Why would you even need a notary in our day-to-day life?

When you move from one city to another or from one country to another whether to change a job or to study in a university, you probably have to send a bunch of document copies to the appropriate facility. These documents can be a diploma from your previous university, a marriage certificate, or a passport copy. And you need to send it to your new employer, to an embassy, or a university. If you’ve ever done this, you know that this can be a real hustle.

This is when a real problem arises. How can you prove that the copies you’re sending to someone are not a fake or a forgery? How could someone know that you haven’t corrected the average score in the certificate of degree and that you’re indeed eligible of getting a scholarship there? What if you’re not who you really are or you’re pretending to be another person? This could potentially lead to a much bigger fraud and problems for that person.

It usually comes into place when you migrate to another country. The embassy has to check a lot of documents and also run a background check on you. And it always slows down the whole process of getting a decision, especially important when you’re running out of time.

This is when a notary appears on the stage. And this is a classic solution to the identity/documents verification problem that has been out there for a very long time. Humanity has created the notary system many centuries ago and is used to living with it.

However, a notary does not speed up the process I described above, but on the contrary, it just slows it down even more. Because now you have to find a local notary, book a time, print documents, come to their office, and eventually get this weird stamp, which is considered to be trustworthy for some reason. More than that, you have to pay for this simple activity, for each sheet of paper you want to get proved. The easiest job on Earth, I’ve ever seen.

Today we are living in the inception of the new economy, the new tech revolution, blockchain revolution. It’s been revolutionizing our world since 2009, so why can’t we proceed with this progress and cut the middlemen even more?

All necessary tools have already been created. There is already a huge amount of blockchain platforms on the web and it’s growing. So we can potentially use any of the platforms which support dApps (hopefully now we can even choose a programming language of preference) and create the infrastructure to hold any documents you want and present it to any authority that needs it. 

The biggest problem that remains and is relevant for the whole crypto industry is mass adoption. Without it why would an employer or a university ever look at your diploma that is stored in some unknown blockchain?

But we’re slowly moving towards it and I believe that eventually, people will use only digital proofs, specifically the ones that are stored in distributed decentralized public blockchains.