We're excited to announce our new cryptocurrency endeavour for Signata, with the release of a new ERC20 token called SATA!
When we first started the Signata Crypto project years ago we had floated the idea of creating a cryptocurrency of our own to work with our product. We always shot down our own ideas though, because creating a token for the sake of creating a token was never our intent. We even considered that the token could function as an indirect payment for Signata itself, but even then that's just not a value-add, it's just adding a layer of abstraction onto an existing end-to-end payment system.
The strongest idea we had was what we now call Dex509: bringing Public Key Infrastructure into the blockchain. But a carbon-copy of PKI functionality onto a blockchain would serve little benefit beyond just operating one normally, so we went back to the drawing board.
The realisation we came to was that all of these identity services in the market are all intertwined and related in various ways, but tangled. The pains we were experiencing building authentication and authorization into Signata Crypto and Signata MFA were what drove us to consider all of the IdAM stack for our cryptocurrency, not just a single service. If you've ever added firebase authentication to a service (and don't get me wrong, firebase is fantastic), you'll know how frustrating it is to have to keep extending your own service to accomodate the variations in OpenID Connect implementations with 3rd parties, authentication contexts, and the control rescinded to Google for a large portion of the processes.
So what does SATA actually do?
The main concept behind our token is facilitation - identity providers will pay and receive SATA tokens for the delivery of services via smart contracts. Individuals will optionally submit SATA as a form of payment to service providers. SATA tokens will be submitted to smart contracts and exchanged for NFTs representing identity claims of authorizations.
SATA itself is the backbone for these services to operate in a distributed context, however we also don't want providers to need to define these contracts themselves, which is why we're also building an Identity and Access Marketplace. In conjunction with this token we will publish smart contracts and pre-built services to provide drop-in implementations for developers. Dex509 will provide the next generation of PKI that no longer costs millions to run and solve the most common problem with PKI - it struggles to scale. DeREx (our Decentralized Rights Exchange) will provide optional levels of authentication, identity collection, and authorization to service providers with the control still held by the user.
All of these tools, services, and the marketplace are bundled together in what we're calling the Identity Guard & Anonymity Framework, or IdGAF. And yes, we chose that name for the ultimate reason that service providers shouldn't give a fudge about their user's identity information unless they absolutely need to. For a lot of services we need to assuredly identify individuals accessing the system to guarantee they only see information that they're meant to, but we don't need to know their email address, phone number, or name - those have become substitutes for identities just because they happen to be unique and difficult but not impossible to spoof. But a cryptographic keypair is unique, next to impossible to spoof unless you compromise the user's systems, and it's naturally non-personally identifiable.
Next steps
The reaction of the community to the release of SATA has been incredible and overwhelming to say the least. We're at the stage now that we need to aggressively build the company to support our vision sooner, and with that I ask for some patience with us for now - we'll bring in more staff to keep the community engagement flowing and developers to get our first proof of concept released.
We are also going to release liquidity pooling incentives to further increase token supply to the market with minimal disruption, and we will be locking our company reserve tokens to be released on a schedule as well. We just want to ensure that all outcomes are factored in and that the smart contracts themselves are suitable for our needs and thoroughly tested. Please stay tuned for the announcement of these token schedule updates.
If you want to check out the SATA token or our communities, here are some links:
Project website & whitepaper: https://sata.technology/
Etherscan listing: https://etherscan.io/token/0x3ebb4a4e91ad83be51f8d596533818b246f4bee1
Currently listed on UNI V2: https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?use=v1?outputCurrency=0x3ebb4A4e91Ad83BE51F8d596533818b246F4bEe1
Dextools: https://www.dextools.io/app/uniswap/pair-explorer/0xbc00e708c407d7633f7504434e74c13e171de7f1
