IOHK and Cardano community are building high quality tools and Dapps to utilize Cardano in real world applications. Atala PRISM can be used to create DID's to issue and verify credentials which shows a lot of promise. The tools that are being built are technologically advanced but don't fully address the complex environments that people, who are supposed to benefit from these technologies, live in.
The idea of issuing "proof of"-credentials to blockchain for people to leverage and gain benefit in their daily lives is still quite unknown in the west as it is in the developing markets as well. Most businesses and service providers don't understand the concept and actually have no idea how to address these technologies.
Proof of Employment -credential is one of the most interesting use cases of this technology and also noted by IOHK in the creation of Atala PRISM. PRISM has the technology in place to issue and verify Proof of Employment -credentials. These credentials can then be leveraged to gain better credit score for insurance and banking or maybe find a new job or apply to a university. The real challenge is to find the businesses willing to engage in the use of these technologies and who would be willing to apply them to create Proof of Employment -credentials for their Employees. The services currently provided to businesses don't make this process simple and more importantly, don't offer an incentive to issue credentials. This is because the businesses responsible of issuing these credentials are not primarily benefitting from the process.
This is where Fairway steps in. We create and pilot user-friendly SaaS-based software applying Atala Prism to issue Proof of Employment-Credentials. With our approach issuing of credentials becomes easy and mutually beneficial for both job-seeker and employer. We provide recruitment SaaS to Ethiopian market that can take the credential issuing process and conveniently include it as a part of the complete recruitment process and user experience. As our software is designed to handle the complete recruitment process and interaction between a job seeker and recruiter. Once the recruiting business and the selected job seeker both sign a contract, our software has the ability to use this information to issue a Proof of Employment -credential (See a diagram attached). Our product is currently run on private demo and will go public in Ethiopia around the end of Q2 this year.
Our goal is that , businesses with low incentives to issue credentials and no skills to do so get to participate into the credential issuing process with lowest possible barrier. By this Fairway becomes the credible issuer of these Credentials. There are, of course multiple approaches to solve the business adaptation challenge and the best practices for other more developed markets might be different. For the developing countries the level of digitalization is usually still not very high and to accelerate adaption innovations are needed. This approach provides the best solution for all the parties included. For the employees the ability to own their data as a verifiable credential and to leverage it in other aspects of life. And for the businesses the easiest possible way to participate in the process of issuing and verifying Proof of Employment -data from the decentralized network. In a country of 115 million people we believe this will be a big step towards the use of decentralized identities and VC's on a massive scale.
In the future Fairway is interested in expanding this solution in two ways:
1. Issue "Proof of"-credentials on various other things that can be used or created through recruitment process such as referencing and skill matching for job seekers as well as compliance records and reputation scoring for businesses
2. Creation of blockchain based legally applicable contract management platform where the legal documents signed by the parties are directly signed on a blockchain
Ethiopia is tumultuous market, where have been wars and lack of digitalisation for some time. That means that there is certain aspect of chance of surprises to the nation as a whole, that would affect the project. However, so far all the advancements are going in to the right direction with digitalisation and politics and peace seems probable within the the current political turmoil. Fairway is still fully focused on Ethiopian market and confident with the progress our team will be able to achieve. The piloting of the software is done using same processes and connections as any other development within our company. In the future we are keen on expanding to other African markets as well and these developments can be utilized wherever there is digitalization and growing adoption for Cardano.
The main risk of the process itself is making sure the model for issuing credits is securely built and has correct incentives in place. Our software has the ability to check that the person owning the DID is the same person that actually get's the job. This happens via KYC-type process where during the physical interview of the candidate the user account is validated to be the same as the interviewed person themselves. Once the candidate selction is made, both parties need to agree on the recruitment for the credentials to be issued. However, a process like this always has potential holes for fraud and that is why a Pilot Project is needed. Fairway will address all the potential hazards that come up during the pilot before launching on Mainnet.
In some settings the recruiter might not have incentives to "issue" (or to help to issue) credentials. The clever solution we have come up with is to gather most of the important data needed for the credential already during the recruitment process as part of recruitment. This information does not need to be inputted by the recruiter later because it already exists, but only validated to be correct once the agreement has been made. The needed data and the validation of agreement already exist in our platform as part of the recruitment process and therefore don't require much extra work, only validation after which the credential can be issued by Fairway.