Abstract
This chapter envisions how verifiable credentials could work in the token economy. Many standards-making bodies, open source working groups, organizations, and individuals are working on self-sovereign identity (SSI) and decentralized verifiable credentials. Commonly suggested principles include identity binding, privacy and security, user control, availability to all, interoperability across platforms, user consent, data minimization, and transparency about data creation, collection, storage, and use. Solutions will likely make use of consensus-driven, international standards in distributed technologies like smart wallets, blockchains, utility tokens, and decentralized identifiers (DIDs). To achieve this vision, the roles of issuers, holders, and verifiers—known as the “trust triangle”—must be incentivized to adopt the solution. We provide examples of two early solutions for verifiable credentials: SmartResume and digital health passes (DHPs). iDatafy’s SmartResume is a job market platform that creates digital resumes based on verifiable credentials and secures these credentials on a blockchain. Digital health passes (DHPs) prove our health to verifiers so we can return to travel, work, school, and play. We assess the degree to which these solutions subscribe to the suggested principles of verifiable credentials and describe how participants are incentivized to join the ecosystem. We found that these first-generation solutions meet some, but not yet all, of the suggested principles for fully decentralized verifiable credentials. The early solutions are “minimal viable products” that will likely improve in the future based on feedback and experimentation. Trusted third parties are still needed for services, and interoperability standards, user-generated identifiers, utility tokens are not yet advanced enough for wide-scale adoptions of SSI and verifiable credentials, but we can more easily see the possibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
Each role may be enacted by an individual, organization, or object. For example, holders can be animals, such as certifications about the conditions under which they were raised, handled, processed, transported, and stored. Holders can be organizations, such as credentials pertaining to incorporation date, incorporation jurisdiction, and tax status. Holders can be objects, such as attestations on physical dimensions and composition; entitlements like access rights for self-driving cars and drones; and certifications like fit-for-use, energy-efficient, or sustainably produced.
- 2.
The security of the digital wallet is also being considered in work by the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF).
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Lacity, M.C., Carmel, E. (2022). Verifiable Credentials in the Token Economy. In: Lacity, M.C., Treiblmaier, H. (eds) Blockchains and the Token Economy. Technology, Work and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95108-5_5
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