Please describe your proposed solution.
<u>Introduction</u>
GLEIF, Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, was created in the wake of the 2007/08 economic crisis by the G20 countries to help improve financial stability worldwide and make sure counterparties to transactions could be readily revealed. GLEIF issues Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI) that provides key information about businesses, funds and governmental organizations participating in business transactions, including their name, when they were formed and, crucially, their ownership structure. More than 2.3 millions of Legal Identifiers were issued so far to companies around the world, a number that is rapidly increasing over time as the regulation enforces their use.
Recently, the GLEIF began to issue a verifiable credential called vLEI (verifiable LEI) that allows the assertion of delegation chains and the digital proof of correctness of things like signatures in financial reports. The vLEI allows those Legal Entities to participate in the verifiable credential ecosystem.
Those verifiable credentials are based on a fully Decentralized Identity technology called KERI/ACDC that requires supporting witnesses to provide a second source of trust. On Fund 9, rootsID got funded to develop the first Proof of Concept for a KERI witness on a blockchain, a project that was delivered successfully on time.
<u>Our Goal</u>
Our goal is to make Cardano the best alternative as a witness for legal entities that participate in the vLEI GLEIF ecosystem. Those credentials, also called as Organizational Identities, provide a person or thing to prove their authority to represent an organization outside the boundaries of that organization. As this medium article explains, “when the authority of a person or thing claiming it can be instantly verified, the world will be different…
- The authenticity of any digital document, agreement, purchase order, filing, or other piece of data will be instantly verifiable;
- Phone calls, texts, email, and other digital communications originating from authorized representatives (or devices) of an organization — or any delegate from that organization — will be instantly verifiable;
- Some documents will prevent signing and some systems won’t be accessible without the expected authority (a parallel to access control lists);
- The authority of every approval, signature, or other digital action in a supply chain will be instantly verifiable by downstream actors, and irrefutably auditable in real-time;
- Authority will be verified before identity in most interactions, and identity not at all in many;”
All those use cases and any other that you can imagine need to be backed by a network of digital trusted witnesses or notaries. Cardano blockchain, with its extensive decentralization and scalability properties, is an unbeatable option to be selected by those Organization.
<u>Our Solution</u>
We propose to upgrade the Proof of Concept KERI backer delivered in Fund 9 with a more robust architecture and new features that are needed to make it a production-ready solid product that can pass the high quality standards required by large and medium organizations.
We will redesign the service to suport:
- high availability
- high reliability
- redundancy
- containerization
- backup infrastructure
- fees and payment handling
- monitoring
- statistics dashboard
- maintenance tools
- CIP-10 metadata labeling
As part of the project we are also including the deployment of a cloud instance of the developed product in RootsID AWS cloud infraestructure.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
GLEIF vLEI ecosystem is being adopted globally and as the number of participating companies grows, it will increase the use of verifiable credentials that enables a smarter, less costly and more reliable way to make decisions about who to do business with.
We believe that if we can position Cardano as a first option for a witness to their Legal Identifiers, the adoption and usage of vLEIs will directly impact in the adoption and promotion of Cardano. That is the business value that we are envision to generate with this project.
As with most RootsID projects, the codebase contributed will be 100% Open Source and ready to be deployed by any interested party. This product is also part, but independent, of this proposal in Fund 10 towards the same goal. We strongly believe the the integration of Cardano with the GLEIF ecosystem is of mutual benefit.
It is important to mention that the technology involved, KERI/ACDC, is also Open Standard and Open Source code; and that the ecosystem promoted by GLEIF foundation is based on an Open Data and Open Source philosophy.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
The immediate direct measurement of success of this project is to have our own GLEIF witness instance deployed in mainnet with real Organizational Identifiers using it as their witness.
In the long run expect to see increasing use Cardano by inspecting:
- numbers of organizations witnesses by Cardano
- number of transaction events submitted by those organization
- number of credentials issued by those organizations
- number of witness instances deployed in Cardano mainnet
There’s also a less quantifiable measurement of success that corresponds to the growth of visibility of Cardano blockchain and the benefits and assurance it can provide for the organizations that participate in the vLEI GLEIF ecosystem.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We are engaged actively in the KERI community attending weekly meetings where we have the opportunity to show and demo our contributions. Additionally, as we also provide technical services to GLEIF and have a direct relationship with them, we will promote the Cardano Witnesses to became part of the recommendations in GLEIF Governance Framework.
Additionally, we are in conversations with the Cardano Foundation to deploy its own instance of the witness and help promote the adoption.