With cybersecurity breaches on the rise globally, the need to protect digital assets—personal, government, healthcare, education, and businesses—is growing exponentially.
Global cybersecurity services' market size is expected to reach US$192.7 billion by 2028, registering a compound annual growth rate of 10.2% over the forecast period, according to a recent report by Grand View Research, Inc. Continued cybersecurity breaches on the enterprise and individual levels, and the subsequent need to address the vulnerabilities in networks, apps and systems, are the factors expected to drive the growth.
That's where Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc. (LQID:CSE; LQAVF:OTCQB), a digital identity company specializing in "supporting Self-Sovereign Identity" (SSI) is stepping in to help consumers take control over storage and use of personal data in protecting their digital credentials, as well as give brand names another innovative way to grow their customer base.
"Our fundamental belief is that digital identity and ownership of that is a basic human right," said David Lucatch, Liquid Avatar's CEO.
"We are used to owning and managing and keeping in a secure space or even in a wallet our personal identifying information," he noted. "And that might be a driver's license…a social security number…all those cards we keep somewhere safe. The challenge is as the world turns to the internet more and more, how do you prove who you are?"
Liquid Avatar's advanced technology addresses this issue within a highly secure infrastructure. When opening an account with Liquid Avatar, the customer provides, through biometric facial recognition, a verifiable way in which to prove who they are. Liquid Avatar makes it easy for customers to start and maintain the process of managing their SSI/digital identity, while giving them the ability to share it with friends, family, colleagues and others.
The Liquid Avatar app became available as an open beta app globally in the Google Play and Apple App Store in February 2021. Phase 1 has been completed and is currently being evaluated to identify "what changes are needed to accelerate growth," Lucatch said. He believes that as the company offers new features, regular releases will provide users with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with existing features "before moving on to more comprehensive services."
The company stated that over 13,000 people have downloaded the program as of May 2021. They are working with organizations like The Campus Agency in Boston to increase user growth at colleges and universities, virtually and on campus, in the US.
Liquid Avatar offers its products and services at no cost to users of their app, and it doesn't sell or rent personal information. It generates revenues through permission-based offers and other services through the more than 500 brand relationships it has already secured. Customers can purchase gift cards and earn cash back from a wide selection of brands, such as GAP, Applebee's, Banana Republic, Hello Fresh, The Body Shop and Indochino. The list of brands is growing quickly, which will help the company build a robust, recurring revenue stream. The brands, in turn, benefit from being able to connect with "real" consumers, not bots or fake accounts.
Liquid Avatar is currently working on a business solution called the Liquid Avatar Verifiable Credentials Ecosystem that will license its digital wallet technology to third parties to create a Software as a Service (SaaS), potentially high-margin recurring revenue program.
The Platform
The Liquid Avatar platform allows customers to create high-quality, digital icon representations of the various facets of their online personalities and identity, which can be used to share what they want, when they want and with whom they want. Customers can also create digital wallets to manage and store a wide range of verifiable identity and access credentials, and to take their conventional identity online, allowing them to prove who they are just as they would currently do in the physical world.
Liquid Avatar is making strides in providing identification solutions to many sectors. For example, in early June the company announced that it joined the steering committee, as a founding member, for Cardea, a Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) project, "helping to grow the open-source community and capabilities of its codebase. Cardea is a complete ecosystem that can be used by public health authorities, governments, organizations, and industries to enable people to maintain their privacy while holding and using an easily verifiable, trustworthy, unalterable proof of a health test or vaccination." This is timely as one of the first projects to provide the related technology and guidance for implementation of the recently announced Global COVID Certificate Network, also from LFPH, Cardea helps facilitate the safe and free movement of individuals globally during the COVID pandemic.
Trust Triangle
Liquid Avatar is offering its expertise in real-world decentralized solutions to the open-source community at LFPH and recently announced the expansion of its Liquid Avatar Verifiable Credentials Ecosystem (LAVCE) to create what management believes is one of the world's first digital identity consumer centric SaaS platforms that supports all verifiable credentials stakeholders, including holders, issuers and verifiers within a "Trust Triangle," Lucatch said.
He explained that a Liquid Avatar is a multilayered, visual technology icon or token that contains permission-based, private data that can be linked, authenticated, and shared. Liquid Avatars include a visual or presentation layer, public data layer, private data layer and a security and authentication layer.
As a customer "goes through the process, they will, over time, provide more and more information to prove who they are…Inside the Liquid Avatar ecosystem, a user is verified. You can only have one account. In contrast, Facebook, Gmail, or Twitter, you could have multiple accounts," Lucatch explained.
Lucatch said that keeping track of the many social media accounts, user IDs and passwords, consumers have a real challenge that could potentially expose them to fraud, or at the very least, cause frustration. Despite there being only one account per Liquid Avatar customer, there is considerable flexibility in the company's offerings because customers can create multiple avatars for a variety of uses. They are able to select from thousands of combinations of facial features to create digital representations of themselves. These are secure because access is gained only through biometric facial recognition.
Liquid Avatar just announced that it has made an investment in Indicio, a development collaborator of the LAVCE platform and a company that specializes in the "development and hosting services for decentralized identity." Lucatch noted, "Our investment in Indicio.tech is a strategic decision to support a leader in the decentralized identity community build interoperable, privacy-preserving identity ecosystems. The digital identity market is changing as companies of all sizes are now seeing decentralized solutions work in the real world. With our investment in, and as part of the Indicio Network, we're working to drive community adoption and ecosystem expansion by making it quick and easy to use verifiable credentials to handle test data in a way that earns people's trust, keeps them safe, and helps open up society."
Liquid Avatar has 106.1 million shares outstanding and 155 million fully diluted. Management owns approximately 28%.
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Disclosure:
1) Deborah Thompson compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an independent contractor. She and/or members of her household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: Liquid Avatar Technologies Inc. She and/or members of her household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. Her company has a financial relationship with the following companies referred to in this article: None.
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