CXOToday participated in an exclusive interview with Mr. Pradeep KP, Co-Founder and CEO of Dhiway
Can you tell us more about Dhiway’s products and how they differ from other blockchain solutions currently on the market?
At Dhiway, we create products and services that inspire faith, confidence and absolute security throughout the digital world. To achieve this, we rethink the trust deficit challenge, present our interactions, and try to solve it at scale.
The CORD Blockchain is a token-free blockchain infrastructure available for applications and services that depend on data authenticity and audit trails to create robust digital data exchange models. We believe that this is the future of digital interactions, where large volumes of data will be exchanged in machine-to-machine transactions, and thus secure proof systems that establish reliable transactions are critical to the model to be adopted in scale.
#MARK Studio is our authentication platform that enables the three key stakeholders in any digital interaction to exchange and verify data without the need for third parties. Using a combination of the CORD blockchain and open standards such as Verifiable Credentials, digital data can be transformed into data streams that are easily verifiable, frictionless and tamper-proof. This provides the foundation for digital transformation from legacy systems to more future-ready ones.
How do you work with businesses and government authorities? Can you give some examples of such cooperation?
Dhiway is a leader in blockchain technology, helping enterprises and governments solve key challenges using population-scale approaches. A critical aspect of the blockchain-based technology architecture for digital trust is the creation of ecosystems. To achieve this, we work with private and public enterprises as well as various government agencies in specific business verticals around the provision of education, skills, livelihoods and employment, among others.
Over the years, our approach has been to work with partners to create some flagship initiatives – prototypes and pilots that quickly demonstrate the return on investment through digital transformation, as well as the value available to ecosystem participants. The digital transformation initiatives of the Union Government and the State Governments are creating opportunities to demonstrate the change available through the adoption of digital authentication to establish authentic data flows.
How did Dhiway develop the winning prototype based on verifiable credentials? What benefits do Verifiable Credentials offer to individuals and organizations?
Concepts such as trust deficit, privacy, confidentiality, etc. are difficult to explain until there are tangible working examples that help everyone understand the need to end the status quo. At Dhiway, we design and develop prototypes that reflect domains where we believe the introduction of Verifiable Credentials has the greatest impact. Both recent public prototypes we’ve built reflect this intent.
With ONDC, we built a prototype that allowed buyers and sellers on the platform to transact with increased security of goods and services.
At the Skill-A-Thon hosted by the EkStep Foundation, we collaborated with a number of companies to design and build a workflow that demonstrates how a job applicant designs and shares all of their accomplishments in response to a job posting.
Both are everyday scenarios. And Verifiable Credentials – which repackages data with cryptographic signatures, allowing participants on both sides of an interaction to gain a level of trust and engage with increased security. Verifiable credentials anchored in a blockchain are immutable records of data – so the verifier of the data exchange can be sure that the data has not been tampered with.
Can you share more about Digital Resume and how it will help the informal sector? How does Dhiway plan to promote their adoption among the workforce?
Each of us builds a skill set through knowledge and work experience. This does not happen overnight – we work throughout our lives. Currently, while the formal sector has some established rituals and means of offering proof of knowledge (degrees, certificates, etc.), proof of experience (service records, pay slips) or proof of skills (badges and certificates) , the informal sector has a gap in this area.
Take the example of a person who is an electrician by profession and is looking for better opportunities. Today, the opportunities available to them are likely to be hyperlocal and based on trust gained through referrals and word of mouth. The skills and knowledge they have are also vaguely documented, as the expected evidence (as above) is not very well documented. So if we match the available taxonomy of skills (available through NSDC and others) to correctly place that qualified individual in a particular role, then many verifiable certificates can be issued attesting to their experience, knowledge and ability on the job. These credentials can then be repackaged using a standard template to build a resume that depends less on word of mouth and more on verifiable data. Recruiting agencies and employee engagement platforms can help them discover good opportunities that can positively impact their financial agency and life.
And again, it’s an archetype. We see that the ability to create easy-to-use tools that generate positive value engages the interest of stakeholders in the systems. Individuals are interested in adoption if it leads to empowerment, organizations tend to change the status quo if it aligns with their strategic interests. Our products and prototypes explore the current digital world with a new perspective and demonstrate that positive impact on a national scale is possible.
Can you share some trends in the blockchain space?
Some of the interesting trends we are seeing are:
- Emerging needs for tokenless blockchain networks that provide the foundation for citizen-centric services built around digital public infrastructure
- Adoption of blockchain for uses beyond digital identifiers, which are not simply digital identifiers, but reusable content, allowing the holder to seamlessly engage in transactions
- Digital transactions in multiple and large trust ecosystems managed by both public and private enterprises, thus creating an economy based on high-volume data exchange
Can you share the challenges Dhiway faced while developing its products and how you overcame those challenges?
We quickly realized that authentication is one part, an important part of the entire administrative operations workflow in education. So, along with demonstrating the capabilities of our #MARK Studio authentication platform, we’ve also created easy integrations for existing software platforms. Educational institutions, HR operational systems, payroll systems, ERP/CRM systems are now SaaS-based and allow embedding of extensions and integrations enabling the exchange of data streams and the creation of authenticated data objects by anchoring to the blockchain.
Another challenge was the speed of digital transformation. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to transform existing, legacy systems with a newer approach that offers a higher degree of risk mitigation for the institution while enabling tamper-resistant, secure credentials. Stakeholders are often interested in smaller and iterative approaches than big bang transformation – this is challenging because the iterative benefits of investing in this approach are visible when large ecosystems shift.
What are Dhiway’s plans for future fundraising and growth?
Dhiway started with seed funding from friends and relatives amounting to around USD 500,000 in early 2020. In late October 2022, it raised a seed round of around USD 1 million.
The company created and operates a working platform called CORD and has its own digital authentication application called #MARKStudio, which is starting to gain some interesting traction. The plan is to build more applications on the CORD platform through collaborative approaches with other institutions in the domain – to build CORD. We will also focus our authentication application to address the larger markets in the areas of education, skills and workplace solutions.
We look forward to using the platform to provide diverse solutions to a wide range of industries and their constituents to help them discover/inquire/on/and transact – in a way that can optimize time and cost.
To help create this environment, we are raising a Seed / A-round in early June 2023 for an amount of USD 50 million.
What are the key partnerships or collaborations that Dhiway has established so far, and how have these partnerships helped your company achieve its goals?
Our focus is on industry verticals that include payments, digital commerce, education, skills and workspace.
We are in continuous collaboration with NPCI for payments, ONDC for digital commerce, EKstep and Ndear for skills and education. There are several pilot projects with various institutions in advanced stages of completion.
Dhiway’s broader vision is towards creating a platform that addresses trusted digital interactions that are scalable, immutable and globally verifiable at population scale. With the interactions we have had so far with larger institutions in the public and private space, we are confident that this vision will be realized.
How does Dhiway address the security and privacy concerns of blockchain technology, especially in the context of public digital services that may store sensitive personal or financial data?
It is important to be aware that blockchain provides an immutable storage of data records. So any data set that can be classified as personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive information should not be anchored in the chain. Dhiway uses the persistent universal identifiers of the CORD blockchain to allow records of transactional events. PII data is not on the chain itself. This ensures that although public inspection of a record is possible, inadvertent disclosure of personal information is prohibited. The CORD blockchain itself is provided as a cloud infrastructure using available public cloud technologies. The cloud infrastructure security playbook has matured to the point where administrators have good defense techniques to secure the infrastructure from a range of attacks at scale.
What is the long-term vision for Dhiway and how does it plan to achieve it?
Dhiway started with seed funding from friends and relatives amounting to around USD 500,000 in early 2020. It raised a seed round of around USD 1 million at the end of October 2022. The company created and operates a working platform called CORD and its own a digital authentication app called #MARKStudio that is starting to gain some interesting traction. The plan is to build more applications on the CORD platform through collaborative approaches with other institutions in the domain – to build CORD. We will also focus our authentication application to address the larger markets in the areas of education, skills and workplace solutions. We look forward to using the platform to provide diverse solutions to a wide range of industries and their constituents to help them discover/inquire/on/and transact – in a way that can optimize time and cost. To help create this environment, we are raising a Seed / A-round in early June 2023 for an amount of USD 50 million.