Provo, UT, March 19, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Sovrin Network, a groundbreaking global digital identity system that allows people and organizations to control their digital identities online, has reached a key milestone. Today, the Sovrin Foundation—the nonprofit organization for governance of the network—announced the launch of a new streamlined process for businesses, governments, and other organizations with use cases currently in development to write to the Sovrin public ledger.
“This is an important step in the move towards full public write access to the Sovrin Network,” said Nathan George, CTO of the Sovrin Foundation. “The developers, organizations, and businesses that have been working with us on SSI-based projects can now begin to use the Sovrin Public Ledger directly to issue verifiable digital credentials.”
“It’s difficult to overstate what self-sovereign identity means for the future of the internet,” said Sovrin Executive Director Heather C. Dahl. “We are looking at the beginning of the end of usernames and passwords. We are looking at an entirely new way of using the internet, one that builds trustworthiness out of respect for people’s identities by interacting via based on trustworthy digital credentials.”
With this latest milestone, issuers of Sovrin-based credentials, including Sovrin Stewards and other organizations called Transaction Endorsers, can now write the information they need directly to the Sovrin Public Ledger. Examples of these ledger writes include public decentralized identifiers (DIDs), schema, credential definitions, and other GDPR compliant pieces of public information that abide by the Sovrin Governance Framework and Transaction Endorser Agreement. The Sovrin Foundation will collect a modest fee from these organizations which will reduce spam to the ledger and support the Foundation’s administration of the network.
“This step means that companies can now anchor DIDs to a public ledger built specifically for identity,” said George. “Now, anyone abiding by the Sovrin Governance Framework can use the network to issue verifiable digital credentials. This provides the access to self-sovereign identity, which Sovrin has been working towards since day-one.”
“We are very proud to announce that Sovrin is now open for any organization to begin issuing digital credentials” said Sovrin Chairman of the Board, Dr. Phillip Windley. “We look forward to working with the first generation of credential issuers to help show how globally verifiable digital credentials can solve many longstanding issues of internet identity and trust.”
The Sovrin Network is an open source development project operated in conjunction with the Linux Foundation Hyperledger project. Sovrin had over 250 active developers responsible for nearly 15,000 unique contributions in 2018 alone. The Sovrin Foundation continues to help grow the number of code contributors and maintainers, along with the number of Stewards running the network’s nodes. This diverse community will not only encourage adoption and use of the Sovrin Network, but also work towards interoperability with other blockchain-based systems for identity currently in development.
Organizations interested in advancing self-sovereign identity and supporting the work of the Sovrin Foundation may also join the recently launched Sovrin Alliance.
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ABOUT THE SOVRIN FOUNDATION
The Sovrin Foundation is a nonprofit organization established to administer the Governance Framework governing the Sovrin Network, a decentralized global public network enabling self-sovereign identity on the internet. The Sovrin Network is an open source project operated by independent Stewards and uses the power of a distributed ledger to give every person, organization, and thing the ability to own and control their own permanent digital identity.
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