History happened yesterday when Self-sovereign SSI Thought Leaders from North America announced that the first official 900 Self-sovereign ID’s (SSI) have been issued by a Credit Union in the Pacific Northwest of United States, as part of the launch of the Evernym platform backed by Sovrin Foundation.
This is historic for being a public utility providing 3rd party SSI verification for free, in real time. This also is the conundrum, where’s the beef?
The European competitor; WiseKey has been minting private SSI tokens for sometime and by any account, is way our from of it’s North American counter-part. Also, consider that OISTE (is celebrating 20 years, the entire time they’ve been lobbying for a verifiable ID platform.
About OISTE Foundation
The OISTE Foundation, created in Geneva in 1998, is a not-for-profit organization regulated by article 80 et seq. of the Swiss Civil Code.
OISTE has proprietary rights upon a Root Cryptographic Key that allows robust digital certification of persons and objects.
The society WISeKey acts as the Operator chosen by the foundation for the management of the root cryptographic key.
OISTE and WISeKey are bound by a defined Trust Framework and Certification Practice Statement (CPS).
Focus
The focus of the OISTE Foundation is pure identity, more specifically: certified digital identity.
Objectives
- Represent the voice of civil society in the debate about the social and political dimensions of different solutions to digital identity management
- Represent the voice of civil society in the debate about the legal, economic and technical dimensions of Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) as a solution to strong digital identification of persons, objects and content
OISTE holds special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN (ECOSOC) and interacts with the Human Rights Council, the International Telecommunications Union and the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
OISTE is a member of the Not-for-Profit Operational Concern constituency of ICANN and actively participate in the public debate of contemporary issues such as:
- The UN Sustainable Development Goals for the year 2030, point 16.9: providing a valid legal identity to all human beings on the planet
- Internet governance
- The respect of the human right to privacy in the digital world
- The protection of personal data in the digital age
- Child on-line protection
The timing is now perfect because of Blockchain and the development of standards that are encoded in the browsers for the web, this decision is in the hands of W3C the World Wide Web Consortium.
Stay tuned as we next report on the impending day of arrival, for unified standards built-in to browsers that begin to parse for SSI. Once the browsers begin making the change-over, the entire globe will comply.
Thought Leaders Photo credit: moneymetals on VisualHunt / CC BY
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