Spit Handshakes in the Age of Digital Identity

As a Gen Z who has finally finished studying, the daunting task of no longer leeching off one’s parents lies before me. Growing up social media seemed to be reserved purely for garnering attention through selfies. Yet now it has evolved into a crucial tool for building a professional identity and therefore a career in the fully digital workspace.

Making sure you don’t have anything problematic on your Instagram is only the first step. Finally set up your Linkedin, get back onto Facebook (just in case), and of course, link your crypto wallet to your various Web3 shenanigans. The world of Web3 being the wild and lawless place it is forces you to take special care when putting together a profile.

Nothing says I take crypto trading incredibly seriously like an NFT of a smoking monkey as a profile picture. Not to mention those incredibly long and bizarre password recovery phrases? How funny would it be if we all commented our phrases below and saw who had the weirdest one lol? But seriously… random people messaging you on discord pretending to be admins are a pretty common occurrence.

The rather rampant scamming that tends to permeate the crypto space is a depressing symptom of a minority who have the mentality of  “get-rich-quick” rather than actually trying to build a better financial system for everybody. While impersonating someone online can be highly amusing as in the case of Elon Musk’s Twitter blue tick debacle, it is annoying when every dm is a potential phishing attempt.

Discord admins on Web3 projects have taken to putting the words “will not dm you first” in their names, a lot of sites have a captcha in place, and google all but nukes your house whenever you log in on a new device, but despite these, there is still a need for enforcing some kind of legitimacy in online interactions.

While meeting in person to spit and shake on it with every potential business partner is probably the best way to ensure that they are who they say they are and aren’t just a bot (the saliva shorts out their circuits you see) this is far from practical in our globalized economy. The next best thing would be to have a video call but again this isn’t practical when dealing with millions of customers or massive multinational corporations, not to mention your personal details would then inevitably begin leaking out into cyberspace which is a little scary. The desire to Know Your Customer between business partners while still maintaining a level of anonymity and protection of personal information is somewhat paradoxical. Fractal, however, cares little for the foibles of logic and has created a system to do just that. By sharing all your precious personal information with them (perverts I know) they are able to ascertain whether you are a human or not (although without the spit handshake they really can’t be certain) and that you are in fact who you say you are. Having done this, they are then able to assure any potential business partners that you are actually pretty legit and not sus at all, without giving away all your private information. Business partners can therefore take Fractal’s word that an entity verified by them has been sufficiently vetted to do business with, without having to endure an unhygienically moist handshake.