Why you’ll never be catfished on Tinder again via crypto.
Blockchain tech is enabling a lot of new novel applications, but here’s how it could get you laid.
In a study by Mosley et al., 2020, 23% of women and 38% admitted that they had catfished someone before. In other words, they had intentionally lied, or even faked their identity to seem like a better catch while online dating.
Clearly, there’s a chronic lack of honesty in the online dating scene. But how do you solve this?
Online dating platforms like Tinder, have tried to do online verification, such as by linking your Facebook profile, or asking you to pose in a selfie to verify your identity.
That certainly helps a bit, but it doesn’t quite solve the problem. After all, you can still lie about your age, occupation, etc on Facebook and Tinder simply carries it over. As for the selfie verification, it helps but the photos on your profile might be ancient or simply photoshopped. You don’t need to create a whole different identity for you to lie about things.
But let’s say, for argument’s sake, you wanted to design a catfish-proof dating system. Blockchain technology certainly allows you to do this. But rather than bolting on blockchain tech onto an existing platform let’s build it from scratch.
First, we start with a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), these are communities that operate on the blockchain, which users jointly manage. Voting could be done in proportion to a reputation system, where people rate each other based on accuracy of information and whether they are pleasant to hang out with.
Ok, this takes care of the first layer of our dating app. Given that we now have users, we could also have a similar verification process much as FinTech banks do with Anti-Money Laundering and KYC protocols, where they ask you to pose with your ID. This would verify both your age, identity and looks.
You could also largely automate this process with facial recognition software, and use it to verify photos. But we’re not done yet! We could further use blockchain technology to mark pictures.
In other words, this microservice running in the back of your phone’s photo app would timestamp pictures on your phone with a hardcode of when they were taken. Essentially, when you’ve taken a pic you would like to upload to the dating site, it would create a non-fungible token with the image and this operation number would be imperceptibly embedded in the photo.
Even if you were to identify how to transpose this hidden sign onto another photo, the system could recognize the uploaded image as a forgery and mark it as such. Consequently, this DAO would create a means by which you can prove that a pic was recently taken, as opposed to five years ago, when you still had hair and hadn’t gained quarantine-related weight.
This article isn’t meant as a serious guide of what exactly will happen with blockchain technology, but is meant to highlight its potential. Blockchain, and specific microservices on them, like timestamps, KYC protocols and reputation/governance systems, are flexible enough to manage something frivolous like a dating app, or as important as running a government.
One such application is that of the CRD Network, which is a DeFi ecosystem that bridges crypto-finance and traditional finances by creating a legally compliant ecosystem that allows you to exchange with other verified users.
We aim to be able to offer banking services to potentially billions of people that are unbanked/underbanked, while also increasing the capabilities of those who do have access to banking serves.
We’ve only just scratched the surface of the potential od this technology, and we will continue to evolve to achieve it!
