Atala was well-represented at Rare Evo this year, alongside Hydra DOOM, Midnight, and all the other IO products. Atala's CEO, David Harding, participated in a fireside chat with IO's Chief Product Officer, Mike Ward. David Harding also gave an excellent presentation on self-sovereign identity (SSI) and Hyperledger Identus. This was followed by a panel discussion with IO CEO Charles Hoskinson, Atala CEO David Harding, CPO Mike Ward, Hyperledger Foundation Executive Director Daniela Barbosa, and Jon Bauer, the CPO of CSign.
The Future of SSI: A Hyperledger Fireside Chat
with David Harding & Mike Ward
Highlights from the conversation:
- Since Jan. 1, 2024, 2.4 billion identities have been compromised/stolen.
- Privacy is no longer the question but how we use our identity and who we share data with.
- Based on the existing model of usernames and passwords, the systems in place don't even trust us, using layers of multifactor authentication to verify our identity.
How to bring issuers in:
- For Dapps and services to gain traction in the financial space, you must have KYC
- Digital identity is going to start from the position of KYC:
- I am who I say I am because I proved it. This gives an identity veracity.
- Issuing credentials to an identity provides efficacy because the identity has been verified and authenticated.
- Companies need a value (aspirin) that solves a problem in order to invest or use technology. Using the existing structures in place and building SSI on top of those structures is how we gain traction.
The identity problem to solve is control, privacy, and security: Companies today are increasingly at risk of facing severe penalties and reputational damage due to stiff compliance requirements as a result of data protection regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA.
Identity in the Age of Blockchain
with David Harding, Charles Hoskinson, Mike Ward, Daniela Barbosa, and Jon Bauer
This panel opens with David Harding giving a thorough explanation of digital identity, the problems we face today, Hyperledger Identus, and the bridging between today and the future of digital identity. There's a lot of ground to cover, so we'll let you listen for yourself (below).
David wraps up the presentation and invites the panel guests to the stage. You'll want to listen to the discussion for yourself, but a few standout quotes:
"When you start deconstructing things, it's almost impossible to find something in the legacy business world that doesn't have a strong need for some concept of identity." - Charles Hoskinson, IO CEO/Founder
"If we want to start moving real-world assets on chain and start doing transactions where trust is a big factor, we need to start having strong authoritative facts around identity. You want to know who your counterparty is in many transactions. Which unlocks a huge number of use cases in public blockchain." - Mike Ward, IO Chief Product Officer
"The open governance and open development principles that a foundation like ours (Hyperledger) bring to the table really helps on a couple of things, one, it helps bring people/developers, maintainers come in that you may not expect to come in, because they may not be associated with their company or ecosystem, so you're widening the breadth of people that come in. The second thing is you get more users and people that want to adopt the technology, because they know it's openly governed and openly developed." - Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director Hyperledger Foundation
"The community is great. The biggest thing that comes to mind is collaboration. Everyone is in Discord, learning together. There's so many awesome projects that are coming up on Identus." - Jon Bauer, Csign Head of Product
We look forward to seeing you on the Atala and Hyperledger Discord servers! Jump in and get involved with an exciting and emerging identity platform Hyperledger Identus.
