Verifiable Credentials

Utility value of Decentralized Identifiers (DID's) becomes more evident when we leverage the benefits of a trusted and decentralized source of identifiers to enable entities to make attestations about facts or attributes in relation to these identifiers. Since the issuer of these attestations can be easily verified to have legitimately done so (via cryptographic signature verification), a powerful system of trust and proofs can be developed in a fully decentralized manner, with the potential to comprehend and improve all areas of digital interaction.

These are a few example use cases for verifiable credentials:

A notary public certifies that a given legal document copy is legitimate for a certain individual.
A financial institution states that an individual has successfully gone through KYC process.
An academic institution states that a person has achieved certain degree in a career or has approved certain specific courses.
An individual (as an identity owner) gives explicit consent to an institution or company to perform certain actions or utilize given personal data on the owner’s behalf.
A company states that a given person is an active employee in the company or was an employee for a given time period.

Also, it’s important to note that verifiable credentials can be stored and shared privately, thus preserving the principle of privacy that is characteristic of self-sovereign identity.

SelfKey is implementing mechanisms, protocols and libraries to provide DID owners with the capability to issue and verify credentials that can be shared privately or publicly, and operate with those within a self-sovereign ecosystem fueled by token economy.

SelfKey is actively participating in research and discussions around the topics of DID's and Verifiable Credentials with the goal of finding real world use cases to implement.