“To achieve true mass adoption, you need to reconcile TradFi and DeFi, which I find increasingly difficult, and also be ready for compliance. There were a lot of blockchains around 2017-2018, but I didn’t feel that any of them seriously addressed the regulatory challenges. To fill this gap, we’re building Concordium,” said Lars Seier Christensen in Cointelegraph’s recent AMA live session.
Concordium is a public, scientifically backed, layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain with a unique protocol-level ID layer. While early generations of blockchain technologies allowed for user anonymity, which is considered unacceptable by many established businesses and financial firms, Concordium takes a unique approach to user identification.
“We let people choose the identity provider they’re comfortable with, next they go through standard ID processes, and finally they can have more privacy than on other blockchains,” Lars said. “Pointers can track transactions and activities, but it’s always in your control to share that information with other users.”
With increasing threats from AI, deepfakes, and fraud in virtual environments, KYC protocols have become even more necessary. “ID is always going to be at the center of regulatory requirements,” Lars noted. “So we’re building the infrastructure around that core regulatory requirement. We’re developing a suite of KYC tools so that people can add KYC to their needs and issue digital certificates that can be used as access control or verifiable credentials. A person can prove where they work or that they have a degree from a particular university.”
On the technical front, Concordium’s consensus mechanism, called ConcordiumBFT, is based on the HotStuff consensus protocol. It ensures higher throughput, more consistent blocks, and most importantly, transaction finality, which many blockchains lack and which is critical for serious use cases. ConcordiumBFT addresses this rollback risk with its advanced cryptographic techniques and protocols.
Concordium’s comprehensive, compliance-ready toolbox supports multiple use cases – enterprise, DeFi, NFT, GameFi and other projects with provenance and age verification.
Some of these projects are already being successfully built on top of Concordium: “We have Mysome.id, a self-service tool that aims to solve the problem of fake profiles on social media,” said Lars. “This solution allows users to verify their own profiles without waiting for the platform to respond or paying for identity verification. We’ve started with LinkedIn and plan to expand to other platforms.
Another project is our institutional-grade DEX, Concordex, with a variety of options, including a multi-sig wallet solution for managing assets. Because it’s built on the same underlying protocols as Concordium, it’s compliant, easy to use, and an ideal starting point for institutions to gain confidence and prepare for any regulatory changes that might keep them out of this market.”
The carbon credit market, known for its opacity and fraudulent activity, can also benefit from Concordium’s blockchain solutions. By using the technology to create unique identities for emissions and assets, the path from carbon credit to real-world action becomes more transparent and accountable. The ClimaFi project, for example, is using this to restore English peatlands while providing tangible local benefits to carbon credit investors.
Concordium’s blockchain technology also has applications in the energy industry. Its collaboration with Energinet, the Danish public company and national operator for electricity and natural gas, provides a use case where hourly electricity trading between companies and producers can be made transparent and traceable using blockchain, thereby enhancing their sustainability strategies. Concordium plans to extend similar models to other European energy grids to solve significant cross-border challenges.
“We are Layer1, so we welcome all projects that build on Concordium, from enterprise to Web3 native use cases,” says Lars. “Especially those that link data to identity or to specific actors for compliance and monetization reasons. Examples are projects based on health data or gaming applications where you have obligations for certain jurisdictions or age groups, or projects with real world assets (RWA) where ownership and any transfers need to be clear”.
“At the moment, DeFi may seem like a drop in the ocean compared to traditional finance,” said Lars when asked about the vision of DeFi in the near future. He added: “I think the value of TradFi will be quite substantial as people get more comfortable with DeFi. And we should stay on the right side of regulatory compliance. The reward for that will be mass adoption, scalability and functionality for DeFi.”
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