Our company has gone a long way since our first dream of automating authentication. During the process, we've learned a lot from the market and from the challenges of our partners.

Our company is evolving every single day to better understand the market and how to add value to the current identity landscape. We have grown from face matching to biometric authentication to self-sovereign identity management. And we wanted to create a specific milestone to celebrate this. To make a statement to the market, to our partners.

Identity is not what it used to be. For some people, identity is simply a passport, maybe a driver's license. For others, identity can also include a loyalty card or their company access card. To many, it is about a username and password to access some website or even an email. For others still, it can even be your web3 wallet where you store some keys to NFTs or to Bitcoins.

The truth is: identity is all of that. Those are simply examples of particular facets of our identity. And we want full control over the use and full control over the information contained in those identities. We don’t want a central entity to know these identities are related, or how they are related. We may want to disclose selectively. Prove I have a degree from a certain university without sharing all of my grades or even the year I graduated. Prove I'm over 18 without disclosing my birth date. The world is moving from centralized identity to self-sovereign identity. And this is really clear from all the trends and signs you observe in the market.

For sure, many incumbents will continue without innovating, creating centralized mobile ID wallets which store data centrally that are "GDPR-compliant". And they are GDPR compliant. It's simply that GDPR is 5 years old and there’s a revolution in data privacy and identity that hasn’t yet become mainstream. But it will, and many in the field understand the benefits of deploying real privacy-preserving identities. That is what's typically called decentralized identity or self-sovereign identity.

When we founded YooniK, we understood the power of your face being unique — hence our name, YooniK — but identity is a whole universe, and it is different from person to person. It is also both online and in-person. It is physical, it is digital, or even a metaverse. It is Your Universe.

As we prepare to take on the world of self-sovereign identity, we thought our own identity needed a little revamp. So, we have decided to mark this milestone, mark our mission alignment with a rebrand as Youverse. Whether online or in-person, your identity unlocks your universe, and your face is still the key to unlock every single part of it. Both your biometrics and your identity data are decentralized and no single entity, not even Youverse, is able to identify you in a context you haven’t authorized or correlate any of your transactions.

Your universe is everything you need to interact with. It should react in a different way because you are you. That’s the basis of personalization. A hotel door should do different things if it is you or someone else. Your car, your Amazon webpage, your corporate tools, your pick- and- go at the supermarket. And all information in your universe should be private, you control, you own.

We hope you'e as excited as we are about the newchapter, we're opening this year and that you enjoy the new brand we’ve created to go with it!

See you around!

Pedro Torres

CEO and co-founder