The Decentralized Identity for Smart Society 5.0 and Metaverse
What is Decentralized Identity
Decentralized identity (DID) is a new method of identifying a person or digital assets. Contrary to traditional methods, where all information is centrally managed by an organization or a government, decentralized identity does not depend on a single centralized authority.
The traditional identity has many problems such as accessibility, security, privacy … The decentralized identity (DID), on the other hand, uses data from many data sources which are managed by the data owners and only owners can prove their identity, decide which information to share or grant the access to a specific organization.
The following picture describes how DID work:
In general, there may be three parties participating in the DID process.
- The Issuers: Provide/issue user information such as national ID, driving license, university diploma, bank account … The issuers may be government, bank, university or some other organization. Their identities are represented by the public key and stored on the blockchain network.
- Users or holders: The data owners. Data will be managed by the user’s wallet (a key pair). Users can decide which information to share and prove their identity with their signature.
- Verifier: The company or organization that verifies user’s identity and grants access to users.
Why does our smart society 5.0 need DID
We are living in a society where privacy is undervalued. We also desire to access global financial services without any barriers but there are billions of people who do not have the ability to identify themselves and access financial and banking services. Hundreds of thousands of fake transactions occur every year around the world and the personal information is still compromised daily.
All the problems above still happened until We change our minds and changed our way of identification. The decentralized identity (DID) is the right solution.
Thank to DID and the help from technology, We can:
- Manage our information by ourselves (self-sovereignty). We decide which information to share and who to share.
- No one can control or tamper with our data. All data is encrypted and stored on a distributed ledger. It’s decentralized, secure and transparent.
- Freely access to global finance system with the simple mobile and we app
- No more fraud. Transactions are stored on blockchain, only owners can provide their signatures which are managed by private key to claim their identity
The DID is applied not only for people but also for any objects. It is an essential part of smart society where the human is centered and also plays important roles in modern life and Metaverse
How to contribute to DID
There are tons of ways to contribute to DID. Government, organization or individual people … can distribute the data, provide the technology platform, tools, educate users, broadcast the message and many more.
For example: Social networks such as Facebook, Google can dedicate users to authenticate and provide their information to other platforms. University/Academy can provide the degree, certificate information for learners. Technology companies like Hyperledger, UniWorld, Microsoft … can provide the blockchain platform to store and distribute the information secured and transparently.
We highly recommended organizations and technology companies to join the Identity Foundation (DIF) and contribute data, solution, technology stuff … to the decentralized identity. It’s also the way we contribute to the real smart society.
