Self-Sovereign Identity / Allison Fromm, Daniel Saeuberli, Daniel Gasteiger

Transcript

foreign [Music] excellent are we uh are we good to go okay excellent well thank you for uh joining us for our discussion about self-sovereign identity thanks Ian for the introduction I'm Allison Fromm Chief commercial officer at proof space we provide an identity platform for issuing holding and verifying credentials we'll get into more of what that means from our expert panelists so first I'd like to ask Daniel geishtiger president and Kovac co-founder of proceedings to introduce

himself yes hello thank you very much for the introduction my name is Daniel I'm the co-founder of procedures I'm also co-founder of a couple of other blockchain companies here in Switzerland among others trust Square um they're on Capital and nexo squared um very happy to be here and was invited by by the University of Zurich because of the project we did with them when it comes to student self-zone identities and master diplomas as verifiable credentials which I'm talking about a little bit later um I'm also very happy to be here because of the partnership with this conference with my colleague from check check Republic with parliamentary police where I did some meetups already 2016 on

the topic of blockchain and with my first company I did some scouting in Prague and actually many other countries around Europe for to find what at the time was not so easy blockchain startups and with Joseph who is one of the co-organizers here we did actually quite a few of these meetups in Prague so super cool to be seeing these um connections coming to Zurich and having that sort of setup here is perfect um also been a regular visitor of the parolani police hackers Congress in October which usually took place before Corona in October which again I think is sort of part of the co-organizational team here and so it's great it's great great to

see Zurich welcoming the tech the team from Prague here in Zurich thank you Danielle and our other Daniel Daniel cyberley president of DDOS please uh introduce yourself hello everyone thanks for being here so um I really appreciated uh the uh invitation by by Claudio to uh to actually speak here and give a little bit of an impression on what is going on here in Switzerland in terms of self-sovereign identity so I'm basically corporate guy or Legacy corporate guy I spent a lot of time at IBM where I learned very early about blockchain and the benefits to organizations and to governments so I'm

more let's say from a knowledge perspective on on that side during my career I had various positions in in organizations that kind of led me to believe that we need to do something in terms of bringing more privacy to the digital world and with that with a couple Partners including football TVs and horses and others we founded we founded ddas in 2020 actually as an organization that would be a body for stakeholders to come together and solution and discuss about

the emerging topics of self-server and identity and the challenges that it actually represents when it comes to adoption when it comes to educating the public when it comes to standardization or finding consensus around standards also the the aspects of Technology are well represented and with indeed us we we kind of try to create value in a in a in a very vertical way so each of the sectoral ecosystems can kind of experiment with the technology and come together to kind of Drive consensus around the um the aspects of of what is important to to drive broad adoption

so with that besides leaders I'm actually also board member at trust Square so really really happy to be part of that W3 or web 3 web 3 ecosystem uh here in Switzerland and we also help organizations together with the Vasily superov on actually applying the right Technologies with with a company called accelerate to uh to today's world especially where it's important to establish a more ecosystem-based business model as well as ensuring that trust is established in each of the interactions and transactions of organizations and individuals yeah thank you and I have to

say I'm I'm a member of DDOS and Switzerland is incredibly fortunate to have such a great organization of bringing together different stakeholders to promote the principles of self-sovereign identity and combination um sometimes with the Swiss government so we're talking about self-sovereign identity maybe we can go back to you Daniel what what does that mean can you break it down for us at a high level it's become a buzzword but what are we talking about absolutely so I mean self-sovereign identity um from our perspective is is there to be able to create verifiable transactions and interactions and ensure that these data can be verifiable any any kind of proof can be verifiable at any point in time with with the notion

of being privacy preserving at any point in time as well so when you think about self-sovereign identity and the various roles in self-sovereign identity you can think about the issuer of a certain information no credential you can think about the holder of that credential and you can think about the verifier that actually verifies a certain piece of information at a certain point in time of a transaction or an interaction and there is a fourth body that actually is involved especially when we want to make it adaptable by organizations and governments and and and and today's society at large that's the governing Authority When You Wish if you

wish which actually puts out the rules under which uh this ecosystem actually operates so uh thinking about the some of the principles that are important um is that you completely disconnect the verification information from actually the issuer so you want to ensure that there is privacy in verifying that I am Daniel soibly um as part of so maybe uh also my my ID card here um because it's always a good example to uh to kind of show that because there are various credentials that you can see on on my ID card so if I am showing that

ID card as a holder I ask a verifier to verify that information and there is trust established through a governing Authority that actually issued this card or has has actually put some security mechanisms and some mechanisms that allow how to verify to verify that the authenticity of of the the ID card at point of presentation so so now as we transfer this concept into the digital world it's very hard to verify certain pieces of information obviously most of you are cryptographers or know what cryptography is and therefore you understand these Concepts but actually

then disconnecting completely the ability of verifying from the knowledge of the issuer that you some that your ID card has been verified at a certain point in time is a extremely challenging uh undertaking in the visual world and that's what self-sovereign identity actually is solving yeah yeah you've got the issuer the holder and the verifier and the challenge is to allow the holder to present their credential in a decentralized way so that it can be securely verified and if I can just add on to that since we're at the ethereum conference and you're all engaged in blockchain in one way or

another one of the interesting things is that blockchains give transparency and verifiability of transactions privacy is more of a challenge one of the things that verifiable credentials do is take data about the holders of those credentials off chain so the data the claims the the data the attributes of a credential are never stored on the blockchain not in any way not even in an encrypted way the only thing that gets recorded maybe into a blockchain ledger is the decentralized identifier of the issuer and so then when the holder of the credential goes to present their verifiable credential which is a data standard to a verifier the verifier checks the cryptographic signature of

the issuer which is public to verify the data that's in the verifiable credential but from a privacy preserving standpoint that data is direct peer-to-peer from the issuerto the holder and then from the holder to the verifier and can be verified without the need to ever put the claims the individual's private information into a blockchain which will be there forever but the blockchain is used as a register of the public identifier of the issuer for verification purposes and it can get a little more complicated than that but we won't go into the weeds just yet what might be helpful is if we take it to a practical example so Donnie perhaps you could talk about what our neighbor did

in the early days with ethereum using the technology yeah I mean ultimately um as with many things there was a very early on development here in Switzerland when it comes to using at what I would call the the concepts of self-zone identity that were become became prominent in 2016 I guess with um Christopher Allen's post and paper on the topic this was then taken by by um by the ethereum ecosystem and developed into something what was called uport and then Newport as a one of the implementation um

options of some identity framework and was actually picked up by the city of tsuka as the first real implementation and I would say really early on it's too early on probably for for um a real productive use and issued a first citizen digital identity based on cells on identity Concepts based on Newport in the city of took so 2017 I mean this was a really really really ahead of the Times premiere when it comes to using that technology and it work went spectacularly good at the time crypto Valley was really anyway a topic in everybody's mouth the Swiss ecosystem

was growing quickly into really I guess the global hotspot when it comes to blockchain Technologies ethereum obviously being into against the foundation since 2014 obviously had also a major impact on that and so it was a good showcase it was I would call it a proof of concept but it was done with real citizens and the citizens I think at the time it was two 300 citizens that actually used this self-center identity wallet and they got issued the identity by the city of souk government um really showcased how as the cycle work and that was really spectacularly good at the same time my inspiration to actually at the time start the company perceives was a mix of that input also

migration behind perceives was that we should develop ecosystems around government-centric Solutions and services based on a mobile technology that basically fails itself on serves on identities and so that concept then we also tried to build a like a pilot project like the Newport project for took but when we talked to our government clients we realize quickly this is far too abstract the concept for them to grasp and specifically when it comes to decentralized Technologies and something like the ethereum network as the base is something that they cannot control this was obvious to us this cannot work that way at that moment in time already so we took some of these concepts of the

service and identity that we've we are a mobile wallet company so we are only doing Mobile Wallet Solutions we've talked taken into account some of these paradigms of being in control of your data being in control of sharing who being in control of what you share with whom at what time having a record of that being able to re um reclaim um your data all of those Concepts that were not so dependent on a blockchain or a decentralized technology we put into our um our product but then we stopped there and we really started building on top of traditional pki based infrastructure so the governments could still control what they are doing and I think unfortunately at the time

um as I said the city of Turks project was a good um a good showcase for SSI but then unfortunately if you think about the average Swiss person that or an average citizen that potentially uses such a thing in the long run they're not con conceptually not ready to to basically deal with gas and them and all the concepts that are needed actually to make such a system work and so um the project basically stopped there and I think but it was really really good showcase for Switzerland for the crypto Valley and the City of took to Showcase how innovative even a place like Switzerland can be yeah yeah and I want to I want to continue the Swiss story moving forward

with SSI but before I do that could I ask you one follow-up question so when you have a self-sovereign identity credential in your wallet how is that different from having basically a picture of my traditional ID in digital format what's the benefit to having a self-sovereign credential in an identity wallet well it's that the whole concept that comes with it and the wallets that actually holds standard credential that you're basically being issued to obviously means that it's in the it's in the word of self-service so you control what you're doing with with that thing and it's not something that um can be taken away from you because in your you're in position of this obviously we are now talking about when it comes to

the real applications that we now see happening the SSI implementations of governments or I would say SSI like the implementations if you want to follow all the principles you can never be government you should um IDs but um let's say it's something that is very close to an SSI implementation solution like what's happening in Switzerland with the Swiss Eid initiative now that is currently um being developed as a law as a law that should be go into into into into into place into 2025 bases itself a lot on the principles of SSI that's basically what uh what what we can then basically see as the advantage if you hold in your wallet your identity

cards in a digital way that's as Daniel said before in a digital um copy basically digital twin of of the physical card once you have ish once you have been issued that thing and you're in control and that's that's um I guess main advantage and you couldn't please Daniel and I think if if I add to that also new methods and mechanisms can actually help to preserve the privacy of the of the holder throughout the life cycle of of these credentials and while they are presented um zero knowledge proof and other capabilities can really help you to be um saving on data so minimalistic on data sharing so you can for example when

you enter a club you can actually just demonstrate that you're 18 years old and you're actually able to consume alcohol or whatever kind of services and you you can do that in the physical world but you can also do that in some way in the in in individual world so being able to demonstrate that you you have the credential that is is needed for a certain transaction or interaction in a very privacy preserving way I think is the core of that one of the pieces of the core core value of what what self-sovereign identity uh um promises yeah yeah and also I think the combination of credentials I mean it's not just about one identity credential

in your in your wallet it's about having all these credentials together in one wallet so and um having an ID your driver's license your Master's student Diploma Your whatever else credentials that eventually you will hold in your wallet um and then the fact that you can combine the content of these credentials the attributes of these credentials in the meaningful way for a given use case which is what we did with the University of Zurich student wallet project that you can apply for a job you use some of your credentials from the student ID I.E your potentially your birthday and the name and then the the the grades from your master diploma and you can through a job application process share exactly that that that sort of minimal

set of data that is needed for that very particular use case that you're actually talking to and that combination of using the different credential content details is what also is very powerful in the future yeah I would agree completely and I would add perhaps that verifiable credentials present a very different way of managing our online identities so instead of giving all of our data to third-party Platforms in order to have an identity online an account with our username and our password we're giving up all of our data to these big platforms so that they can know who they are but then they they have access to our data and they're they're monetizing it to provide advertising to us the verifiable credentials turns that equation in

reverse and we control all of our data and we decide who we share it with and when and how the example I forget which one of you was using where you can prove who you are and what age you are without giving up your address and your birth date and other information that nobody needs and you you keep control of that data privately yourself go ahead Daniel I mean the the example of Daniel's credential of uh University of Zurich also kind of highlights the importance of interoperability because when you when you kind of move towards Singapore or somewhere else in the world you need to make sure that in some way this credential can be used in context

um with what we are trying to do so applying for a job or whatever I think that that kind of highlights the importance of interoperability across ecosystems interoperability across borders interoperability across various aspects of using technology and using these Concepts as part of technology so I think it is it is vitally important that bodies like like ddas help to actually drive that consensus not only nationally as as we do it or for focus on today but also internationally and and get that input from from a global perspective on what are the key standards that we can reuse Switzerland

has a great history of doing Swiss Swiss type of standards and um I I can fully understand that because it creates value for the local for the local kind of ecosystem and environment and allows organizations to capture more value um but on the other side it really challenges the way how these ecosystems work in in the in in the Digital World um or should work in the digital world today yeah and let's stay on that topic of interoperability for a minute so we've talked about the different building blocks of self-sovereign identity one is the decentralized identifier which represents either an issuer or a holder of a credential or a

verifier and we've talked about the verifiable credential and both of those pieces of data need to have standards so that they can be used to communicate between the different parties one of those standards bodies that Daniel just mentioned is the w3c they register decentralized identifier methods and I just checked this morning I think there are 30 or 40 different decentralized identifier methods registered already and this industry is brand new and some of them many of them Point their decentralized identifiers to the ethereum blockchain there are some for Bitcoin there's cardano there's Cosmos there are a lot on hyper Ledger which is a private permissioned

blockchain and so one of the challenges that I think the industry needs needs to Grapple with is exactly to Daniel's point if you have an Eid that's issued in Switzerland but you want to travel to Singapore how can you ensure that interoperability how do you ensure that a credential I have here like my my physical passport can be used to cross borders and so I would I don't know would either of you like to comment on some of the standards work that's taking place to ensure that interoperability and what the industry is doing to overcome that that problem I mean ultimately I'm definitely not the right person to go into the standards discussions in detail about what standards are the right ones and the wrong ones but what I observe when it comes to high level the discussions and

w3c's discussions around W uh we see sent how long that took to get to a version one of a standard this is exactly the problem that's where I think is a big challenge for this concept of self-zone identity or anything that is dependent on global global standards for for it to work and the ecosystems to build around around these things and to potentials point from before Switzerland is famous for its federalistic system its power to the people the people are the highest Sovereign when it comes to the Democracy we're having here but that also means that the the decisions are always at the bottom and in the context of um the Swiss government set up commune in Switzerland has much more

power than the Swiss government in Bern and that's seen in the context of what the work we are doing when it comes to standardization of what is Everyday Use cases for governments like a citizen certificate of residence or a certificate of a credit record extract or um criminal record extracts all these credentials that are government issued it's a huge challenge just to get them right from a normative perspective when it comes to the what is this document actually saying about a person and in each Village it says the same thing about that person and that's a work that we just started with this with government now to normalize across 2500 Swiss cities and communes a standard for

certificate of residence for instance and that has nothing to do with self-cent identity but this that is needed in order for sales or identity eventually to work because these records are a crucial piece to to the use cases that eventually will be created around self-store and identity systems to make them actually interesting for the citizens to use and that's the end goal it has to be usable in everyday life it has to be meaningful in everyday life otherwise Concepts like this will never fly and so there's many different interoperability challenges the technical ones what which was discussed and the other ones about the use cases and the credentials that are needed for these use cases huge challenges huge

interesting opportunities to overcome but I guess it will take quite some time until we get there yeah nothing just as you were talking I think self-sovereign identity really provides a unique opportunity for the communities to come together so thinking about about the blockchain community and thinking about the the devs that the brilliant devs that are part of your community today and at the same point in time sometimes sometimes not you know going deep into how the real world works today um and therefore missing how a

meaningful Bridge can be built into an optimized future aligned with our principles and values as a community I think um it creates a tremendous opportunity to come together and solve not only with the blockchain ecosystem itself kind of thriving on some of these technology technological innovations but also kind of finding a way to come together with how the world works today and how we can truly create impact with use cases that are human-centered and that create value for organizations and

that create value for societies and governments um in in privacy preserving ways and aligned with these principles that I think Christopher Allen very well put out um kind of walk the journey together and for me this is is clear that we need to do this together that there cannot be just Dev in the on the blockchain community side and then there's suddenly Mass adoption in the real world I think it really needs that that strong balance and I think self-solving Identity or the concepts around it and and that that convergence of the world really creates an opportunity for the convergence of of

these of these worlds yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and you you hit on something that that reminded me of a distinction I wanted to draw where you talked about privacy preserving that's a fundamental value of sovereign identity and it comes back to that building block of verifiable credential and how does it preserve the holders privacy and there's can sometimes be confusion between an nft and a verifiable credential because they they can do similar things but a verifiable credential is not a flavor and of an nft it's different in a couple of ways and privacy there is is the key so with an nft all of the data about that nft is stored on chain somewhere and that's fantastic that's allowed

incredibly robust and exciting use cases and economies and tokenomics that we've seen just exploding across the blockchain industry and all of that data is stored on chain with a verifiable credential none of the data is stored on chain so that's where the the Privacy comes in trying to use nfts for identity use cases can be very dangerous because it would involve putting all of the individuals identity data into an nft and recording it on chain immutably forever and there was just a really interesting presentation earlier about not just encrypting data for today so you could have the best encryption in the world for my identity data that you

put on chain in an nft today but it's got to last forever because that's the beauty of a blockchain the data is there immutably forever and so putting identity data into an nft even in an encrypted format and storing it on chain forever can be very dangerous so while nfts have fantastic use cases what a verifiable credential does is take all of that private data off chain and it's issued directly from the issuer to the holder but it can be verified using the blockchain and that's where the interoperability and the global standards come from and Danny you mentioned the the University of Zurich and proceeds use case briefly but I think that's a fantastic example of the benefits that self-sovereign identity can bring could you elaborate a little

bit more on what you're doing there and and the benefits it's bringing yeah I'm the work that we historically through different channels and I don't know if Claudia is here but um we've been working with um Claudia the Sony and the team of the the blockchain center since again since the beginning of of um of the development of of blockchain here in Surrey with trust square and so forth and um we always said we should be doing something around along the lines of a student wallet a student ID and um obviously the recursive us this uh the time stamping solutions that were going around in Switzerland for a while now where you basically put the timestamp fingerprint of of a student's Rec

student 50 promo on a blockchain but that then changed um since the introduction of self-zone identity in the real world with especially with the Swiss government now looking down the concepts of stuff and identity for the future Eid in Switzerland um that really gave it a boost and um we we developed a cell phone identity platform at the company and um based on hyperledger Indie and we basically continue the discussion and last summer we said let's try out now this idea of a university student wallet that contains a digital version of a student card which basically is exactly the copy of the Zurich University student card that

we created as a verifiable credential and then think through a couple of use cases that could come with with such a wallet and that's what we've done over the last nine months we have developed a system that across across the university haunted students were using so they got issued a digital version of the student card into a wallet of the University of Zurich then we basically developed a first use case around access management to a student event where the student could authenticate them or rather authorize themselves to enter the event by by scanning a QR code and basically just share basic information about about him to to be checked on a guest list that was obviously a very

simple use case but that's a very powerful one because that can illustrate the our use case as well where you just show your with the serenoid proof Europe of 18 and that's it and so that's what we've done to Showcase that thing what you can do with the electronic way of of identification in the real world and then we said okay well that's good but let's think this a little bit further we had a student event in September last year where we did some brainstorming we did a demonstration of the of the of the wallet came through with quite a lot of good ideas that we didn't think of and we picked some of them tried to develop them into real applications again and obviously everything is proof of concept this is not a live system I have to obviously say that very clearly but um

we then came up with the idea of a job application and together with swisscom and their HR process for applications we developed a Showcase of if you have your digital Master diploma which we also created as verifiable credentials both for Science and Arts students and always the real students with the real certificates were using this we processed basically then that job application proof of concept idea into a real application and we just last week demonstrated that at the University at an event with some with the students plus also some of the senior the senior people from the University

and so we did really try to make get these things to life these ideas of very Farber credentials how they look like um our career is always that we want to make them as intuitive as possible so everything we are doing is typically just richly a visual copy of the physical world that part of the University so it just looks like the card it's the same design the same logos same colors um and the same thing for the master diplomas there is to the topic of Standards again there's no standard foreign diploma that looks like it's not even in Switzerland universally standardized how a university issues a master diploma and that's just not not heard of and let alone internationally

and so that's another thing we then started realizing okay we do this we showcase this but obviously there is a challenge if you want to use that at the University of Singapore to come back to that example can then scan the the the schema from the University of Zurich and recognize the content of that verifiable credential that not that's not going to work so there's a lot of work involved in standardizing academic credentials in the future um but yes I mean it's a good example we had as I said there's about 100 students involved in all of this we will publish a report about all of this we'll do a public demonstration um probably next month at the Swiss participation meeting of the Swiss

government and yeah really cool use case it's not something um super unique the University use case in the context of SSI is globally one of the leading months that's clear that swear to where the Innovation comes from the universities they see and obviously a place like University of Syria with the blockchain center is the spread is it's obvious that something like this should be also tried here but it's actually the first time I think that it was really so so broadly implemented and so broadly demonstrated yeah that's fantastic fantastic example and I wanted to highlight one thing you said so the decentralized identifier of the University of Zurich who's issuing the diplomas is being stored in a private

permissioned hyperledger in the Ledger and the idea is that as this ecosystem grows that credential could be combined with credentials issued by others so maybe there's another credential issued by an issuer who uses ethereum as the register for the the decentralized identifier of the issuers maybe someone else is using Bitcoin as the ledger to record the decentralized identifier and I've heard some people in the US government who are working on self-sovereign identity applications they're not even thinking to use blockchains as their Ledger for decentralized identifiers they're thinking to use a US Government website so as this ecosystem grows yeah I think I heard someone roll their eyes

it's typical right of the US government as this ecosystem grows we need a way to combine these credentials just as seamlessly as we use the internet today I mean you can use your any web browser and access any website so I think that's one of the interoperability and adoption challenges that the industry is working towards and maybe maybe if I can mention as you also spoke about experimentation currently the Swiss Bund and maybe just a step back that the Swiss Confederation is working very collaboratively in participatory on the creation of the Eid um law as well as on the creation of or of the selection of the architecture

that is being used for deploying that trust infrastructure for Switzerland on one side it's interesting because you as a community are invited to actually experiment with them and learn with them as they are looking for new ways of of actually driving um how should I say maturity into the various aspects of the technology the governance the standards as well as the the skills and capabilities of the people involved and the Departments involved and the um also the the Civil Society and also the organizations that ultimately will benefit from a trust infrastructure like

this because it it will not only hold the aspects of Eid but it will also allow organizations and individuals to issue verifiable credentials into such a trust infrastructure which which runs on the basis of SSI principles so what what is what is going to be important is that experimentation is going to be driven by as many parties as possible so if you go to to the government website you will find a way to interact with their sandbox We As Leaders we started like one and a half years ago to deploy such a Sandbox and and and have our members

and Associate experts to to to learn and experiment with it but it also is an opportunity for ecosystems like yours that you can contribute to the further development of that of that architecture and the further development of of the uh of how the technology is going to be applied in the future so on this notion I just want to mention quickly that we recently had had a post on the ARF the ARF is the architectural reference framework that has been issued by the European commission so as you can see there are many many initiatives across the globe

whether it's New Zealand whether it's Canada whether it's the U the EU whe whether it's in Singapore um whether it's in Switzerland um and you can see that um all of these initiatives by the way also in third world countries or Global South countries and all of these countries have different needs and aspects that they want to drive into these ecosystems in in terms of how privacy preserving should they be how strong of cryptographic methods should should be used Etc so we issued a blog post on the ARF that was published by the European commission and we invite you also to kind of look at that and be aware of

what's going on in the real world in in in in in self-server and identity because it's so important that the aspects of of the broad stakeholder base is going to be finding its way into that consensus so just wanted to highlight that excellent point excellent point and I think we have time for a question from the audience of getting a little bit of a message here but all right do can we thank you very much I just want to say thank you very much for the conversation great job Allison moderating everything we have time for questions we have time for interaction and so on and so I have a couple questions myself but I throw it out to the audience immediately yes sir

right here we have a mic already over here good super I'm told to stand in the middle of the stage that's good turn on the microphone for the gentleman please I would like to there we go or like like practical attitude and uh and probably more like you know I was recently in uh in Israel and they have pretty much optimized their public transport system so if you miss to get a ticket for the transport system at the airport as an external you have no chance to get uh

you know permission so I had to write black how do you say that so so I I could think about you know that why is not this identity to think connected to people you know being on travel like you know helping them you know to get there what they need as a foundation at their destinations they're going to to have stuff like communication Insurance cash flow and all this kind of stuff and and really take care for these people because you know there's you know you know how many Americans don't have a passport and so forth so maybe we can be afraid you know being in yourself no and and try to you know establish for them maybe

temporarily at least for the the time of the the travel some some support for uh identity so so so is it okay if I think or at least to start um so I think it's absolutely vital what you're saying and that is maybe one of the misconceptions of what or the problems that we are facing so how do we drive the adoption for the traveler how do we ensure that the services can actually be designed in a way so they use verifiable credentials as part of their everyday life whether it's traveling in in uh in in abroad or whether it's actually looking at your health record or whether it's actually looking at whatever kind of interaction

you need to do um with with the within your your your day-to-day life and the beauty of of verifiable credentials as they would be adopted um uh is that and Danny mentioned it earlier that combination of multiple verifiable credentials into something that makes sense or that something that would be available to a Smart contract to actually execute on so you could actually think about a frictionless future of buying a house because all of the proofs could be obtained in a in a in a digital way and um could automatically be processed alongside the use case of buying the

house and all of the regulatory aspects of what need to needs to get done to to execute that on that transaction so you're absolutely spot on and I think my colleagues will definitely have also a word on that yeah absolutely another option I completely completely agree and the only thing I would add is the importance of verifiable credentials because as we create that frictionless experience that you were asking for and Daniel referenced the thing to avoid is feeding all of our data about everything that we're doing every movement we're taking everything that we're buying to some centralized entity whether it's a government or a company we don't want to give all of our data away and be and allow ourselves to be monitored with

every single thing that we're doing so how do you create that frictionless smooth Easy Digital experience and preserve our independent privacy and verifiable credentials really are a huge step towards exactly that that is the Holy Grail one more question sir or two and then we move to the next speaker okay up here then hey thanks um not sure if you were like following Recent research and like you know what's Community is also building with um the centralized societies um yeah so basically it's more like a concept of rather having um

identity system builds based on verifiable credentials right you have like more social classy right Soul band tokens and this kind of mechanisms um yeah it's open it opens basically like really like the doors to all the centralization in that matter right because like one of the problems with verifiable credentials is that you know an authority of like providing some um yeah credential itself yeah so of course to hear your votes and if you vote if yeah you have anything experience about that yeah I remember from the discussions back in the time at um when I was regularly in Prague and

the discussion around liquorland I think it was at the time that it was going in the direction of a decentralized totally decentralized country approach and at the time also the discussion around real self-storm identities in the case of you create your identity yourself and you choose who actually attests for whatever identity element that you have I mean these are all the great Concepts these are a lot of things that also motivated me to really get engaged with all of this unfortunately reality is something that is not quite ready for something like this yet and think we are struggling in Switzerland specifically since more than 10 years now to get a government-issue digital identity to use in everyday life as it is now and to go to that next step I think Society at

least at least here in Switzerland which is not not there yet unfortunately but it's obviously the end and game and the end state but I think it's just not the right time just yet but if I can make a last comment I don't know it says finished here but if you're interested in this topic I would like to make a quick announcement about uh the decentralized identity unconference that will take place here in Zurich on 7th to 9th of June it's going to be a three-day event on this topic of sales and identity centralized identities uh in the format of what some of you might know as the internet's identity Workshop in California that takes place since 18 years that's really where this topic is is being discussed at the real

detail level and at such a concept and any other technical Concepts and any other philosophical Concepts around identity can take place in an unconference fashion that means it's not like a conference where you go and sit and listen to somebody in front of you but where you actively create the agenda by by giving input in the morning and then teams are formed around the topic and then you can actually discuss these things in great detail unfortunately that's not possible here today but if you're interested if you go to the dice europe.org website you can send you can see the details around that conference I highly recommend it it's here in surika trust Square it's the first edition in Europe and um we're super excited us to organize super very very good

thanks for the questions thanks for the great discussion we'll wrap things up there and move on to the next speaker