CXOTi day has engaged in an exclusive interview with 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 available in the market?
At Dhiway, we build products and services that drive faith, confidence and absolute security throughout the digital world. To achieve this, we reimagine the challenge of trust deficits present in our interactions and attempt to solve it for scale.
The CORD blockchain is a token-free blockchain infrastructure available for applications and services that rely 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 amounts of data will be exchanged in machine-to-machine transactions and thus secure proof systems that establish reliable transactions are essential for the model to be adopted on a large scale.
#MARK Studio is our authentication platform that gives the three key stakeholders in any digital interaction the opportunity 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 basis for a digital transformation from older systems to more future-ready ones.
How do you work with companies and public bodies? Can you give some examples of such collaborations?
Dhiway is a leader in blockchain technology that helps businesses and governments solve critical challenges using population-scale approaches. A critical aspect of blockchain-based technology architecture for digital trust is the creation of ecosystems. To achieve this, we collaborate with private and public enterprises as well as various public agencies across specific business verticals around, among other things, education, skills, livelihoods and employment.
Over the years, our approach has been to work with partners to establish some beacon initiatives – prototypes and pilot projects that quickly demonstrate the return on investment through the digital transformation, as well as the value available to participants in the ecosystem. The digital transformation initiatives of the Union and state governments are creating opportunities to demonstrate the change available through adopting digital credentials to establish authentic data flows.
How did Dhiway develop the winning prototype based on verifiable credentials? What benefits do verifiable credentials offer individuals and organizations?
Concepts like breach of trust, privacy, confidentiality, etc. are difficult to explain until there are tangible examples that help everyone understand the need to end the status quo. At Dhiway, we have designed and developed prototypes that reflect domains where we feel the introduction of verifiable credentials has the greatest impact. And the two recent public prototypes we created reflect this intention.
With ONDC, we built a prototype that enabled buyers and sellers on the platform to trade with increased security for the goods and services.
At the Skill-A-Thon organized by the EkStep Foundation, we collaborated with a number of companies to design and build a workflow that demonstrates how a job seeker designs and shares all of their accomplishments in response to a job posting.
Both of these are everyday scenarios. And verifiable credentials – which repackage the data with cryptographic signatures, allowing participants on each side of an interaction to achieve a level of trust and engage with increased security. Verifiable credentials anchored on a blockchain represent immutable data records – so that a verifier of the data exchange can be sure that the data has not been tampered with.
Can you share more about “Digital CV” and how it will help the informal sector? How does Dhiway plan to promote their adoption in the workforce?
Each one of us builds up a set of skills through knowledge and work experience. This doesn’t happen overnight – we work through it all our lives. Currently, while the formal sector has some established rituals and means of offering proof of knowledge (degrees, certificates, etc.), proof of experience (work experience documents, 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 trade and is looking for better opportunities. Today, the opportunities available to them are likely to be hyperlocal and based on credibility gained through referral and word of mouth. The skills and knowledge they have are also unclearly documented because the expected evidence (as above) is not very well documented. So if we match the available taxonomy of skills (available via NSDC and others) to be able to place this skilled person in a particular role, many verifiable credentials can be issued confirming their workplace experience, knowledge and abilities. 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. Staffing agencies and employee engagement platforms can help them discover great opportunities that can have a positive impact on their finance agency and life.
And again, this is an archetype. We see that being able to create easily consumable tools that generate a positive value engages the interest of stakeholders in the systems. Individuals are interested in the adoption if it results in empowerment, organizations tend to move the status quo if it aligns with their strategic interests. Our products and prototypes examine today’s 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 see are:
- New needs for tokenless blockchain networks that form the basis for citizen-centric services built around digital public infrastructure
- Adoption of blockchain for use beyond digital identifiers that are not just digital IDs but reusable content that allows the holder to participate seamlessly in transactions
- Digital transactions across multiple and large trust ecosystems managed by both public and private enterprises, thereby creating a high-volume data exchange-based economy
Can you share challenges that Dhiway had faced while developing his products and how you overcame those challenges?
We quickly realized that credentials are a part, an important part, of the entire workflow for administrative operations in education. So along with demonstrating the capabilities of our #MARK Studio credential platform, we also built easy integrations for existing software platforms. Educational institutions, HR operating systems, payroll systems, ERP/CRM systems are now all SaaS-based and allow for extensions and integrations to be built in so that data streams can be exchanged and authenticated data objects created through anchoring on the blockchain.
Another challenge has been the pace of the digital transformation. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to transform the established, older systems with a newer approach that provides a higher degree of risk reduction for the institution while enabling tamper-proof, secure credentials. Stakeholders are often interested in smaller and iterative approaches rather than a big bang transformation – this is a challenge because the recurring benefits of investing in this approach are visible when large ecosystems are moved.
What are Dhiway’s plans for future fundraising and growth?
Dhiway started with a bootstrap funding from friends and relatives of around USD 500,000 in early 2020. It raised a pre-seed round of around USD 1 million in late October 2022.
The company has created and manages an ongoing platform called CORD and has its own Digital Credentialing Application called #MARKStudio which is starting to gain interesting traction. The plan is to create more applications on the CORD platform through collaborative approaches with other domain institutions – to build on CORD. We will also focus on our credentials application to address the larger markets in the areas of education, skills and workplace solutions.
We look forward to leveraging the platform to offer diverse solutions to a wide range of industries and their constituents to help them discover/inquire/engage/ and transact – in a way that can optimize both time and cost.
To help create this environment, we are raising a Seed/A round in early June 2023 in the amount of USD 50 million.
What are the most important 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 the workplace.
We are in continuous collaboration with NPCI for payments, ONDC for Digital Commerce, EKstep and Ndear for the Skills and Education area. There are several pilots with various institutions in advanced completion.
The larger vision of Dhiway is to create a platform that addresses trusted digital interactions that are scalable, immutable and globally verifiable at population scale. With the interactions we have had to date with major institutions in the public and private space, we are confident that this vision will be realised.
How does Dhiway address concerns about the security and privacy of blockchain technology, particularly in the context of public digital tools that may hold sensitive personal or financial data?
It is important to be aware that a blockchain provides an immutable store of data records. So any dataset that can be classified as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Sensitive Information should not be embedded in the chain. Dhiway uses the Persistent Universal Identifiers on the CORD blockchain to resolve to records of transaction events. The PII data is not on the chain itself. This ensures that even if public verification of a record is possible, inadvertent disclosure of personal information is prohibited. The CORD blockchain itself is delivered as a cloud-based infrastructure using available public cloud technologies. The cloud infrastructure security handbook has matured to the point where good fencing techniques are available to administrators to secure the infrastructure from a variety of large-scale attacks.
What is the long-term vision for Dhiway and how does it plan to achieve it?
Dhiway started with a bootstrap funding from friends and relatives of around USD 500,000 in early 2020. It raised a pre-seed round of around USD 1 million in late October 2022. The company has created and manages an ongoing platform called CORD and has its own Digital Credentialing Application called #MARKStudio, which is starting to gain interesting traction. The plan is to create more applications on the CORD platform through collaborative approaches with other domain institutions – to build on CORD. We will also focus our credentials application to address the larger markets in the areas of education, skills and workplace solutions. We look forward to leveraging the platform to offer diverse solutions to a wide range of industries and their constituents to help them discover/inquire/engage/ and transact – in a way that can optimize both time and cost. To help create this environment, we are raising a Seed/A round in early June 2023 in the amount of USD 50 million.
