know it'svery easy for doing that but they needto handle the cryptocurrency for payingthe fees all we need to do anothertransaction to fund their their walletbefore receiving the registrationprovided by their own key andthere's some that it's not difficult butthere's some issues on usability aboutthat then we prefer we have 15 secondsof they need to trust own on us afterthat thing they can go to the to thismuch contraption check if it'sregistered by ourselves okay please soyou mentioned like immutability is likeone of the reasons why you use et Cieinstead of aetherium yeah I'm justwondering like last year when 51% attackthing was happening like it does thatput significant risk on your business orhow do you feel about that kind of thinghow big of a risk is it to you yeah I Iwas very scary at that moment for surebut we have a kind of backup ofeverything that we register on ablockchain on on the steering class andwe were monitoring every transaction andchecking it we created we beautifroutine for rechecking everything afterone day after today's after today's a--a week to see if you could lose anytransaction so and send again as areplacement we have a lot of controlabout that if you send something and itis not registering in one hour we sendagain and we have some some controls butbecause of the 51% attack we need tocheck we needed to check more times andthe same routine is is running yet andprobably will not turn it off because ofthat okay thank youokay thank you another question okaythank you very much see you next yearthank youthank you thank you so much for comingand here is your your Canadian gift okay