Interview - Cole Davis

KERICONF26 Interviews · 1:54

0:00 I'm Cole Davis. I am the founder and CEO of SwitchCord. I'm a lawyer and

0:05 technologist and I spoke today on what do we call it? Contract credentials and

0:10 verifiable legal authority. So modeling legal relationships stuck in paper-based

0:15 agreements, PDFs, Word documents into KERI, ACDC spec to be proving your

0:21 contractual authority to third parties. So I see things differently now after living

0:27 in this world for the past six, seven years. That contractual authority and your

0:33 ability to go through life and do things depends on legal contracts and authority

0:40 from the state and you can't get away from it. And so I stopped viewing these things

0:43 as separate and it's all sort of this interrelated mix of identity and legal.

0:48 And that led to me also seeing finance accounting, legal finance and accounting

0:52 is not separate disciplines like I was taught and have degrees in, but it's

0:55 really a spectrum. And identity, I found, is the one thing that ties all of them to

0:59 together. It is the backbone of commercial transactions. And I think people are

1:05 starting to come around to that idea. I've been saying it for a long time and it's

1:09 exciting to see people, their eyes light up when they realize what I'm talking

1:13 about. So if my work and research were to just disappear, I think it would be I've

1:21 been working to push this society towards Ronald Koest's magical world of zero

1:26 transaction costs. So I'm using identity and AI and every tool at my disposal to

1:31 reduce the cost of doing commercial transactions to bring shared economic

1:36 prosperity. If it were to go away, I think we'd be stuck with centralized databases,

1:41 centralized processes that don't scale and are not they're beholden to the existing

1:47 gatekeepers and it does not allow us to push forward as a society. Thank you.