Insureblocks

Insureblocks


Ep. 74 – Self Sovereign Identity – insights from Sovrin

September 08, 2019

Heather Dahl is the CEO of Sovrin, one of the leading self-sovereign identity solutions. In this podcast we discuss how identity has evolved from the offline world, to the limitations of it being online in the internet and finally to the opportunities it brings in a blockchain world.

 
What is blockchain?
Heather Dahl looks at blockchain as one of the technologies tools that we have today. From her perspective we should ask ourselves - are you seeking a solution that provides a decentralised network, meaning that you're running a large number of diverse validators or nodes around the world that are run by different organisations that are censorship resistant, that helped build redundancy? Is that something you want that provides governance where no one organisation or company or government runs that network? If that's something you want, blockchain technology brings that decentralised, diverse set of nodes to run a blockchain solution.

From an identity standpoint is do you need interoperability with your identity? If you only need an identity for your sole company’s purposes then you don’t need a blockchain. However, if you’re building an identity, that needs to be interoperable with other systems then you need a blockchain based identity system like Sovrin. This allows issuers to write schemas and credential definitions and revocation on publicly available decentralised global network that everyone can access.

Heather likes to think of blockchain as an immutable ledger where her customers, users or clients are in control of their data and information.

 

 
What is Sovrin?

Heather Dahl is the CEO and Executive Director of the Sovrin Foundation.  ‘Sovrin’ most commonly refers to the Sovrin Network, a public service utility enabling self-sovereign identity on the Internet. The Sovrin Network is decentralized, meaning individuals can collect, hold, and choose which identity credentials —such as a driver’s license or employment credential—without relying on individual siloed databases that manage the access to those credentials.

Sovrin is an open source project that offers the tools and libraries to create private and secure data management solutions that then run on Sovrin’s identity network.

Sovrin is now a global network for decentralised identity in six continents. In the past year they have launched the Sovrin Alliance to provide education and training programme for their community and those interested in decentralised identity. In partnership with Hard Yaka, Sovrin has launched a self sovereign identity incubator out of San Francisco. Sovrin also recently won the award for “Greatest Social Impact” by One World Identity.

You can find out more about Sovrin on their website and join the Sovrin Alliance.

 
The internet has failed in providing an identify solution
The web is abound with news regarding breaches of privacy, personal data being sold, cybercrimes and much more. The common factor around all these issues is identity. Heather believes that we don’t have a data management problem, we have an identity problem as all pieces of data are connected to some form of identity. These issues stem from when the internet was created as a network of machines. The identity protocols weren’t designed for people they were designed to identify machines. Heather gives the example of how email addresses a...