In Feb 2018 an organization surfaced with the URL Decentralized.id posing as a real organization called the DID Foundation and directly leveraging language from the real organizations actually working on Decentralized Identity. They even were offering DID Tokens. I wrote a whole post about it…

Unfortunately we are in a similar but perhaps more pernicious situation today. An organization has surfaced called the DID Alliance claiming to be working on solving identity issues in a decentralized way by building a Global Association for Digital Identity and that this specification will be avaliable by the end of 2020!  To quote their press release…

Think of GADI as the ICANN of personal identity,” says GADI visionary and DID Alliance co-founder Ramesh Kesanupalli. “ICANN enables a global internet where every address is unique and authentic. Similarly, GADI will assure verifiable, authorized identity for every individual on the globe, whether online or in physical world applications.”

They want to make sure everyone just has “one” identity – this goes totally against what we are working on. Identity is not “one” network address for people – that they can use ‘everywhere’ and be trusted. Identity is way to complicated for that to be true and that sort of system would be terrifyingly invasive of people’s privacy.

They make more incorrect statements on their website.

The DID Alliance is a global organization dedicated to developing and maintaining the new standards for decentralized identity.

No one actually working on the open standards in this space has really heard of them. To be fair the chair of the Sovrin board went to a meeting with them last week and some how Sovrin became a founding member of the Alliance!! – this is not trustworthy behavior.  

What are the real foundations, organizations and communities actually working on decentralized identity?

There are a bunch standards and coding efforts going on in the field of decentralized identity technology – they are centered on

The W3C Credentials Community Group – its subgroups and official standards working groups (DID – Decentralized Identifier, Verifiable Credentials + a ledger managed via a community process there Veres.One.

The Decentralized Identity Foundation with quite a few active working groups  + two different DID methods (SideTree – Ion – BTCR and SideTree Element-Etherum) these are in regular dialoguewith the W3C work.

The Sovrin Foundation and Hyperledger has several coding projects (Aries, Ursa and Indie) doing work also in dialogue actively with the Decentralized Identity Foundation and W3C efforts.

We all gather at the Internet Identity Workshop twice a year. You can buy my book if you want to really get up to speed – A Comprehensive Guide to Self-Sovereign Identity.

Its a little complex but it is a network of work and communities all actively making real decentralized identity happen. It is very open and very active. Its super real. All of the companies named as the so-called members of the DID Alliance are welcome to join us.

 

Oh and one final like “this is never going to fly” point. The photo on their website is a bunch of men making fist pumps?

Zero women. No people from the global south?  There is no developement of large scale identity systems without the involvement of women (and not just white women), people of color and real leaders from the global south.

Not about us without us!

(psst this applies to all of the above organizations working for realz on decentralized identity)

 

 

Buy the book if you are confused about this technology – its written for C-Level executives. 🙂