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Dominik Beron
Dominik Beron

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Decentralized Identity & Payments β€” Grant Report #1

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Project Update

Over the course of this project we conducted a lot of technical and market research as well as talked to many thought leaders and companies in different industries. What we found is that the payments and financial incentives will not only be a crucial enabler of decentralized and self-sovereign identity, but that (in many cases) they will even be (legally) necessary, such as in the context of applying decentralized identity to AML regulated industries.

In a nutshell, the insights we got from our research show that the proposed project is even more relevant than we initially thought it would be.

Today, we are on track to completing our project by the end of Q1 2022 (as proposed)

Note: We rebandend from β€œLetsTrust” to β€œwalt.id”.

Progress on objectives

While the timeline between different milestones shifted a bit (e.g. we included external experts earlier than anticipated relative to other milestone such as the finalization of the architecture), here’s the milestones we achieved until today:
Project kick-off
Onboarding of project staff
Research (technical, legal, market)
Conceptualized architecture
Start compiling / writing the white paper
Get external feedback

In sum, these milestones are aligned with the initial delivery plan for the first 3-4 months (of 6 months). Therefore, we are confident that we will be able to deliver the project results by the end of Q1 (i.e. in 2 months).

Considering that all project outputs are still work in progress, we will publish them as soon as we have stable if not final versions (latest by the end of this project).

Key activities

Aligned with the objectives / milestones outlined in the last section we conducted the following activities:

  • Kick-off and onboarding of the project staff (incl. new hires, advisors)
  • We conducted online research as well as talked to individuals (e.g. thought leaders from the identity and payments space, people involved in new regulatory processes like the EU’s new eID and AMLR regulations) and companies (e.g. partners and clients from different industries including banking and financial services). The research approach is quite holistic considering technology (e.g. web monetization / interledger protocol, existing data monetization frameworks, SSI, …) as well as market and legal research (e.g. role of new regulations for data monetization e.g. in the field of anti money laundering/AML)
  • We conceptualized different monetization approaches and (high-level) architectures (incl. data modelling, protocol design) that could support these approaches.
  • We started compiling / writing the white paper.

In addition, we also have ongoing projects with clients (e.g. open banking) in which we explore different approaches to monetize data (or more concretely the issuance and life cycle management of Verifiable Credentials).

Communications and marketing

So far we have not yet published about our work. However, as mentioned, we conducted various bilateral discussions with customers and other stakeholders.

What’s next?

Based on our past activities we will:

  • Create and finalize the technical architecture and specifications (incl. e.g. data modeling, protocol design)
  • Create mocks to illustrate the impact of web monetization on the user journey
  • Finalize and publish the white paper

What community support would benefit your project?

It would be great to chat with someone who already implemented interledger protocol in a (d)app in order to better understand the concrete implementation requirements and parameters.

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