Hyperledger, one of the leading industry consortiums for distributed ledger (or more colloquially, blockchain) technologies, has received an interesting new project under its open-source roof: Indy, which is focused on developing next-generation digital identity services.
Indy is based on a code contribution from the Sovrin Foundation, a nonprofit "created to govern a global public utility for decentralized identity," as foundation chair Phillip Windley wrote in a blog post:
Internet identity is broken. There are too many anti-patterns and too many privacy breaches. Too many legitimate business cases are poorly served by current solutions. Many have proposed distributed ledger technology as a solution, however building decentralized identity on top of distributed ledgers that were designed to support something else (cryptocurrency or smart contracts, for example) leads to compromises and short-cuts. Indy provides Hyperledger projects and other distributed ledger systems with a first-class decentralized identity system.
Sovrin's post takes a fairly deep dive into Indy's approach. It's worth reading his entire post for the full technical details, but other key takeaways include this:
Indy shares three important virtues with the Internet: No one owns it. Everyone can use it. Anyone can improve it. Launching Indy as a Hyperledger Project is a critical component of allowing anyone to improve how Indy works.
Indy's code base was created by the Utah startup Evernym. The Sovrin Foundation was created in September to serve as a governing body for the Sovrin Network, a specific implementation of the Indy code that will continue operations. The Foundation is contributing the Indy code to Hyperledger in a bid to get more developers working on it and making contributions.
"Evernym has been evaluating blockchain technologies for digital identity applications for a long time," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson. "Along the way they saw the limitations of the original public blockchain and the Proof of Work algorithm, which was not designed with identity in mind. In fact, the central idea of the Bitcoin blockchain algorithm was to not identify anyone."
Overall, Evernym's work is "a great example of third-generation ledger technology R&D," Wilson adds. "Evernym and now Indy have been refreshingly clear about the problem they're trying to solve, and developing new fit-for-purpose algorithms."
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