The popular Telegram messaging app, also known for its $1.7 billion mega ICO, has launched a new service called Telegram Passport, a unified authorization system for identification services that in the future will become a decentralized cloud.

It is an archive of documents that can be uploaded, stored and shared.

What is special about Telegram Passport is that it allows you to have a unique ID to validate the identity of who is uploading the documents.

This means that each document will be associated with its own identity so that it can be shared without losing ownership of it.

For example, if you upload your identity card, any Passport-compatible system will be able to request it without having to upload it again. This way your documents are uploaded only once, and you just have to share them with all the compatible services.

ePayments.com already supports the identity verification service with Telegram Passport. There is also a manual and a test page for developers who want to integrate it into their websites.

Personal documents and data will be stored and encrypted on Telegram’s cloud so that the system does not have access to this information: they will only be visible to the recipients with whom they are shared.

Telegram promises that in the future this cloud will be decentralized to make it trustless, as is the Bitcoin blockchain.

Moreover, a further development will be the identity verification directly within the Telegram profiles, so that people can use it instead of the classic verification: at that point the external services will not even need to request data, because it will be sufficient to rely on the identity verification already previously made on the account through the Telegram Login.

The service will be introduced in version 4.9 of the app to be released soon. To use this new feature you will need to install the appropriate bot called Telegram Passport.