COVID-19 Immunity Certificates

Immunity certificates are almost always shared using a state-provided paper form signed by the health care provider. There are no widespread systems in place to determine or certify immunity from the recovery from a virus, only vaccine based immunization.  Immunization records from vaccinations are not currently a priority for healthcare providers or insurance payers due to the relatively low margins of providing vaccines.  

Our platform allows health care providers to easily issue distributed ledger-based certificates to their patients. Individuals can then manage the access to their certificates quickly and securely.  Certificates can be endorsed and managed by government stakeholders based on meta-data stored on the OG platform. If a provider, testing protocol, or other aspect of the certification is no longer valid, these certificates can be revoked or devalued by the government. Our system conveys the privacy benefits of a distributed ledger system without exposing the complexity.

It is likely that benefits in the form of access to work or social events will be provided to individuals who can provide a certification of immunity regarding COVID-19. With increased benefits being allocated to immunized or recovered COVID-19 patients there will exist a compelling reason to falsify immunization documents. The traditional approach would be a centrally managed application requiring significant upfront investment, along with intrastate, interstate, and potentially international coordination. The traditional approach would create a single point of failure for data hacking and carry privacy risks associated with proprietary data mining by a technology administrator. 

There are valid concerns that it is too early to issue immunity certificates because immunity from COVID-19 exposure might last a couple of months or a couple of years and there are different accuracy profiles for the various antibody tests.

Another strategy is to only lift social distancing restrictions when 'herd immunity' is realized by a community. This is difficult for a decentralized healthcare system (such as our country’s) to ascertain without a large data depot and the associated compliance, security and privacy concerns related to these databases.   

Healthcare providers can issue certificates to individuals. Individuals can share their certificates quickly and securely.  Certificates can be managed and analyzed by stakeholders based on meta-data stored on the OG platform according to local regulations without exposing personal details. 

Our platform has helped government agencies utilize a high speed, inexpensive, distributed ledger (DLT) known as Stellar. Issuing certificates on Stellar allows for portability, individual ownership, and revocation by the issuing government. Our platform allows for simple provider and individual onboarding, DLT key management, and configurable smart contract functionality that would allow for verification by authorized users.

The DLT architecture provides an impartial certification system funded primarily on a transparent transaction-fee basis so that the validity and accessibility of certificates are not reliant on a data mining business model, government, healthcare provider or other centralized risk that might risk the long term technical effectiveness of the system. Our approach avoids many public DLT pitfalls with a low latency, low electricity demand, and relatively low per-user and per-transaction fees. OG extends a public DLT by helping governments endorse the certificate standards and manage the resulting certifications. We then help providers issue certificates, and individuals quickly and securely share their certificates.

The target population will be those who have tested positive, and then negative for COVID-19. As antibody tests are more available, we will support those who have tested positive for antibodies, and once a vaccine is available, we will support the vaccinated population as well. 

We have already interfaced with local governments around electricity related certification thanks to our existing projects and contracts. We have had preliminary conversations with health care providers to understand their needs. We expect to have more substantial conversations with public health officials to further our understanding of their interests. Verifiers that need to manage many certificates, such as employers or other stakeholders would be the primary source of revenue and engaging with these customers is of the utmost importance as soon as the focus begins to shift from the immediate concern around adjusting protocols and shared spaces to accomodate social distancing. 

It is likely that benefits in the form of access to work or social events will be provided to individuals who can provide a certification of immunity regarding COVID-19. With increased benefits being allocated to immunized or recovered COVID-19 patients there will exist a compelling reason to falsify immunization documents. The paper approach is not scalable, and a traditional digital approach would be a centrally managed application requiring significant upfront investment, unlikely inter-governmental coordination. The traditional approach would create a single point of failure for data hacking and carry privacy risks associated with proprietary data mining by the administrators.

The integrity and transparency of data stored on a distributed ledger network are based on the algorithms used to encode transactions on the network. 

Traditional solutions rely on an entity to manage an application or database to store critical records. This entity delivers value in a business context by acting as trusted platform to ensure the accuracy, manage changes and disseminate the information. The integrity and transparency of a traditional platform is based almost exclusively on the legal and business repercussions of failing to perform.

Open digital ledger networks allow anyone with access to the network to append or verify data. Creating a digital asset (in this case, a immunity certificate) on the network allows for additional rules to be associated with the management of those types of assets. 

In this application, we allow health care providers to easily create, issue, and manage immunity certificates on an open distributed ledger. We deliver the benefits of an open digital ledger and tools to manage them without the complexity typically associated with digital ledger solutions. 

We address the high costs and low speed associated with open solutions secured with computing power (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum) by using an inexpensive, fast, and open distributed ledger network called Stellar. Consortium solutions or private digital ledgers do not convey the scalability or decentralized management benefits of public networks.

We repurposed our tools, previously used to issue and manage distributed ledger based immunity certificates issued from health care providers to individuals. A digital certificate managed in this way is more portable, flexible in light of new immunity knowledge, and less susceptible to fraud.  When a government entity wishes to associate their authority with this type of certificate, we can adjust the verification tool to provide the government's relative confidence in the certificate.

Our technology consists of a cloud based management tool for creating and managing distributed ledger data. Our original application was designed for government owned utilities to issue certification of electric meter data to users. The certification was in the form of a digital asset on the Stellar network. We chose Stellar because of their open, fast, inexpensive network, ability to manage custom assets, and leverage simple smart contracts. 

Our tools include user management, digital asset managements (including issuance, revocation, and meta-data association), historical review of distributed ledger transactions, and the creation of device or entity privileges for issuing the digital assets (certificates). 

In the past, we have leveraged the Stellar public blockchain network for our work with Burlington, VT; EDF, Inc. (France), & the Sacramento Municipal utility District (SMUD,CA). Stellar was used as a low cost, low latency, system of record for managing certificates related energy use. We are repurposing this technology to maintain individual confidentiality regarding immunity from COVID-19. The diagram below outlines how our platform was used to certify electric use in Burlington, VT in 2019. There is a link to the webinar from the American Public Power Association that describes the process and outcome in more detail. Overall, the transactions were completed in a timely manners (less than 3-seconds each), and the total cost for operating on the Stellar network was less than $0.02. Stellar has been optimized to enable cross border settlements, so the network is sufficiently secure, decentralized, and 

APPA, Burlington, VT pilot

https://www.publicpower.org/ev...

Our solution provides a bottoms up way to manage immunity certificates as opposed to multiple top-down competing approaches that seek to consolidate data. There are concerns about privacy and the relative effectiveness of the antibody tests, potential vaccines, and other immunity pathways. A system that respects privacy and provides an impartial view of the immunity pathways will be an important tool for public health officials and the public to determine the true effectiveness of vaccinations, exposure, and antibody tests. 

Activities: By designing and marketing the solution as an accessible, fair, privacy focused personal and public health solution for managing test and vaccination records we expect individuals and their health providers to sign up and provide additional data that can help the community better manage the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Output: a better data set that is secure and does not have the potential to expose individual information. 

Outcome: more representative and retroactive actionable and impartial data on the effectiveness of immunity pathways. 

2 full time, 1 part time and 2 contractors for design and front end programming.  

The core team is composed of Killian Tobin, our CEO, Alan Grau, our Lead Architect, and Alex Maki-Jokela, our Backend Developer.  Technical architecture is led by Alan Grau, an established security expert who helps Omega Grid in designing the architecture for our projects. Technical implementation is performed by Alex Maki-Jokela. Mr Maki-Jokela has successfully migrated and upgraded the Omega Grid platform over the last year. 

Mr Tobin has an MS in Computer Science from DePaul University, and has successfully led business development efforts for Omega Grid, earning a top 10 ranking for the small business in the global electricity blockchain market. Prior to Omega Grid, he led business development for Uptake in 2015-2016. Uptake grew from 99 to over 400 employees and received investment valuing the company at $1.1B. 

Mr Grau has 30 years experience in telecommunications, embedded software, and security.  He has been working on blockchain based solutions for the past two years.  Alan was co-founder of of Icon Labs, an embedded systems security company acquired by Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA), the world’s largest Certificate Authority and provider of automated PKI solutions. He previously worked for AT&T Bell Labs and Motorola.  Alan has an MS in computer science from Northwestern University.

Mr Maki-Jokela graduated from Duke University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2009. Mr Maki-Jokela has worked as a software developer for over 10 years and has first hard experience with our system. He recently added smart contracts support to our platform that enables device-initiated certificate verification.

We have partnered with government utilities including EDF, Inc, The French state owned $80B global electric company and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District of California, the third largest municipal utility in the USA, and the American Public Power Association, a group of over 2,000 community-owned utilities that power towns and cities nationwide. 

We anticipate furthering our partnership with local government to include health officials. We will engage with health care providers and pharmaceutical organizations as need be.

Revenue will be generated from a paid subscription service for stakeholders, such as employers, that wish to verify certificates. Verifiers could include anyone granted access to the certification by the individual. 

Another revenue stream is expected from providing a data access service for government, health insurance payers, and pharmaceutical companies interested in understanding the outcomes of test or vaccination types.

The most important users will be the health care providers and patients, to lower the barrier to entry, they will receive and be able to manage access to their certificates at no cost. 

We have submitted SBIR grants and are approaching traditional seed investors to fund our pivot into this application. We will leverage much of our existing code base for managing certificates and onboarding individuals. The most important success factor for of our business will be enticing individuals and their healthcare providers to use the free system. Without widespread user adoption, there will not be enough momentum to convince businesses to pay to manage the certificates.