While the Internet may be missing an identity layer, Self-Sovereign Identity empowered by the blockchain aims to address just that. Diar speaks to Danny Zuckerman, who heads up strategy & operations at uPort, and Drummond Reed, Founding Trustee of the Sovrin Foundation, who both agree that interoperability of the SSI ecosystem will vastly improve security and reduce redundancies of the centralized systems, aiming to provide the public with ownership of their own information.

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), a decentralized identity where each user stores and controls their own data, built on blockchain technology is aspiring to become the missing identity layer of the Internet. Instead of centralized services holding the personal data in data silos, SSI would allow users to hold their own data locally and then selectively permission who gets access to that specific piece of data.

The data that user holds about their identity can be created by themselves or contributed by other trusted parties that attest for the validity of the data. A trusted cryptocurrency exchange for example would theoretically be able to attest that the user has been verified on their platform and then the user wouldn’t have to redundantly verify their identity on other exchanges. The personal data combined with the attestations comes together and creates a digital reputation.

The SSI systems can vastly improve security and reduce redundancies of the centralized systems. The most prominent SSI systems are currently being developed by uPort and Sovrin. And while they may be viewed as competitors, the two outfits are actually working together along with the Decentralized Identity Foundation on interoperability and open standards to build a single ecosystem that supports SSI systems. Drummond Reed, Chief Trust Officer at Evernym and the Founding Trustee of the Sovrin Foundation told Diar that “SSI needs to be a coherent, interoperable ecosystem and I strongly disagree with anyone who says that we will have one proprietary solution that the whole world will use.”

And Danny Zuckerman at uPort, agrees that in the long run, there won’t be just one SSI system. Mr Zuckerman, speaking to Diar said “it is misleading to think of a SSI system as a single thing because it relies on so many different components and levels to operate and each of those has many opportunities for many different companies - consumer applications, enterprise applications, storage, hubs and reputation algorithms, consumers and providers of identity attestation. It’s unlikely that any one company went across all of these fields.”

uPort, which is being developed by ConsenSys, is building its system on Ethereum and is currently fully operational on all Ethereum testnets. Mr Zuckerman tells Diar that even though there is no firm timeline on the mainnet launch, it could very well be fairly soon. uPort already has functioning partnerships (GNOSIS, Status, Melonport among others) and Coinbase’s own Ethereum Browser, Toshi, also plans to implement uPort as its underlying SSI system. Mr Zuckerman commented that the partnerships that uPort is most focused on are those within the SSI ecosystem that would ultimately latch to interoperable standards that would see SSI systems work flawlessly together.

In the past year, uPort launched pilot programs with the city of Zug, Switzerland and also in Brazil. Mr Zuckerman is of the mind that “we will continue to see government projects and implementations. It will start off with smaller branches of the government and being used for a specific functionality but with time, the trust in the technology will grow, which will clear the way for wider scale government implementation.” Mr Reed think “it’s almost necessary for any successful SSI ecosystem to have governments as peers for validation.”

Evernyn, the company that built the code base for Sovrin, recognized that it needs to become a global public utility and donated the code to the Sovrin Foundation. Evernyn has done research for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which funded the original research for the open standards of SSI. The Sovrin Foundation is talking to other governments about implementing Sovrin - British Columbia in Canada, Illinois, Maryland and Arizona in the United States as well as Finland, Austria and the UK in Europe. The governments are incentivized by citizen enablement to pursue their digital economy as well as enhancing cyber security.

Sovrin is an international non-profit foundation created to govern a global public utility for SSI. Since early 2017, Sovrin’s code base is being contributed to Hyperledger Indy, which has allowed Sovrin to increase exposure to a much larger group of developers. In contrast to uPort, Sovrin is built on a public permissioned blockchain tailored specifically to identity done under a Trust Framework with open public governance. Mr Reed says that the decision was made because Sovrin “talked to the different parties that would need to rely on the SSI (credit unions, banks, health care agencies, universities, governments) and they didn’t want anyone to be able to run a node."

Indeed, “Sovrin Stewards” - the permissioned institutions that serve as nodes for the Sovrin network, are governed by the Trust Framework. The Sovrin Stewards already include IBM, Deutsche Telekom, Brigham Young University, law firms of BakerHostetler and Perkins Coie and Credit Unions.

Even though blockchain is a crucial component to the SSI systems, Mr Reed tells us that it is actually the smallest piece of the puzzle. “It’s the distributed agents and the wallets that actually make it self sovereign. What the blockchain does is to solve the problem of how can you be issued a credential that can be shown to a verifier. The verifiers then refer to the blockchain to verify the public key.”