[Proposal] walt.id – Bringing Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and Verifiable Credentials (VC) to Ocean Protocol [Proof of Concept]

OceanDAO Round 10
#1

Name of project

walt.id – Bringing Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and Verifiable Credentials (VC) to Ocean Protocol [Proof of Concept]

The proposal in one sentence

Proof of Concept: Implementing Europe’s new open-source digital identity ecosystem based on EBSI and ESSIF in Ocean Protocol.

Website

Proposal Wallet Address

0xa4c6c2013810661a6750443aEF86cFeAc983e07f

Project Category

Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean

Have you previously received an OceanDAO Grant (Y/N)?

N

Contact Email

dominik@walt.id (Dominik Beron, CEO)

Current country of residence

Austria

Project Overview

What is the final product?

We will prepare and set up our full SSI integration (SSI Kit), to be used by Ocean Market implementations. This includes setup and operation of a Signatory (Trusted Issuer), implementation of an easy to integrate frontend interface for registration and onboarding of Natural Persons or Legal Entities (Publishers) to our SSI solution (Custodian), as well as the setup and operation of an Auditor, enabling GDPR-compliant verification of issued credentials.

The Auditor will be exposed via a REST-API, to be accessible by new and existing Ocean Market implementations.

walt_id_1
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How does this project drive value to the Ocean ecosystem?

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) enables anyone to easily and reliably prove their identity, i.e. who they are and anything about them (e.g. age, address, diplomas, work records, financial information, membership status, certificates …). There is no longer a need for lengthy identification processes. Data exchange becomes possible where it is simply not possible today such as because data is not available / locked in silos.

By offering an SSI/VC solution, we significantly increase the value of the Ocean tech stack for enterprise level businesses, as well as public institutions. This is best illustrated with a simple use-case:

A data consumer wants to find and consume a suitable and trusted data service, published by an enterprise or institutional publisher. Currently there is no solution in place to verify publisher properties, such as membership status or certificates. This is often important to meet regulatory requirements (“is the publisher a verified member of association X”? or “was this algorithm audited”?). walt.id offers a self-sovereign solution to verify such claims, while being fully open-source.

Later on, there needs to be a solution in place, allowing for easy registration, onboarding and authentication of trusted customers or publishers.

The SSI Kit enables GDPR-compliant KYC & KYB processes as well as form- & password-less one-click user verification, while being completely open-source, ensuring not to forgo any of the aforementioned benefits.

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Who is walt.id?

walt.id develops Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) solutions for governments and businesses across industries. We offer an easy and fast way to adopt Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) - particularly Europe’s new digital identity ecosystem, based on robust open source products like the EU Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) and the EU Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF). To ensure client’s success, their industry-leading experts provide holistic services ranging from conception over the implementation of pilots and production system to enterprise support and managed cloud services.

walt.id is a European company with headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

We made it our mission to enable every developer and every organization to build identity and trust into the web and their applications.

Project deliverables

Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean

  • Setup and Registration of a new Trusted Issuer instance (Signatory)
  • Easy-to-integrate open-source frontend interface for onboarding and registration of NPs/LEs into the ESSIF/EBSI ecosystem will be developed by walt.id via https://github.com/walt-id
  • Setup and operation of a new Auditor (verifying instance) to be used by the Ocean community to test and illustrate the SSI solution. REST API will be available at https://datamarketplace.walt.id. (REST API may change during the project implementation.)

Roadmap

10/2021:

  • Setup and Registration of a new Trusted Issuer instance (Signatory)
  • Development of an easy-to-integrate frontend interface for onboarding & registration of NPs/LEs into the ESSIF/EBSI ecosystem for testing purposes.

11/2021:

  • Setup and operation of a new Auditor (verifying instance) to be used by the Ocean community to test & illustrate the SSI solution
  • Preparation of our solution towards the 2nd Gaia-X Hackathon

Funding requested

20,000 USD

ROI

To measure the success and ROI of this project we consider the following metrics:

  • SSI and VC integration are essential requirements in Gaia-X. Our integration will strengthen Ocean Protocol within the Gaia-X architecture.
  • SSI and VC integration will drive adoption of Ocean Protocol for enterprises and organizations.
  • Open source software and the (hosted) SSI Kit will enable new projects to build on top of our solution.

We will leverage the 2nd Gaia-X hackathon as a platform to showcase our solution and the Ocean Protocol technology stack. As a reference, the first hackathon had a total of ~250 registered participants from over 25 countries. Given the success of the event and the traction it generated, measurable by participation in follow-up meetings, retrospectives, and preparation meetings for the 2nd hackathon, we expect this number to grow for the next event. Additionally, a successful demonstration of the solution would signal the existence of a working SSI solution to the whole Gaia-X community. This would generate lots of traction, which is why we can also include some of the >300 enterprise and organization members of the Gaia-X AISBL in our calculations.

Additionally, by developing open source software we enable new and existing developers alike to build with and on top of our solution. This in turn generates value to the Ocean community by further growing the ecosystem.

We assume that these features will help with regulatory clarity. As policy makers are very interested in the identities of users this proposal is an important next step towards regulatory compliance. It will support the Ocean Protocol stack in the long run. Eventually this leads to more enterprises engaging and running their custom markets. Let’s further assume we can win 50 new publishers next year and each of these publishers has two pools with a TVL of 100,000 $Ocean over a year. This results in 200,000 $Ocean * 50 Publishers = 10,000,000 $Ocean. This does not even consider the network revenue that is generated by trade volume.

With the above-mentioned metrics and evaluations our ROI calculation is as follows:

  • Bang:
    • Onboarding of Gaia-X hackathon participants into the Ocean Protocol tech stack: With the recent first hackathon as reference, we expect ~40% of attendees to actively participate in onboarding and development sessions. 40% * 300 participants = 120 participants.
    • Traction within the Gaia-X AISBL and its members: We expect two additional third-party portals (Ocean Market implementations) to be developed because of our solution.
    • We assume we can win 50 new publishers next year and each of these publishers has two pools with a TVL of 100,000 $Ocean over a year.
  • Buck: 20,000 USD requested
  • Chance of success: 90%

Expected ROI = bang / buck * (% chance of success)

= 10,000,000 USD / 20,000 USD * 0.9

= 450

Team

walt.id

Website: walt.id

LinkedIn: https://at.linkedin.com/company/walt-id

GitHub: https://github.com/walt-id

Dominik Beron

Role: CEO

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominikberon

Email: dominik@walt.id

Background: Serial entrepreneur with business and legal backgrounds.

Identity expert to the EU Commission and co-author of new EU identity standards (EBSI, ESSIF).

Philipp Potisk

Role: CTO

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipp-potisk

GitHub: https://github.com/philpotisk

Email: phil@walt.id

Background: Serial entrepreneur and experienced technical leader.

Over 15 years of experience in security and identity including biometric passports.

Severin Stampler

Role: Chief Architect & Engineer | Technical leader and developer.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/severin-stampler-714605140

GitHub: https://github.com/severinstampler

Email: severin@walt.id

Background: Over 15 years of experience in computer science, software design and development (security, big data, AI/ML, …).

Advisers

deltaDAO AG

Website: https://delta-dao.com

LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/company/deltadao

GitHub: https://github.com/deltaDAO

deltaDAO AG will assist with onboarding into the Ocean and Gaia-X communities as well as any questions regarding the Ocean Tech Stack. deltaDAO AG will not receive any of the fundings raised within this proposal.

5 Likes
#2

Hi guys, welcome in the Ocean DAO! It’s great to have you here and I’m sure that your proposal will add great value to the ecosystem. Let’s continue our conversation soon to see how we can align our existing collaboration in the field of eSSIF & EBSI for Ocean.

Best regards,

Rik

3 Likes
#3

Welcome to the OceanDAO, walt.id! I am happy that you decided to improve Ocean Tech Stack with your SSI and VC solutions. This will add great value to the ecosystem!

1 Like
#4

Welcome on board Dominik.
Hope we can make A.I. learning from SSI a reality together!

1 Like
#5

This is such an important piece of technology to be integrated on top of the Ocean Protocol tech stack.
Some of our Unions are looking for SSI solutions for their contributors e.g. validators of data. If you would are interested to connect for a collaboration with DataUnion I would love to have a call.

1 Like
#6

Hey Walt.ID Team,

We just submitted our vote for this proposal, your presentation on the townhall convinced us :slight_smile:

If you have time, go ahead and review our Proposal on the Port. Let us know whether you have any comments.

Cheers,
Data Whale

1 Like
#7

Full support from my side and we are deeply grateful for you joining the Ocean DAO for the very first time and taking this new adventure into a DAO and Gaia-X with us. These kinds of community building and collaborations across tech stacks and areas of expertise will make all the difference.

#8

I like the overall aims of this project. However the team doing the work needs to be more aware of what Ocean already offers, and revise its target work accordingly. I believe this is possible even for the time frame of this grant. I’m happy to iterate with the project team to ensure that what gets built makes sense.

Details…

Ocean already has some SSI support, plus fine-grained permissions. Much of it was built for enterprise use cases, in close collaboration with enterprise users.

What already exists:

  • in Ocean, every transaction (publishing, consuming, etc) is performed by an Ethereum address.
  • independent of Ocean, someone can create an account with a did-based identity provider (SSI). E.g. 3box, Everest, etc. Then they can link that did to various accounts, with appropriate verification. E.g. in 3box link to Eth address, github address, twitter account. These identity providers use Verifiable Credentials (VC).
  • in Ocean Market, a user can opt-in to link their Ethereum address to 3Box. Then Ocean Market displays the link to the 3box account, and twitter, github, etc.
  • each data asset also gets its own did (more SSI! :slight_smile:

What already exists, more recently: fine-grained permissions:

  1. Marketplace-level fine-grained permissions for browsing, publishing, etc within a marketplace frontend
  2. Asset-level fine-grained permissions on consuming the asset itself

These are implemented by a role-based access control (RBAC) framework that reconciles with Ethereum and with did/VC.

This project, as currently framed, doesn’t seem to be aware of the SSI support that Ocean already has:

Actually, there is a solution in place, as described above.

However, this can be improved! Here are specific examples.

  • 3box doesn’t have KYC. So there is value to integrate into Ocean Market an id provider into the market frontend which actually does have KYC
  • Ocean credentials schema is already general enough to support allowlists or denylists, with eth addresses or VCs for each. However, in the actual checking by Ocean Provider etc, only eth addresses are currently supported. Building proper support for VCs here was always planned; it would be great to see it completed

These are specific possible things that can be done which clearly help, and play well with the Ocean setup. And, I envision that we can discuss how Ocean ecosystem might leverage the walt.id tech even more, and find other ways to integrate for maximum effectiveness.

Therefore I do support this proposal, with the provision that the team doing the work will work to better understand the Ocean tech and to integrate with it in ways that make the most sense.

4 Likes
Walt.id – New Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) tools for the Ocean Ecosystem
#9

Deliverable Checklist

Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean

  • [X] We set up and maintained a new “Issuer” instance (“Signatory”)
  • [X] We developed an easy-to-integrate open-source frontend interface for onboarding and registration of NPs / LEs (into the ESSIF/EBSI ecosystem)
  • [X] We set up and maintained a new “Verifier” instance (“Auditor”) to be used by the Ocean community to test and illustrate the SSI solution.

In addition to the deliverables we:

  • [X] We set up and maintained a new “Holder” instance (“Custodian” or “Wallet”) to allow for credential storage and presentation.
  • [X] We set up and maintained “Issuer Portals” and “Verifier Portals” to make it easier to build end to end use cases (simplified speaking issuer and verifier portals connect a service providers existing web service / system with a wallet.
  • [X] We made APIs available every required functionality.
  • [X] We implemented updates / new features as discussed with / required by DeltaDAO & the GaiaX community (e.g. wrt to DID methods like “did:web”)

Outreach / community / spread awareness

  • [X] Onboarding assistance during the 2nd Gaia-X Hackathon (2. & 3. December 2021)
  • [X] Spreading awareness in the Gaia-X Community

Note: We even ended up leading our own track (“Identity & Trust”) and had call with various people from the GaiaX community (outside the Hackathon).

2 Likes
#10

Thank you so much for your update @walt_id!

As far as I can tell, your update delivers against all promised grant deliverables. I have taken your update and registered everything into Airtable, and your project is in good standing.

Very exciting to see the progress, and am looking forward to hearing more updates from you and the team as you continue to build! I would love to hear more from you in the #project-guiding channel, understand how you are addressing some of the points that @trentmc0 raised, and learn more about your future roadmap!

All the best!

1 Like