Why do we need verified data?

One of the most important problems facing the world of blockchain projects is the proliferation of fake identities and claims, and the resulting difficulty of separating reputable players from the ones relying on fraud and impersonation. The consequences of this are grave and range from inefficiencies of “sorting the wheat from the chaff” among crypto projects, up to direct financial loss resulting from impersonation or outright business-related fraud. Fake profiles, websites and tokens that pretend to be real, illegitimate team members, projects, and tokens proliferate. Alternatively, and just as important is the instance where legitimate very early-stage projects and investors could appear as untrue or, even worse, appear as scam.

It is interesting that currently data in the corporate world is validated through a mechanism similar to what in the blockchain world is known as “staking”: when someone vouches for the truthfulness of a particular set of data while receiving financial incentive for providing such reference and risking a financial loss if the data is challenged and proven wrong. For example, auditors are paid to provide financial audits. They provide a confirmation of the truthfulness of data and stake their “reputation” on it. But what they are staking in reality is not their reputation, but the value of the potential negative financial consequences of regulatory fines and loss of future income (or “slashing” in blockchain speak). The process of engaging auditors (or lawyers) is long and cumbersome, expensive, and therefore done rarely (usually once a year) and only affordable to (and required from) larger companies that generate a meaningful amount of revenue. In the modern society there is no convenient mechanism to do this for earlier stage companies or for smaller and more diverse chunks of corporate data, as the current “staking” mechanisms are very inefficient.

But the blockchain technology changes this. It makes it possible to reduce dramatically the cost of administering the staking process and opening it to a much broader variety of uses, as well as to democratise who could provide the staking and opening it up to a much broader variety of agents that may in turn provide access to more diverse areas of knowledge. It also enables more complex relationships with respect to data validation whereby any entity that needs a certain piece of data validated can provide bounties to attract the services of validators.

Based on the above realisation, KANDO Technologies has set on a mission to create a platform for storing and supplying on- and off-chain performance and identity data (initially for blockchain and crypto, as well as venture startup projects), which is generated and validated through a decentralised mechanism involving rewards, staking, and slashing, and where each set of data carries a validation score allowing the users of data (human or machine) to have a measurable score of the truthfulness of data which they are consuming.