Why Universal Identity?
The idea of self-sovereign identity has been getting a lot of traction in the past few years, and a good number of projects have claimed to take on its mantle. Universal Identity is one such effort that was born out of the struggle to make existing decentralized identity technology work specifically for consumers.
So what makes Universal Identity unique and worth pursuing? In short, Universal Identity has an inherent focus on human usability, which results in a unique mix of goals, ideas, and approaches to tackling the self-sovereign identity problem.
Universal Identity starts with the idea that the internet should have a native identity layer, that similar to the web, should be a usable public good. It then focuses on the people and organizations that the technology is setting out to serve, defines the solution from their point of view, and works its way back through the various business and technology implications.
This is inherently different from the approach of starting with a set of promising technologies, and then working through design and business implications.
Despite this difference, these two approaches do not necessarily need to compete and negate each other. Especially when it comes to advancing public good causes and goals, the two approaches can be complementary, help challenge each other, and potentially unify at some point in the future, assuming their technical differences can genuinely be reconciled.
Market focus
It is a historic fact that most new technology trends have scaled through the path of early adopters and consumers first. Most of the important technologies of the past decade including internet, web, wireless telecommunications, and many others have hit their stride after iterating first in a market with willing early adopters first, and then in the general and mass consumer market due to economies of scale. Enterprise and government sectors have generally been good venues to discuss, market, and incrementally innovate on them, yet they have been structurally resistant to the fundamental disruptions that scaling these technologies requires.
At Universal Identity we believe early adopters and consumers are the more likely manner in which decentralized identity will scale. As such, we have prioritized focus on these markets. Given the deep technological, philosophical and functional connections between decentralized identity and crypto, approaching early adopter users already familiar with the crypto market seems like a reasonable beachhead. The next step in “crossing the chasm” will largely depend on consumer value proposition and product usability in the space, another set of areas we are prioritizing our focus.
DIF
Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF), with partnership of the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), and through the set of Decentralized Identifiers (DID) standards they champion, represent the most notable effort in self-sovereign identity to date, one that ultimately has similar goals to Universal Identity. Their fundamental difference of approach however comes from DIF’s focus on technology and enterprise use cases, as they actively work to enable a decentralized identity ecosystem of people, organizations and devices.
DIF has a large number of advantages in pursuing this mission, including: a sustainable and sizable budget, brand-name recognition, support of powerful tech players including Microsoft, consensus-based decision making, world class network with experienced members, and no shortage of intellectual horsepower, just to name a few. But some of these same attributes, in addition to an inherent technology focus, also create a potential for it to develop a certain emphasis on technology at the expense of usability and universality.
Additionally the extended focus on enterprise and government use-case may deter from its success in scaling decentralized identity, if one already believes that these markets are less likely paths to scaling.
