March 2019 Update
March was an excellent month of development at Transmute! We released a new version of Transmute ID with an enhanced credential attestation workflow that leverages verifiable credentials, decentralized identities, OAuth and Ethereum. We’ve also made significant progress on Sidetree Ethereum, which we intend to use for attestations initially, and eventually for much more scalable decentralized identities.
Sidetree
Sidetree is a protocol and architecture for layer 2 solutions, also known as a scaling solution for blockchains. The idea is to batch work performed off chain and anchor the batches on chain. This drastically reduces the cost and latency associated with interacting directly with blockchains.
Transmute continued development of “Element,” a Sidetree Ethereum DID method, implemented in Javascript. This method mirrors Microsoft’s work on Sidetree Bitcoin to an extent, but we’ve deviated a bit from sidetree-core for the purposes of being able to support light clients that run in the browser. Separating the protocol logic from the server node code helped us accomplish this. The work is still ongoing but you can follow our progress here.
Balancing Open Standards with Proprietary Value
At Transmute, we’re often asked how our work on open standards fits into our core product, Transmute ID. Our recent work on Element is a prime example of how we leverage open standards alongside our proprietary offerings.
Transmute ID is built to help enterprises manage identities [for people, entities and devices], credentials and workflows at scale. One of the more simple examples is ensuring that a trucking freight driver’s license has been reviewed and attested to by a specified authority; the result is a verifiable [digital] credential that does not include any PII, but does contain references to the actors and processes that contributed to its creation.
These credentials are then anchored to a distributed ledger, such as Ethereum or Hyperledger. Anchoring is where Sidetree Ethereum and Element come in because we need a scalable way to anchor credentials without revealing PII or incurring unreasonable costs for our customers and partners. Likewise, we must ensure that identities participating in the credential workflows experience minimal friction throughout this process.
The Transmute ID app and API handle the ingestion of identities from legacy systems like LDAP, active directory or OpenID Connect. Once we have linked said legacy identities to managed decentralized ones, customers can leverage our proprietary decentralized identity verifiable credential workflow system to automatically generate tamper proof records of the activities that business users and devices are taking — all while maximally protecting users PII and the businesses’ IP.
By building on open standards, we ensure that our identities and credentials are interoperable and easy to integrate. This is both the key to mainstream adoption of user-centric, decentralized identity, but it is also a stamp of credibility with our customers who want to confirm that we [and our code] will be around to support them indefinitely. Plus, it helps us focus Transmute ID on adding business value instead of implementing software protocols.
Finally, March had us doing a lot of architecture work for supporting this separation of concerns, along with the usual focus on test driven development, streamlining our data access layer and separating out our UI components from our application to support reusability and modularity.
Stay tuned for more announcements from the Decentralized Identity Foundation, Transmute and Microsoft regarding Sidetree methods, ION on Bitcoin and Element on Ethereum! If you’re interested in leveraging decentralized identity, contact us to join one of our innovation pilots here.
