Here in the halls of Blockchain Journal's virtual offices, we've come up with a name for an unsolved blockchain identity problem for which no scalable, technological solution exists as far as we know. We call it "The William Shatner Problem" because, back in July 2020 when a bunch of William Shatner-approved NFTs were posted for sale on Wax.io's NFT marketplace, there was no technological identity standard in place such that buyers could trace any so-called William Shatner NFTs back to the actual William Shatner himself.

As far as Blockchain Journal can tell, this important element of transactional provenance remains technologically unsolved which in turn means that less scalable non-standard workarounds must be applied when such provenance matters in order to avoid fraud (for example, when purchasing digital assets from a seller that's truly authorized to sell those assets). Those workarounds, which do work but are not inherent to blockchain technology, are currently the basis for much of the trust in the world of blockchain today.

So, when Blockchain Journal editor-in-chief David Berlind was invited to interview the co-founder of Wax.io William Quigley (who also co-founded Tether) at the NFT.NYC 2023 Conference, he jumped at the opportunity to see if maybe the technological solution existed but was evading the BCJ team.

According to Quigley, as far as the decentralized ethos of blockchain is concerned, it still remains an unsolved problem. In the interview, Quigley says "One of the challenges with NFTs is understanding the provenance of the item because, while anyone can go on and buy a William Shatner NFT, they would rightly want to know 'Well, did William Shatner actually approve this? Is this really his?'"

Quigley also points out that technologically speaking, this problem tracks closely to the identity problem that was solved in the Web 1.0 era by Certificate Authorities saying "There are third parties that validate that a company is who they say it is like Verisign for example." But reliance on such central authorities or registries to establish such trust is contradictory to the decentralized religion of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As such Quigley also pointed out that "The goals of blockchain [aren't] where [they need] to be. There's still some trust you have to place in the system. You hear 'trustless' a lot but there are very few things that are trustless. Decentralization is a path and not something that someone has fully done yet." And until standards for technologically assuring (a) the authenticity of an identity and (b) the provenance of digital assets that are connected to that identity are developed, Quigley says "non-blockchain forensics" will be a part of the buyer-beware process.

Towards the end of the interview, Quigley tells David that NFTs have all sorts of magical properties and applications that are not widely understood and that the buying and selling of digital art, music, and video are just the first of many applications to come.

To watch the video version of this podcast or read its full-text transcript, go to:

https://blockchainjournal.com/interview/decentralization-trust-still-not-fully-solved-blockchain-says-cofounder-tether-and-wax/

The video can also be watched on Blockchain Journal's YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8y_jrQMmUc