Peer Mountain (PMT)

What is Peer Mountain

Peer Mountain is a mobile-first distributed system of trust. It uses cryptographic protocols to allow people and institutions to create and own a trusted record that encompasses digital identity, trust relationships, and proof of activities.

System members own and control their data; they decide who can access it, as their information remains inaccessible and unexposed to third parties at all times. Peer Mountain uses such powerful cryptographic protection that data stays guarded from all other entities - even the platform itself.

At a more abstract level, the ecosystem allows individuals and companies to assert facts about themselves and other parties, and to attest (i.e. verify) those assertions. This is especially valuable for financial institutions as it can significantly lower the cost of Know Your Customer (KYC)-compliant client onboarding. This paper explores this further in the section Peer Mountain KYC & Compliance.

To organizations in sectors other than financial services and markets, Peer Mountain can also provide considerable value as a distributed platform of trusted facts (e.g. employees could assert that they are sick and HR could attest to this after verifying a doctor’s certificate).

Ecosystem participants are only identified by their public keys (analogous to how Cryptocurrencies work) and can assume multiple personas, which are basically public keys derived off their root key. Personas are useful for interacting with multiple external parties and to comply with different set of obligations and requirements. For example, a person may be a university student and the client of a bank. Generally speaking, the university requires an information subset that differs from the subset the bank requires. However, while applying for a loan or grant, a university student may not want the university to know they are a client of a specific bank. By using different personas (i.e. a role), the student controls their privacy.