ATALA PRISM: One ID, Many Possibilities

Over 1 billion people are unable to prove their identity and are excluded from healthcare, education, finance and government services. Latest innovations in decentralized identity are showing potential to make identity more accessible. However, vulnerable citizens are unable to benefit from these blockchain based mobile solutions as they lack smartphones, internet access and basic literacy skills. Our solution aims to further democratize the technology and benefits of decentralized identity to those who don't have smartphones by integrating low cost SmartCard solutions. Once enrolled, individuals have the ability to access services using the identity that is verifiable, private, portable and under their control. The solution works both offline and online. The blockchain is used to anchor the identity while biometric data and other personally identifiable information are stored off-chain on the SmartCard. The solution works for all people, whether disabled, illiterate, in remote villages or in refugee camps.

IOHK believes that digital identification is key to inclusive growth. According to a McKinsey global institute report conducted in April 2019 regarding digital identification, an estimated 1 billion individuals are currently without identification. Without the ability to prove their identity, these individuals are excluded from basic access to healthcare, voting, financial inclusion, education, governmental services and other important services. As societies and economies are looking to unlock the benefits of digital identification, there are now various technological findings that have expanded on making digital identity affordable. However, the latest innovations in digital identification exclude vulnerable and marginalized citizens that lack basic literacy skills, do not have smart phones or internet access and are located in remote areas.

Emerging economies can benefit from the scope of improvement that digital identity can offer through unlocking access to financial services, education, voting, etc. Our solution is designed to serve vulnerable and marginalized citizens that do not have smartphones, internet connectivity and live in remote areas. According to a World Bank report, the majority of the invisible billion live in Sub Saharan Africa and are typically members of the poorest and most vulnerable groups. Our solution uses a SmartCard that an individual can use at local service points to access services. This allows service delivery to be performed where the individual is located, removing the need for internet access or a smartphone. 

IOHK launched its African headquarters in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa in January of 2017. While building our PRISM solution we participated in an e-voucher proposal for farmers. In order for our solution to address the farmers' needs, we conducted a field visit and held interviews and had various conversations with the concerned bodies. We then gathered more of their requirements and molded our solution to address their current shortcomings.

Our solution is specifically designed for vulnerable populations. It offers privacy by design as all personally identifiable data is stored with the users in a SmartCard that they hold. Data can only be shared with the consent of users. Users do not need smartphones or internet access and can have basic literacy to use the system. The service providers can use NFC enabled smartphones to enable service delivery where the population is. 

Our solution is pushing the state of the art in many ways. It can scale to millions of users with marginal costs and can be optimized for individual use cases. To achieve this, we have implemented a novel layer 2 scaling solution that batches DIDs and verifiable credential operations into a single blockchain transaction, inheriting the benefits of blockchain without being limited by current performance limitations. We are also implementing a simplified protocol for blockchains with lower transaction fees where batched data can be stored directly on the ledger. This increases the security and overcomes the late publisher attack problem. None of our major competitors (Everynm, Uport, Civic, SelfKey) offer a SmartCard for storing and sharing credentials. We are also the only project that is blockchain agnostic. We have a reference implementation of the solution that can be deployed on Proof of Work blockchains (e.g. Bitcoin) and Proof of Stake (e.g. Cardano). We also have active agreements with the government of Ethiopia to pilot our digital identity solutions across several sectors.

We have an interactive demo here: https://atalaprism.io

Please note this is for our smartphone based solution. What we are proposing for the challenge is the SmartCard based solution that is under development.

You can also see presentation and demo that was conducted at the Cardano Virtual summit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cfO5tQQ0i8

One of the main features of our solution is that it has been built with the ability to scale with marginal cost to millions of users. The design of our solution is specific to vulnerable and marginalized groups with added features such as SmartCards and paper wallets.

We believe the foundation to economic inclusion starts with individuals being able to identify themselves, thus with the addition of a scalable and inclusive digital ID individuals will not only be able to identify themselves but access their rightful opportunity of education, healthcare, banking, financial inclusion and other important services that are standard in developed countries. Furthermore, this ID will encourage people to move from the informal to formal economy, creating greater job security and government revenues.

With our current strong relationship with various government entities in Ethiopia, we have been able to gather specific requirements from the different sectors we are looking to work in and amend our solution accordingly. We believe that after the initial pilot project kicks off we will be able to push the number of users using our product and leverage it to include microfinance and microinsurance features and fulfil KYC and AML requirements. This will create opportunities of economic inclusion for marginalized and vulnerable citizens.

We provide SDKs and Libraries for 3rd party issuers of digital identities or verifying institutions to integrate with our solution. Our solution can be integrated with existing digital identity solutions, and third parties can also build their own user experience if they do not choose to use the mobile wallet or SmartCard that we provide. Our solution is based on standards and specifications from the W3C and Decentralized Identity Foundation. This allows third parties to more easily integrate with our solution and vice versa.

We provide a complete set of tools including management consoles for issuers and verifiers and a mobile wallet / SmartCard for individuals. SDKs and Libraries can be used to integrate with 3rd Party tools. Our solution is based on standards and specifications from the W3C and Decentralized Identity Foundation. This allows components of the solution to be replaced and enables interoperability with our systems. In general, our SmartCard based solution is very user friendly as it requires basic literacy and leverages the benefits of a decentralized identity solution. 

Our solution is based on standards and specifications from the W3C and Decentralized Identity Foundation. This allows components of the solution to be replaced and enables interoperability with our systems. We have a strong track record in developing open source software solutions (e.g. Cardano blockchain). We plan to open source our identity platform to encourage high interoperability and avoid vendor lockin. Our solution also implements secure data vaults that enable users to own their data and share it with other platforms enabling high data portability. 

Please note that all code developed for this challenge will be open source under Mozilla 2.0 or MPL. We plan to open source our existing platform under MIT license. 

Our solution uses a SmartCard for individuals. They do not need a smartphone or internet access. The interaction with service providers requires them to tap their ID on a NFC enabled phone and select a unique sequence of shapes to authorize usage of their identity. In this model, the service provider provides the smartphone and internet access. The service provider app can also batch and store actions offline and carry them out when internet connectivity is available. If required, we could also explore other communication bearers such as SMS.  

• Current number: MOU with the Ministry of Education of Ethiopia for 3 million students when the contract is finalized. 

• Number within 1 year: 30 million (we have opportunities with the Government of Ethiopia with the Ministry of Education and Transport) and the Government of Georgia for Digital ID and Credential Verification solution. 

• Number within 5 years: 300 million (scale out across Africa and South America)

Our goal in the next year is to have 5 million people using our digital ID product. Given the discussions we are having with various ministries in the Ethiopian government, we believe this is feasible. Pushing towards the 5 year timeline, we would like to increase the number of people using the product to 100 million, but also go beyond digital ID, leveraging it to meet the KYC and AML requirements for provision of microfinance and microinsurance. We hope to build these connectors and capital links, to allow for responsible movement of capital across the world. Given our focus on Africa, we also expect to have built a full suite of products for the smallholder agriculture market, including tracking of supply chains, ID for the farmer, digital vouchers for agricultural inputs, and full microfinance linked to the ID. In countries where we have strong networks, we will achieve this scale by partnering with the leading in-country partners (like the Agricultural Transformation Agency in Ethiopia), but our goal is to make our technology usable by any individual or organization independently by Q1 2020. That means having the technology fully documented and open sourced. We believe this combination approach will maximise the scale of impact our technologies will have.

The major challenge we are facing is that we are building a product for deployment across Africa, but each country has its own regulatory and cultural environment. Secondly, any actual large scale implementation project requires a suite of partners who have expertise in running large scale projects.

Case in point, in Ethiopia, identity is fragmented across local and federal levels, and many people in the rural areas do not have a single form of ID. Working on a federal level to create a single ID would create value, but would also create issues on a regional level over centralisation of power. Kenya on the other hand does not have this problem, but does have a government that would rather keep certain parts of the data centralised. This requires two different software architectures. Similarly anything to do with leveraging digital ID for microfinance will necessitate conversations with National Banks, which have different regulatory requirements in each country. Finally, each country has vast variation in the culture of doing business, which requires a unique approach for each country both in terms of conversations, and also how you run the implementation process.

• Cultural issues: When we entered the Ethiopian market, we ran a training course for software developers with the Ministry of Innovation and Technology. From that course we hired 5 of the highest performing developers. When we approach a software development project in Ethiopia, they form the core of the solutions team. They can speak the language and are aware of the problems we might face.
• Regulatory issues:  In Ethiopia, we work closely with the government and a local lawyer to navigate challenges with the national bank and other stakeholders.
• Implementation: We have identified a number of local partners, including software development partners and NGOs who have experience implementing projects at scale. 

Our final strategy is to make the process grassroot led. When our codebase is documented and freely available, we will work with local evangelists in each target country to put together and lead the opportunities.

12 Full-time staff and 5 contractors work on the identity solution.

• Charles Hoskinson is a Colorado-based entrepreneur and mathematician. His professional experience includes founding three cryptocurrency-related start-ups: Invictus Innovations, Ethereum, and IOHK. He has held posts in both the public and private sectors. Charles is CEO of IOHK USA LLC.

• John O’Connor is our Director of African Operations. He is an Oxford PPE graduate, with a background working in technology and finance. He lives in Addis Ababa, from where he has built the African operations.

• Our Chief Scientist, Prof. Aggelos Kiayias from the University of Edinburgh, is a renowned academic and a leading specialist in Digital Identity.

• Dynal Patel has created and led product management programs at global companies such as Vodafone and Microsoft and agile start-ups, all with an innovation and technology mindset.

• Christos Loverdos is our lead architect and team lead. He has been building software products for more than two decades. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and specializes in Scala.

• Alexis Hernandez is a full stack developer and an engineering lead for our Identity solution. He holds a BSc in Computer Science. 

• Ezequiel Postan holds an MSc in Computer Science and has led engineering teams for U.S. investment banks. Ezequiel is currently working in IOHK developing decentralized identity solutions.

• Carlos Vargas-Montero has an MBA and a Computer Science degree. He brings a  wealth of experience from companies such as Amazon and HP Networking R&D. He currently represents IOHK at the W3C.

• Hyperledger Foundation: Working to contribute our open source projects to the foundation

• W3C and Decentralized Identity Foundation: Working to define standards and specification for decentralized identity.

• Government of Ethiopia: Scoping out several pilots covering farmer voucher solutions, student records and credentials, digital ticketing, and digital identity

• Government of Georgia: Working on a pilot for a digital identity and credentials verification solution for the Ministry of Education and universities

The solution can be offered in two phases:

In the first phase, we offer the government one set of apps in a single deployment, for a one-time license fee, and a yearly service provider and support subscription fee (as required). This includes the SmartCards.The service is available for free to end-users as it aims to build as big a user base as possible.

In the second phase, we offer value-added services upon user subscription to onboard issuers of credentials (e.g. health and education). The issuers will then be charged an on-boarding fee, potentially charging them per number of connections.

By enabling the issuance of credentials through a decentralised system that is accessible to many issuers/companies, we create the opportunity for the final users to hold and save information in one place (the SmartCard).  Thus, paving the way especially for vulnerable groups to get better basic services and access to financial inclusion.

The project is self funded. We intend to recoup the costs for development through license fees and subscriptions for services we provide. We are a technology company that is in the business of building DLT platforms and cryptocurrencies. Our goal is to fund our work through client engagements for the development of products and services worldwide.

We have not yet generated revenue from the solution. We do however have paid pilots in the pipeline.

We are seeking $150,000 to add smart card support to our current solution and also provide the companion Apps.

Our budget for 2020 is $1.5 million, which is self funded. We are seeking an additional $150K to add smart card support to our solution.

The Mission Billion Challenge Global Prize is aligned with our company vision to enable economic identity for marginalized communities throughout the world. While we are self funded, we require additional budget to add SmartCard support to our solution to extend the benefits of decentralized identity to vulnerable communities in remote areas with little access to smartphones and internet. Our solution can be used with minimum literacy levels. We provide companion Apps that ease the requirement for onboarding and allow that to happen where the individuals are located. The core of our solution revolves around data privacy and ensuring the rights of marginalized communities are protected by enabling them to have ownership and control of their personal information. We are already working with governments in developing countries and can scale up rapidly once the full solution is built. We have an ethos of open source and collaboration which is aligned with the objectives of the Mission Billion Challenge Global Prize.

We need support in moving from pilot programs to scaled projects. This means having partnerships with organisations that have done it before. We believe creating a coalition with partners will increase the likelihood of success significantly. Our company has not taken in grants before, so correctly monitoring, evaluating and creating donor transparency is an important competency we need support in. 

Additionally, actual implementation of a project to millions of people is another important element we would like support on. Finally, going from pilot to a scaled solution will require financial support that would need to involve large multinational organisations as well.

• World Bank: World Bank invests heavily in the countries we work in. They have large tranches of money set aside for some of the sectors we are implementing our solutions in. They can help financially support the scaling of the pilots.
• Mastercard Foundation: They have just invested heavily in Ethiopia. They have large tranches of money set aside for some of the sectors we are implementing our solutions in. They can help financially support the scaling of the pilots.
• Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ): They have large amounts of experience in capacity building, monitoring and evaluation. They could help in strengthening some of these missing competencies.
• MercyCorp/UN agencies: They have deep implementation experience in the countries we’re looking at. They have shown interest in running and scaling pilots using our technology.