Gravity’s Decentralized Identity Protocol, Built on Tezos, To Power DIGID Project in Kenya

This month, Gravity joined some of the largest international NGOs in the world to launch the Dignified Identities in Cash Programming (DIGID) project in Kenya. The goal of this project is to help the Kenya Red Cross leverage Gravity’s decentralized identity protocol on Tezos to provide much-needed cash transfers to vulnerable Kenyan populations.

Gravity’s vision is to build human-centered digital ID solutions for easy, transparent and secure data sharing for all people, anywhere in the world. With Gravity, individuals and small business owners can safely store and share their personal data to access humanitarian aid, financing, employment, and government services. In cases like the DIGID project, international organizations can also leverage our digital ID solutions to efficiently collect verifiable data for improved service delivery, interoperability, and impact.

With humanitarian aid projects like DIGID, Gravity’s goal is to help end-users and partners progressively adopt and implement this decentralized identity protocol to open the door to even greater financial inclusion for vulnerable populations. The reality is that Gravity’s humanitarian aid solution supports populations who are not yet familiar with advanced blockchain technology. By taking a human-centered design approach and meeting our partners and end-users where they are at, we will continue to adapt and build our protocol on Tezos based on real-time needs.

The DIGID project is a manifestation of our ongoing collaboration with the Tezos ecosystem to bring our decentralized identity solutions to vulnerable populations of humanitarian aid recipients, refugees, and displaced persons around the world. Among the latest verifiable credential implementations recognized by W3C standards, Gravity’s decentralized identity protocol is built on Tezos to ensure that our protocol is more scalable, standardized, and transparent.

With Gravity’s protocol built on Tezos blockchain, together we can empower all individuals to access key services (humanitarian aid, financing, educational certification, e-government services) and accelerate their path toward financial inclusion. Gravity’s use cases include facilitating humanitarian aid and cash transfers to remote communities in East Africa, supply chain financing for small business owners in Kenya, and educational certification for Syrian refugees to access greater employment opportunities in Turkey.

Why Tezos?

The Tezos protocol aligns with Gravity’s high security standards and our vision for a digital identity platform that builds trusted digital identities on blockchain that are private, portable, and persistent. We believe in Tezos ecosystem’s focus on formal verification of smart contracts and on-chain governance, which allow for everyone to participate by submitting proposals to be voted on to update the Tezos environment.

According to Gravity co-founder Johannes Ebert: “The Tezos ecosystem’s democratic, community-based, decentralized form of on-chain governance is consistent with Gravity’s vision for our own ecosystem. Like Tezos, Gravity’s solution focuses on decentralizing and community-sourcing our protocol to comply with the latest W3C standards.”

Tezos also fits in with Gravity’s human-centric vision, which values community-based input and a decentralized approach to create more innovative and effective solutions that truly meet the needs of all stakeholders along the data supply chain.

Lastly, Tezos is particularly suitable for Gravity’s decentralized identity use cases due to its affordable transaction costs and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) compatibility.

What’s on-chain?

Following Spruce’s initial implementation of the Tezos DID Method, Gravity implemented our own version of the Tezos DID Method and DID Manager.

Gravity’s strong beliefs in maximum privacy and a user’s right to be forgotten mean that we only store specific pieces of personal data on-chain. The on-chain attributes contained within the DID manager include:

• Authentication public key: Used by remote parties to verify a signature with an “authentication” purpose (in W3C terms), most frequently used during the sharing of credentials,
• AssertionMethod public key: Also for use by remote parties to verify signatures with an “assertionMethod” purpose (in W3C terms), usually used during credential issuance,
• KeyAgreement public key: Used by remote parties to compute the shared secret necessary for end to end encryption.
• Link to credential repository: A link to a dedicated space on the credential repository which allows issuers to know where to send credentials post encryption, and
• TZIP-16 metadata link: Standard that helps attach off-chain metadata to the DID manager, allowing for the inclusion of metadata views.

These attributes are all retrieved by Gravity’s specific DID Resolver which is embedded within the Universal DID Resolver to allow for the re-computation of the related DID document.

Most recently, we integrated the much-anticipated Contract Metadata (TZIP-16) standard, which makes integration, discoverability and querying of Tezos smart contracts easier and scalable for applications and wallets.

The sky’s the limit for Tezos and Gravity, and we are excited to continue growing with and learning from the global Tezos community!

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