SSI is Anti-Fragile, meet the Sovrin Identity DAO

SSI is Anti-Fragile, meet the Sovrin Identity DAO

A post on the future of Sovrin and a pathway to universal SSI..

Corona is a black swan. 

The social, political and economic costs are going to continue to reveal themselves over the coming weeks, months and possibly years. As I write this post I myself and my family are self-quarantined, we and several of the now distributed team who have worked to put this communication together possibly displaying varying degrees of the Corona Virus, although in the UK we can’t be formally tested. 

Fear and its contagion have already impacted markets and the ripple effect will now put many companies out of business, none more so than capital constrained startups working at the edge of their respective industries. 

At the best of times this is a risky business but in these conditions we can expect many projects to fail. Some seemingly out of nowhere. 

At Outlier Ventures, as investors and advisors to early stage projects, we sadly expect to see several of the entrepreneurs we back, people we class as friends and peers go out of business.  

However, my hope is, this time when some of those projects fail, it is possible it is only one evolutionary instance where they themselves assume somewhat viral qualities. 

The technical innovation they have built, through its code as a form of digital DNA, when open sourced and sufficiently ‘decentralised’, can be reborn, perhaps in several instances or mutations.

Some, thanks to their sacrifices, will go on to change the world well beyond their companies perhaps even their own life-times.  

We have always said there are many things wrong with the world of crypto, and in particular the heddy era of ICOs, but the one thing that makes it all worth it in our humble opinion is; that billions of dollars got invested into open sourced systems, that otherwise wouldn’t have.   

Some things are too important to die

In this new paradigm, projects that have a community that value its technology so profoundly never die, they are only reborn.  

SSI, and Sovrin, are one of them. 

Self Sovereign Identity is the missing link that allows Web 3 and Data Sovereignty to happen. 

It allows us to fix much that is broken about The Web. 

Where ‘software has eaten the world’, and much of society's norms and institutions, it has inserted Platforms, some of which have now established monopolies that predictably abuse their position, we can now flip sovereignty back to the user. 

It's why I call SSI and associated tech: Sovereign Software

SSI is universal

A SSI network has a genuine and real reason to have a unit of account built into its system, to enable transaction costs native to a shared ledger. 

Identity is transnational, it has many sovereign domains, they could be national, corporate or more inter-personal but if they are all to talk to another seamlessly in a way that's native to the Web we can’t do it through any one company.  

It has been described as needing a ‘network of networks’. Each of these networks serves to anchor the publicly available decentralized identifiers (DIDs), public keys, and other metadata needed by issuers of digital credentials. 

All of these networks interoperate with each other using the Trust-over-IP stack in a manner similar to how other different top-level domains (TLDs) interoperate in the Domain Name System (DNS). The difference here is that with SSI networks, the networks don’t control the identifiers, the users do.

All users can cryptographically prove control of their own identifiers and credentials.

So if we are to have a global distributed identity system we need a hard cost to abusing the network and its social norms. Without a token you could easily spam any SSI network through a basic DOS attack making worthless writes to the network. 

This is why we believe even the great Tim Berners Lee’s attempt at SSI called Solid won’t cut it unless we accept the security risks of local encryption at the users pod or worse through a data custodian (see the below comparison)

2020 is the Year of SSI

We have supported the Sovrin Foundation, its management team, and their sponsors and backers including the project creator, Evernym, over several years. They have made great strides alongside Hyperledger, and their partners as stewards, to bring SSI mainstream.

  • A google search for self sovereign identity brings close to 200k results, with Sovrin at the top
  • The Sovrin Network has over 60 stewards in 18 countries around the world.
  • Over 2 million digital credentials have now been issued based on the Sovrin network and Hyperledger Indy.   

They have spent the last 3 years working tirelessly to bring a tokenized version of the network live, make sure that is secure and stable, but have done so under the heavy burden of the SEC.

In fact the technology has been ready for some time. The primary constraint has been regulatory. And all simply because of where the foundation itself is geographically headquartered.

They could have—perhaps should have—but didn’t offshore to Singapore or Malta to play a game of regulatory arbitrage. 

They wanted to do things by the book and continue to hold out for meaningful and constructive engagement with the SEC in order to launch with a token that was truly global in scope, and that includes the US.

The cost of trying to address the shifting regulatory landscape and engage with the SEC cost the Foundation millions. But they did not kill Sovrin or SSI.    

Sovrin is dead, long live Sovrin

The Sovrin Foundation is not dead but it has gone fully volunteer based, at least for a short period. It has had to let many good people go, but where they have the community has really stepped up to take on the batton.

We share our sympathies with them and want to thank them for their herculean efforts. Because, despite the odds, they managed to get a Test Token out of the door.

However, the Sovrin Foundation concluded the only way it could bring a fully tokenised network to market, in a way that comforts both the SEC and its Stewards (which include several of the largest companies in the world, many also based out of the US) is through a Reg A offering like Blockstack. 

To do that it would need $1m to $2m in yet more legal fees, and it would take at least a year to get through the regulatory approval process..

The world needs universal SSI now.

Moreover, we believe doing so could come with such huge constraints on who can own and use a token by actively making it a security that could hurt its ability to be universal and ultimately limit its social impact let alone the time it could be brought to market. 

SSI Reborn

Many of the people involved in Sovrin are not from, or based, in the USA. 

We as a community are global, borderless and believe SSI is a fundamental and universal right.  

If you want to understand this is so important please watch this powerful video from Christopher Allen a pioneer of SSI recently at The Hague.

Sovrin under the leadership of a newly formed Transition Committee is now evolving to a ‘network of networks’ model where different networks can co-exist and interoperate. 

In this new world, we would like to explore the creation of a community-driven permissionless network, with a token baked-in from the start.

This network would be intended to work within the Sovrin umbrella, parallel to, and separate from, the existing U.S.-based Sovrin public utility network, not replace it. 

We believe this development to be net positive because it now allows multiple pathways to be explored simultaneously, ultimately increasing the chances of the success of Sovrin as a whole and its mission to achieve universal SSI. 

A Sovrin SSI DAO

As such, we are actively exploring the creation of a DAO to rapidly form a consistent and representative lobbying voice for the primary financial backers and donors to the Sovrin network, whose expressed interest is the delivery of a tokenised Sovrin network instance. 

The hope is this DAO could enable SAFT holders to engage with the Transition Committee, and the other stakeholders within and across the Sovrin community.

All members of The DAO will be able to table and vote in a transparent and auditable way on exactly how we as a stakeholder group move forward, and the future design and roll out of a possible tokenised network. 

We felt it important these efforts were surfaced publicly quickly in order to foster debate and show to the world if anything is 'too big to fail' it's SSI.

Most of all I would like to footnote with a thank you to my 6 year old daughter Satya for bearing with endless calls in order to make this post happen today whilst being holed up with me this week. She and future generations will thanks us for making universal SSI a reality.


邓冲

深圳海曼科技有限公司 - ios研发工程师

4 年

Why not consider distributing tokens free on the existing Sovrin mainnet? Distribute tokens free to foundation, volunteer, stewards etc.

Simone Ravaioli

Serendipity Maker ? Digital Credentials ? Gastropilgrim

4 年

Thanks Jamie for sharing your thoughts. In this moments of uncertainty about the future of Sovrin, the goal of a universal SSI model, should always be considered as a priority.

Scott Saunders

Chief Awareness Officer at eCoinCore

4 年

Phenomenal Jamie Burke, much appreciated

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