Season 1 is here! Connecting ID protocols to web platforms with WalliD

The table is set and the pieces are moving. We’re on a mission to transform digital IDs into valuable assets individuals and businesses.

After almost two years of building the tools to connect ID protocols to online platforms through a self-sovereign wallet, Season 1 of WalliD is coming to unleash the first wave of integrations and partnerships that aim to bring accountability into Web3 and privacy into Web2.

Our story

WalliD was founded at the end of 2018 by co-founders Filipe Veiga and Vitor Viana after a few years working together at Caixa Mágica de Software — A power house in open-source technology in Portugal with one of the oldest European footprints in middleware and software development for digital IDs based on digital certificates and Public Key Infrastructures (PKI).

Both founders were fascinated by the endless possibilities that cryptography applied to identities could unleash even though it was both fascinating and frightening at the same time.

😍 The Fascination:

• The possibility of customizing online interactions based on predetermined criteria (e.g access an online service depending on an achievement or unique characteristic);
• A chance to eliminate sybil attacks
• The opportunity to bring accountability into the pseudonymous world of the Web3.

😱The fear:

• Digital IDs and government PKIs could unleash the creation of systems prone to authoritarian abuse and social control.

We started paying attention to the European and USA governmental approach to the topic and the rise of the new regulations such as AML5 and eIDAS that clearly expose the intentions of spreading these ID infrastructures on both continents and for every piece of attestation (Citizen IDs, Academic achievements, health passports and much more).

At the same time, Web3 also started applying cryptography to digital IDs and Decentralized ID protocols (DIDs) started appearing on every new chain with the purpose of democratizing the access to these tools and making it possible for every person and community to create their own IDs through the usage of protocols for decentralized credentials (e.g. W3C Verifiable Credentials standard.)

We soon came to the conclusion that Digital IDs were here to stay and the battle between Governamental Digital Certificates and Decentralised Credentials was just about to begin.

So, our mission is to settle the score for that battle and make sure that the good parts of both sides remain and the bad ones are abandoned. In other words, we work everyday to make sure online accountability exists without interfering with individuals’ sovereignty.

WalliD’s Season 0 recap (2019–2022)

Our incorporation in 2018 was made possible by a pre-seed investment led by Armilar Venture Partners and followed by Caixa Mágica and INCM. The founders hired the first 3 developers to join this quest: Beatriz as Head of UX/UI, Guilherme Arsénio and Nuno Feio as our full-stack squad.

In the early days we kept tight and focused on building. We didn’t know exactly where we would fit in this new — barely existent at the time — digital ID landscape. So we experimented and built. We created a DID protocol to connect with PKIs, another to issue new IDs, an Ethereum wallet to locally store those IDs and a no-code platform to design and make the creation of new IDs seamless and accessible to anyone.

Other players in Web3 were doing their own experiments and as of now some of them were much more successful than our own. Ceramic Network and IDX did an amazing job setting up the infrastructure and protocols to issue decentralized credentials. POAP Badges became a standard when it comes to on-chain reputation and verification. Proof-of-Humanity created a great starting ground to ensure online human interactions and BrightID designed a one user per account authenticator for webapps.

So by 2021, while reassessing the landscape and our toolkit we understood that a lot had changed but there was so much that still needed to be done and we had already built most of that. Only a few tweaks and fat trims and we pivoted into what WalliD is today:

A toolkit that connects ID protocols with online platforms through a self-sovereign wallet

• MyWalliD is the self-sovereign Ethereum wallet that became the central point of the toolkit. We’ve built it fully open-source, using the base code of Metamask and fine-tuning it to authenticate on Web2 and Web3 webapps and to locally store ID assets from DID protocols or centralized PKIs.
• We designed and built the Issuer APIs to connect DID protocols and PKIs to MyWalliD wallets, making it possible for owners of decentralized credentials and digital certificates of any provenance to store and prove the ownership through their wallets.
• We built, deployed and tested a no-code platform to design and import designs for decentralized credentials and badges that can be integrated with any DID protocol under the W3C standard.
• We built the SDKs and Libs that allow any Web2 or Web3 platform to authenticate their users with MyWalliD wallets and to verify the ownership of ID assets from any DID protocol or PKI connected to the ecosystem, in real time and directly in their infrastructures.

So what have we achieved since then?

• Portuguese Government Issuers INCM and AMA integrated our solution making the national digital IDs available for every Portuguese citizen within a MyWalliD wallet.
• We integrated with Wallet Connect protocol and made MyWalliD an official wallet of the ecosystem and reachable by every dAPP in order to authenticate their Web3 users.
• DocuSign integrated our solution in its product to bring qualified and Ethereum signatures to their users. Portugal is the first jurisdiction available and almost 5,000 signatures have already been subscribed.

And what’s in store for Season 1?

If Season 0 was the time to build and to set up the stage, Season 1 will be the time to deliver and make sure MyWalliD wallet gets traction by solving unique real problems for Web3 communities.

In this sense, our line of action will be streamlined in the following ways:

Extending WalliD’s ecosystem:

• Partner and connect with DID protocols, integrating WalliD’s in their ecosystem as the wallet to bridge their ID assets and credentials with other networks and Web2 platforms.

Delivering through the existing partners in the ecosystem:

• WalliD and DocuSign are extending their partnership and launching an integration to allow for PDF signatures using Ethereum addresses or ENS domains and the backing-up of that proof-of-signature as an NFT on Polygon.

WalliD ETH signatures for DocuSign private beta is now live and open for limited spots. Know all about this integration in our article here.

Hope you stay with us for the ride: the battle for self-sovereignty over digital ID is just starting. From where we stand, the winning key is in connecting all protocols and web platforms, allowing individuals to choose and own the ones that better represent them.

Let’s keep building,

WalliD team