January 2019 Update
PRODUCT
Transmute’s product work in December and January was all about feature focus and business value. This approach allowed us to iterate quickly on Transmute ID and launch an alpha version of the tool, specific to the Third Party Logistics vertical. We are now moving into intensive product discovery and pilot preparation.
Feature Focus
Feature focus for us meant narrowing our product roadmap to three key feature areas: identity creation, verifiable business credentials, and secure business workflows. More details on our technical implementation are included below.
In a space with so many dynamic players and evolving standards, it is tempting to try and support many different features and tools. However, this wide and shallow approach doesn’t help us to complete and test a real product that solves pain points for companies, and therefore doesn’t help us to grow the decentralized technology ecosystem in a meaningful way.
Business Value
Our focus on minimum viable, standards-compliant execution in these three interconnected areas has resulted in a user-friendly, interoperable application that prioritizes uncovering immediate business value through direct integration with existing technology and workflows.
Using Transmute ID, multiple parties can now leverage the trust and security advantages of decentralized identities and verifiable credentials in conjunction with their existing management systems and workflows. An example is very helpful here:
A Third Party Logistics (3PL) company is responsible for ensuring that important goods make it from a distributor to a customer without damage or delays. Goods often pass between many different locations and drivers before arriving to their final destination. These companies also have to comply with audit and compliance requirements, such as submitting evidence of driver credentials to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). When mistakes happen, responsibility is often unclear, resulting in the 3PL company taking on the associated costs in the interest of maintaining long-term relationships and trust — the bedrock of their business.
Transmute ID secures the chain of custody for a 3PL company by making it extremely easy and fast for a driver or company to upload and securely store evidence of credentials (like a Drivers License or TWIC Card), request attestations from trusted parties on those credentials, and to share that evidence as a part of authorization workflows. Resulting authorizations (which output something like a Bill of Lading) and associated signatures become tamper-proof evidence of responsibility. Benefits to the company likely include reduced onboarding and authorization time, eased compliance, and improved satisfaction with critical customers and drivers.
This example is informed by many product discovery conversations with experts in the 3PL space. However, the only real way to show the competitive value of Transmute ID is to implement with real companies and users in the coming months. We can then expand value to other verticals using the same underlying technology and process.
TECHNICAL
Here are the technical highlights from this month:
- We designed and developed a number of JavaScript Object Notation Linked Data (JSON-LD) signature suites to ensure compatibility between our DID framework and JSON-LD signatures. Check out the OpenPGPSignature here and the EcdsaKoblitzSignature here.
- We developed and released Github DID, an open source testing and development tool for easily working with decentralized identities.
- We rebooted our work on sidetree-ethereum, a layer 2 scaling solution for blockchains, supported by Microsoft and the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF).
- We developed several improvements to Transmute ID, including adding support for the ethr DID Method, used by UPort, a scalable permissions system for restricting access to PII associated with DIDs and adding UI improvements related to secure business workflows, external storage integrations, and integration with external IDPs like Oracle IDCS and Okta.
