Use cases for digital, decentralized trust services

Part 2 — Supply chain

The blog post “Digital Identities — Trust Infrastructure for Digital Business Models” introduced the basic principles of a trust infrastructure and its basic concepts (Trust Holder, Trust Issuer, Verifier, Verifiable Claim, Verification Service). This article is the second part of a series of articles on business use cases for decentralized trust infrastructures.

(Read the German version of this article here)

Trust is the basis of all business relationships. Digitally available trust is, therefore, one of the most important building blocks of digitization.

If, as it is customary today, one relies on individual central providers of trust-generating platforms, dependencies and information asymmetries arise. To avoid the aforementioned power and information gaps, decentralized trust infrastructures offer an alternative approach and can be seen as enablers of the cooperative digital economy of tomorrow.

Using application examples, we will illustrate how digital business relationships can be carried out in a trustworthy manner and without dependencies. We will present use cases from the field of enterprise data management and compliance management along supply chains. With these use cases, easy entry into decentralized digital business relationships and self-determined data management is possible. In one of the next articles, we will explain some more advanced use cases in the field of economy of things.

The basis — Verified digital identity for your company

In the real world, there are numerous measures for securing trust in business relationships. Public registers, such as the commercial register in Germany, are used to prove the authenticity of a company (legal entity). But how can it be ensured in purely digital communication that a digital identity belongs to the supposed business partner? Since public register systems do not exist in the digital world, the authenticity of a business partner still has to be proven in an analog way.

Through the notarization function of the evan.network the trust of the real world is transferred to the digital world.

Businesses create a digital identity, and this is confirmed by a notarial fact-finding. The implementation is done using Verifiable Credentials, so this verification can be used for all future business relations. Thus, basic trust is made available digitally, allowing companies to interact with each other in a trustworthy way, e.g. in the form of a cooperative ecosystem, as in the evan.network.

Step by step to a cooperative ecosystem

Most companies have already recognized that cooperation is important for growing together and for being able to stand their ground against increasing global competition. However, implementing a cooperative digital infrastructure is anything but easy. Our previous article has already shown how one can digitize trust. The following application examples should demonstrate that a cooperative ecosystem can be created step by step. Simple use cases that replace current processes can serve as a start. Parallel to this, the infrastructure required for completely digital value creation will be established step by step.

Use Case 1 — Digital Authentication

A daily use case in every company is sending documents and data to business partners. Today, we usually only trust the sender’s address, which — especially with e-mails — can be forged all too easily. An exchange of data and documents via classical methods can be made more secure by using Verifiable Credentials.

For this purpose, a fingerprint (hash) is generated for the document to be sent, which is then stored in a VC document. The VC document is signed by the sender and stored with the Verification Service of the evan.network. From this moment, the URL for verification can be sent together with the data. The recipient can now call the Verifiable Credential using the URL and verify the origin of the document.

Advantages:

• The authenticity of the data can be securely validated.
• Existing data exchange procedures can be retained and provided with additional security.

Use Case 2— Digital Signature

The digital signature of a document represents an extension of the first use case. Not only the authenticity of the sending company but also the signature of the signer is ensured via the verification chains of the evan.network Verification Service. A notarially verified company uses Verifiable Credentials to confirm their employees’ the authorization to sign. These employees then sign a document with their digital identity in the same way as in use case 1.

Upon receipt of the document and the URL to the Verifiable Credential, the receiving company can use the Verification Service to confirm that the company’s employee is authorized to sign and that the company’s digital identity belongs to the real-world business partner.

Advantages:

• The signature of individual employees can be verified by the company on authorization.
• Specific signature rules can be digitally mapped.

Use Case 3 — Digital Master Data Exchange

The exchange and updating of Master Data in supplier networks is a major challenge for companies today. First, the authenticity of supplier data must be validated when new suppliers are added (onboarding), and then mechanisms must be established to keep the Master Data up-to-date. Typically, suppliers are required to keep their data at the newest state in their customers’ supplier portal. However, in complex supply networks where one supplier has several customers, and customers have a large number of suppliers, this maintenance is hardly possible.

Using Verifiable Credentials, company’s Master Data can be maintained by the supplier himself and linked to his digital identity via Verifiable Credentials. These Verifiable Credentials can now be shared with all customers of the supplier. At one point, data only needs to be updated by the supplier and can then be used by all the customers who the Verifiable Credential has been shared with.

In this case too, the anchoring of the Verifiable Credentials in the evan.network is of help. The supplier can manage the access to the data contained in the Verifiable Credential at any time, invite new customers or delete existing releases. Besides, a change of data can always be traced by all involved parties through the historicization. Since Verifiable Credentials can be accessed in the evan.network via a uniform access interface, all customers, regardless of their digital capabilities, can be connected with this mechanism.

Advantages:

• All customers use the same suppliers’ Master Data.
• Suppliers only have to maintain data in one place.
• Master Data is always up-to-date for all users.
• The supplier can control access to his data himself.

Conclusion

Companies benefit from the digitalization of their cooperative relationships. The digitization goes hand in hand with standardization, integration, and transparency, which is costly and — especially in terms of transparency — often not desirable in a comprehensive way. Service providers with central infrastructures fill this gap and become more and more established. They reduce the effort and, as intermediaries, ensure that the necessary transparency is maintained. However, each transaction via these intermediaries strengthens their position, which can lead to enormous dependencies in return. Through decentralized cooperation, many use cases can be solved without these intermediaries. As in the use cases described above, large results can already be achieved in small steps, and such decentralized systems can also be integrated with calculable effort. As a neutral infrastructure, the evan.network ensures easy usability and reliable service for all its participants.

The evan.network is a manufacturer-neutral digital infrastructure that uses blockchain technology to provide a collaborative environment where business partners can work together in a trusted and tamper-proof manner.

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