The developer who created core technology that has helped launch thousands of initial coin offerings (ICOs) isn’t all that impressed with the fruits of his creation.

Looking ahead to 2018, Fabian Vogelsteller is interested in taking the model he pioneered with ethereum’s ERC-20 token standard, effectively a drop-dead simple way of creating your own cryptocurrency, and recreating its effects for one of blockchain tech’s most-often touted use cases: digital identity.

And there’s reason to think replicating the success here could be big. In many ways, traditional online identity has become a disaster, especially in recent years where many of the large gatekeepers of consumer data have been hacked and millions of consumer data points exposed.

Blockchains, by contrast, have been touted as a way of giving consumers control of their own information, to not only decrease fraud, but also cut off large enterprises from using consumer data for their own gain.

The identity mess is a hard one to untangle, though, and while there are blockchain startups focused on this area, Vogelsteller believes something like the ICO token standard could kick the industry into gear.

 

Read more: https://www.coindesk.com/forget-token-sales-the-father-of-the-ico-is-all-about-identity-now/