Icelandic online identity management startup Authenteq has offered its blockchain-based authentication technology to help website administrators ban trolls for good. The new system called Trollteq is essentially a repackaged version of the core authentication product with a few tweaks.
Authenteq's technology provides a fully automated way of creating an “online ID,” which involves taking a selfie and reading the information stored in the NFC chip of your passport in order to compare the photos. The ID information is then stored encrypted in a blockchain, so that no one, including Authenteq itself, can access it without permission.
By installing Trollteq on their websites, the administrators would only have to ban the offenders once, without worrying about them returning under different names.
“Some of the benefits of Trollteq is that you can limit offenders who violate the rules or terms of a website, to only one account,” Authenteq co-founder and CEO Kári Thor Runarsson told tech.eu. “Typically a person only has one "real" identity which is used to sign up to Authenteq. If that person is banned, they cannot simply sign up for a new online account with a new email and continue their behaviour under a new identity. One difference between Authenteq ID and Trollteq is in the setup and admin features, as the online admins can ban users directly from their system.”
Trollteq's pricing will depend on the scope and volume of verification, but won't exceed “cents per user.” When logging in to a website, the user flagged as a troll would have to submit “claims,” i.e. parts of its identity saved in Autenteq's blockchain, which will be verified against the stored values.
“Any website or commenting system such as Disqus can instantly add Trollteq to their site or customers–we can scale up to a billion identity authentications in under 90 seconds,” Runarsson said. “This means we are robust enough to handle even Twitter or Facebook user IDs.”
Founded in 2015, Authenteq has raised about $2 million in funding to date. Its authentication system has been out of beta for about a month, but it's already being used by “about a dozen online services,” Runarsson said. The company is also in talks with “a large insurance company and automobile maker” about integration possibilities.
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