Business
Gatenox: Seamless, Privacy-first Decentralized Identity Built on Aleph Zero
Jan 17, 2022
AI Summary
Led by a former founder and CEO of Coinfirm, Gatenox aims to become a go-to decentralized identity wallet for exchanges, fintech companies, and banks. Users, on the other hand, will be able to profit from sharing their data.
Gatenox is a new-generation decentralized identity wallet that allows exchanges, applications, Web 3.0 services, as well as fintechs and banks to integrate a seamless, near-zero cost, instant Know-Your-Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes. Just as importantly, users who do decide to share their data with a third party through Gatenox will be able to profit from this activity.
Gatenox Makes it Easier for Users to Own Their Data
According to Bloomberg, big investors with some $100 trillion are getting crypto-curious. Somebody needs to help them seamlessly connect with crypto and metaverse worlds in a native way—and Gatenox aims to fill this gap.
Current KYC/AML processes are far from being optimal. They’re costly and ineffective. With Gatenox, customers will onboard once and use their data on multiple occasions—which will ultimately lower the costs to almost zero per user. And while the cost argument is a significant selling point, the Gatenox team seeks to focus just as strongly on conversion and data ownership. “We see customers dropping out of the process quite often. In most cases, it’s a cumbersome, boring sequence of steps that one has to execute on any given occasion. With Gatenox, we aim to significantly increase the conversion rate and provide customers with an incredible experience”, says Pawel Kuskowski, founder and CEO of Gatenox. “We want to build a platform with instant, frictionless onboarding, and propose it as a better solution to over 24’000 regulated crypto companies and their users.”
Over 20 Years of AML Experience Brought to Crypto
Paweł is a founder and former CEO of Coinfirm—a leading SaaS AML, blockchain, and crypto analytics business that has raised over $20M in funding through seed, ICO, Series A, and B rounds. Mr. Kuskowski is a former Global Head of AML for Royal Bank of Scotland; he also served at UBS, AIG, and has a combined 20 years of experience in compliance and AML.
Pawel’s business partner on the Gatenox journey is Wojciech Zatorski. Formerly engaged as Honeywell’s Systems Engineer, he joined Pioneer Investments as a technical expert only to become a Vice President of the firm several years later. Since 2013, Wojciech has been building Neontri (formerly Braintri), which is one of the companies behind BLIK—a revolutionary payment system used by over nine million users and 11 banks across CEE—as well as different mobile apps delivered for financial institutions.
“While Gatenox is still in very early stages, we’re convinced that Pawel’s and Wojciech’s track record will bring the concept to full-blown fruition. Having worked with a plethora of customer-friendly products, their team will be able to streamline the KYC and AML processes for both sides of the aisle”, says Antoni Zolciak, co-founder of Aleph Zero. “Gatenox founders share over 20 years of combined experience in mobile technology, financial sector, security, and KYC/AML—including crypto compliance. The team is also actively engaged with the latest global regulatory developments.”
Compliance and Privacy to Go Hand-in-Hand
“We all know how powerful smartphones are nowadays. In addition to certain features such as reading biometric documents with NFC or geolocation, we feel that not enough is being done in the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) space”, Wojciech explains. “The solution, proposed by the European Union, will make one-time passwords non-compliant when logging into a variety of financial services platforms—in favor of biometrics.”
The goal of PSD2 is to increase the security of any digital transaction, and, therefore, decrease the amount of fraud. The challenge, however, will also lie in ensuring the highest possible privacy standards whenever biometric solutions are concerned. Aleph Zero’s MPC-based privacy technology, Liminal, will allow all users of Gatenox to prove that relevant information is correct without revealing the contents of that information, as well as ultimately provide the security that’s on par with hardware wallets.
In addition, the data will be owned—at all times—by individuals themselves. They choose if, how, and when to share their data—directly with the businesses, without any third parties involved.
