At Rare Evo 2024, David Harding from Atala challenged us to rethink our current attitudes toward our own digital identity. He explained that our digital identities - our emails, our social media, our bank logins - are scattered across hundreds of accounts owned by companies that control our personal information, often without our permission. It doesn’t have to be this way. Harding’s message was clear: it’s time to take back control. This system, which we’ve been using for decades is obviously broken, but we are like the proverbial frog in the soup pot - as it slowly heats up, we don’t notice we are about to be boiled alive! In our huge pot of digital soup, we have hundreds of passwords and accounts. More than we can ever remember. And we don’t actually own any of our own digital identities - we’re just borrowing them.
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is an idea for a better way. In his Rare Evo presentation, Harding explained that SSI is like having a digital version of your wallet. Instead of carrying physical ID cards, you would keep your important credentials in a secure digital wallet on your phone or computer. The difference is, with SSI, you control what information you share and when you share it.
Back to the example of buying the wine. They don’t need to know your last name, or your exact birth date, just that you are over 21. This is possible through a tool called a zero-knowledge proof—a way of proving something is true without giving away all your personal details. Other examples include cases where you need to prove you own a car, or a property, or confirming that you hold a certain credential.
Today we all tend to just accept that hundreds of companies and agencies have the right to hold (and sometimes sell, lose, or compromise) all your personal information. SSI is an idea that is trying to shift that whole paradigm.
“Here’s the core truth: digital identity is not a product, it’s not a feature, and it certainly better not be an afterthought. Digital identity is the foundation of our digital world. Think about a house. When you walk into a house to buy or rent it, you don’t usually say, “What a sexy foundation!” You just expect it to be there and to work. If it’s not, that house is going to fall down quickly.That’s the problem with digital identity today. We’ve built all these digital personas, but the foundational systems behind them are broken. And most people don’t think about their digital identity. You don’t wake up in the morning excited to play with your bank card or your driver’s license. But without them, you can’t make purchases or verify your age. It’s just something you need to have.”
SSI has other big advantages, too. It could make logging into websites much faster and safer, because you wouldn’t need to create a new username and password for every site. Your digital identity could work across many apps and services, almost like using your real-life ID card wherever you go, but with much more privacy.
The Atala team built one solution for SSI for the Cardano blockchain – Remember Atala Prism? They have since donated their work to the Hyperledger Foundation, an international group that develops open-source tools for blockchain and digital identity. Now called Hyperledger Identus, the project is growing quickly, with developers from around the world working together to make SSI practical and easy to use. You can check out the project, along with more latest news and articles about it, here: https://www.lfdecentralizedtrust.org/projects/identus
At the Rare Evo talk, there was a panel discussion following Harding’s talk, which included Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and Hyperledger’s Executive Director Daniela Barbosa explaining why SSI is so important for the future of Web3. They pointed out that almost everything in finance, property, and online services eventually requires identity. SSI brings a way to add identity to these systems without sacrificing privacy or becoming dependent on giant tech companies.
You can watch the full presentation from Rare Evo 2024 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWMpaIpRS0w
If you’d like to be in the room for Rare Evo 2025 in Las Vegas, check it out here: rareevo.io.
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