When I was invited to speak at the International Blockchain Conference in Dubai at the beginning of the year, it really didn’t take much convincing to get me there — because blockchain — and Dubai — right?!
So after a very, very long trip which included a 12-hour layover in Jordan, I arrived in Dubai — a part of the world I’d never visited — to speak about our expansion into the blockchain — a technology that, until recently, I wasn’t very familiar with. The experience had a fresh, promising newness that was palpable from the onset.
The event hosted more than 1,000 attendees from all over the world — including Europe, Russia, India, and Africa. I used my time on stage to announce that Kairos has been working on an identity verification product supported by the blockchain which uses our face recognition technology — we’re proposing to use an anonymous, secure version of your actual identity to be used for verification in financial transactions and beyond.
I explained that we are all living in what at Kairos, we call the Identity Economy™ — a global culture wherein our identities are at the forefront of modern commerce. I also offered that while the monetization of identity can be amazing for generating marketing insights and useful in countless business applications, it has the potential to leave us open to biometric identity misappropriation.
I’m pleased to report that after my casually toned talk and thoughtfully designed slides, the audience seemed very excited — even generating investment opportunities for the business. The entire energy in the place was extraordinarily positive and exhilarating.
I was asked to attend an “after event” meet up at an incredible resort on one of the man-made Palm Islands. Let me say, I’ve been to a lot of places, all over the world — and Dubai is dominating the hospitality game! They just get it so right. It’s the best hotel experience I’ve ever had.
I also had the opportunity to visit the Burj Khalifa building, the tallest building in the world. Being atop something so colossal, which obviously took massive amounts of planning, funding, and courage to pull off — I couldn’t help feeling like it was the defining moment of my trip. I became instantly reflective of my journey, recalling that Kairos started as a provider of timekeeping products, and realizing that every product we have developed since, has been driven by market demand and created of customer necessity.
This Biometric Blockchain™ offering (as we’ve coined it) is another step in the direction of on-demand progress, and exemplifies what we do best — which is take the leap into something different, to pioneer something new.
Ad Astra!
Brian Brackeen
CEO, Kairos
The article was originally published on Medium. It is reposted here with the permission of the author, Brian Brackeen.
