What? No Existing Solutions?

Sure there are a lot of existing solutions out there already. But here is the problem: None of them satisfy all of the simple minimum criteria. And so they all suck!

First of all, the common question we get: Isn't government issued ID good for this? Isn't that why we have KYC? Simple answer, NO! Slightly longer answer: You're misunderstanding the problem. KYC identifies you as human, but not unique. One person could easily enter two different KYC twice, first with a driver's license and then with a passport.  And if you have double citizenship you could duplicate this and have four different logons. Plus KYC sucks in many other ways.

OK, second question: What about leveraging KYC plus a national identifier, such as a social security number in the US. Yeah this is the old way of solving the problem. But it doesn't work either.

• Isn't compatible with decentralization (because... governments). 

• Isn't compatible with web3, because most governments won't let us cross reference against their databases. In many countries it's even illegal to even ask for someone's national identifier.

• Won’t work cross-border, because there is no global identifier system (other than passports, and most people actually don't have passports). Web3 is global by it's very nature, so that's a no-go right there.

• And most importantly, won’t work AT ALL with the 1.7 BILLION people that are paperless around the world. They don't have a national identifier to begin with.

Third question we get: Couldn't we just use smart phones? Most people only have one. Well, there is your answer. Not everyone has one. Others have two cell phones, so that makes them able to cheat a uniqueness check. And hackers, who we are really designing for (against) can easily spoof 100 or 1,000 numbers. So unfortunately phone-gating only works for your average user, not for everyone and certainly not against hackers.

But surely there have to be a number of web3 attempts? Yes, there are. Some notable examples include BrightID, Idena Network, Gitcoin Passport, Proof Of Humanity, GoodDollar and WorldCoin. These have all solved uniqueness in their own way. However, they all come with their own set of yet-to-be-solved challenges, including but not limited to 

• Relying on capturing biometrics (which many users don't want to give up)

• Lack of continued liveness check after the initial verification

• Non-user-friendly experiences

• Lack of account recovery strategies

• No support for people who share a device, or don't have a smart phone

• Standalone esoteric solutions without any utility or user adoption

• Reliance on one single protocol strategy

• Lack of qualification of how reliable their uniqueness certificate is

• Plus more...

Check out our more detailed competitor review of the existing key Sybil resistance protocols and their various failings. 

Potential Market Size?

The potential for end user adoption is huge: 350 - 390 million possible users.

• In 2021, the number of internet users worldwide stood at 5 billion, of which 4.5 billion are active social media users. This means that almost two thirds of the global population is currently connected to the world wide web.

• Of these, well over 78% are lower middle class or below, which means that they are either experiencing financial hardship, food insecurity or lives hand-to-mouth with little or no invested savings, and would thus benefit from the opportunity to supplementing their income with UBI.

• We can assume that users that are already using social media would also not hesitate to use a self-sovereign online identity solution - if it gives them further benefits.

• Sum total of 3.5-3.9 billion possible users. 

• If we assume a moderate to low target state adoption of 10%, this leaves us with an addressable market size of 350-390 million users.

• Opportunity to charge a very small signup fee and also an equally small minting fee for users that wish to mint their proof on chain.

Some Use Cases?

We are a SaaS protocol. Our customers include a multitude of protocols and Apps with use cases such as DAOs, DeFi, games, and various other sites who wish to qualify their users as unique and alive.

• DAOs and other governance bodies requiring one-person-one-vote, or requiring human gating, or quadratic voting. There are already thousands of DAOs, with $10 Billion held in DAO treasuries, and 1.7 million governance token holders as of June, 2022.   (source)

• Airdrops, Token launches, ICOs, etc. of which Airdrops are largest and typically range between 10k and 200k users each. If we assume that 50% of these are Sybil accounts, we can expect somewhere betwen 5-100k users to sign up with us for each of the first few major airdrops that require CUBID (with a decreasing marginal signup rate thereafter due to overlapping users.) 

• UBI protocols. There are currently 4-5 active and viable global UBI protocols, with a combined user base above 500,000 users and $2M+ TVL.

• DeFi. The global decentralized finance market size was valued at USD 11.78 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.5% from 2022 to 2030.   (source)

• X-to-Earn such as learn-to-earn, play-to-earn, move-to-earn all require some uniqueness validation to prevent Sybil attacks. Top protocols to benchmark against include Rabbithole, Stepn, Sweatcoin, Axie Infinity, Sandbox, Gods Unchained, Binance Academy, Coinbase Learn.  This whole segment is still nascent and largely untapped. The learn-to-earn category was first out the gate and it alone is currently valued beyond $4Bn.

• Social networks and other web2 sites who wish to qualify their users into an premium verified tier, e.g. Twitter Blue. Or newspapers who wish to reliably give people one free article per week or gambling sites that want to give users $1 per day, and have this work across all platforms. Twitter alone has 400M users. If they adopted CUBID for Blue verification and only 1% signed up, we would still get 4M users overnight. Sites range from Facebook with 1.5Bn users, through Discord / CNN / FOX each with 200-300M monthly average users, to smaller sites like Mastodon with 400k users.

• Many other yet-to-be invented features. What would you do with a web3 where you knew that behind every account there is a unique human?Q