# Self-Sovereign Digital Identity by Diego Fernandez | Devcon Bogotá

- Speakers: [Diego Fernandez](https://streameth.org/speakers/diego-fernandez)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 28:19
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-CF3wmO-5n4M
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3wmO-5n4M

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/self-sovereign-digital-identity/

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Speaker(s): Diego Fernandez
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: identity

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

foreign [Music] my name is Diego Fernandez I'm the secretary of innovation of the city of Buenos Aires and uh I will share with you basically how our deal and how we're planning with self-sovereign ad approach and how do we got to the point that we are right now so I'm going to share with you quarkid which is a self-server ID protocol that we promoted but let me start thinking about how do we deal with identity in the analog world let's think for a second about our wallets in a wallet we have a chunk of attestations of our identity but we have a driver's license in my case I have ID from two different countries Uruguay and Argentina I have a credit card from two different banks I have a card from my health insurance company I have a card for my football soccer teams River all of those institutions gave me attestations that make my identity all of those institutions don't know that the other institution gave that credential to me nevertheless all of them agree on a set of given standards which is quite basic is the hate and the way and the width of the credentials and why is that because we have our own wallets we have our wallets we have a black wallet and maybe each and every one of you chose a different color of wallet we choose a wallet that we want and we put the credentials in the water that we choose and how do the verification of this credential works in the analog world follows this triangle over here the most important part of this triangle is the line that says trust in the base of the triangle and why is that because let's say for example that they want to say the city government issues a driver license on my behalf stating that I am able of driving a car then a policeman stops me and say hey show me a driver's license please that when I showed my credential the policeman needs to trust they want to say the city government needs to know how the one inside the city government makes credentials in order to be enable of verifying that the credential is valid and there is not a forge but let's think of the last 30 years when internet took over and we became digital how do we deal with identity in the digital world well we have a huge problem there why because we don't have yet a digital ID primitive and I'm really excited that I think that this is starting to change that we are starting to build a digital ID primitive but today and we are all familiar with this in order to ensure let's say a bank an insurance company or whatever in order to be sure that the other party is who we think we it is each company they need to make their own security Frameworks their own security approach hence we have tons of apps in our in our cell phones we have an app for the bank an app for the government of the of the national government an app for the local governments apps for the health company except for the airlines taking this into the analog perspective will be the same as uh hey sorry I I don't have a timer here sorry going back up comparing this to the analog to it to the analog model would be the same as if when they want to say governments gives you a driver license the driver license came in a wallet assessment of the city government when Visa Grace gives you a credit card comes in a physical wallet that says visa and you will we would be carrying a bag full of wallets it doesn't make sense in general world but we do it in the digital world we have pages and pages of up in of apps in order to be enabled of interacting with any given organization what is the great advantage that the self-server in digital ID model proposes as you see conceptually is quite the same model of trust that we have in the analog world but it's much much better why because as you see in the base the trust line is not more solid line and why is that because the blockchain comes into place and we go into in deep into this in the next few slides each work creates a digital identifier and write statistics that are identifier with its Associated cryptographic materials needed to decode it in a public blockchain when the issuer means a perfect credential to the wallet of Any Given holder the holder is first able of accepting or rejecting the wallet and this is really important in this model nobody can airdrop or give a credential to a user if the user doesn't accept their credential when the verifier requests a digital proof of that credential this request is claims based not credential base let's say I have three dollars 19 17 and 15 years old of course when I go to a bar and request appear nobody asks for my ID because everybody assumes that I'm over 18 but that's that's not the case of my daughter in into stay in the analogues world we have a credential based authentication or verification so we give for example my daughter when she requests appear in a bar she's forced to give all of her information all of the information contained for example her ID card to a waiter handing her a beer in this sorts already model it's only claims based and you can give proof of certain aspects of your identity without needing to reveal all of the claims containing of given verified credential so for example my daughter could just send the proof to the waiter that she's over 18 not giving her name not giving her address not giving with any other characteristic of her Persona and as that proof contains the digital identifier of the issuer the verifier doesn't need to trust or to make no integration whatsoever with the issuer because the verifier is able of checking in the blockchain that the perfect credential is valid and that is that it was signed and created with the private keys of the issuer so what goes on chain and what goes off chain and this is really really important the only thing that goes on chain is the digital identifiers and the associated cryptographic needed to understand that digital identifier they are on your right hand side you can see what's the structure of Any Given digital identifier the Quark ID model has every verified credential every every person data goes off chain every personal data is stored in the user's personal device in the Quark ID protocol we are using uh an open source wallet that open source water is non-custodial and everybody asked me in this point hey what happens if I lose my wallet but my phone well you have two choices if we were if you were saved enough of storing your private keys and backing up your confidential storage then you will be able of recreating your digital identity already immediately if you didn't do that you're in the same situation that you are today in the analog world you need to go again to each and every institutional organization that gave you a perfect credential and request that credential again I'm going to do a quick review of the four layers that the Quark ID protocol has following the Quark the thrust over a p Foundation model in the level one is the blockchain level the the distributed Ledger levels where we write every digital identifier so that is available to anyone in the world that wants to verify it in the layer 2 we deal with a peer-to-peer communication with the Asian Communications in this scenario that we were thinking before when a waiter comes to my daughter and say hey are you 18 years old he will establish a peer-to-peer communication with no agent in the middle whatsoever this is based on the did come protocol which is an evolution of the hyperledger areas the third level relates to how do we deal with proofs claims and credentials what is the way that we interact with those proof claims and credentials and the layer 4 is the ecosystem level is where we store where we sort of announce all of the issuers all of the entities available or authorized in order to issue credentials one very interesting thing about the trust of European model is as each layer of this technology stack has a governance stack as well I'm not going to go into the government stack I invite you to go into the trust of European model Transformer Foundation website because it's a really interesting approach so let's go in deep into clock ID how do how do we envision work ID we have of course the chance of saying hey let's we're a government let's go and do this government implementation let's make the one outside ourselves over an ID protocol but we're convinced that that's not the way to go why because we're convinced that the way the governments interact today with Society need to change we believe in open permissionless blockchains and we believe that any God any protocol created by the government wouldn't be trusted just let me ask you a question would you draw us a protocol created by the government now okay I wouldn't either so what we did is we called Argentina has a very big and very thriving community of developers of companies of projects most of you for sure know open sapling decentral and sandbox uh pull up with Patricia or rsk IOP Labs I mean I can keep on mentioning we have a really strong really strong ethereum community in Buenos Aires so we called all of these guys and said hey you know what we're going to pursue this goal why don't you help us why don't you help us developing disease and that call was pretty successful and we started building work ID and one of the definitions that we the one of the first definitions that we made is this mustang this shouldn't be a government protocol this should be a community protocol so you have a white paper on the Internet it's an open source protocol it follows the standards that I measure in here the centralized identity Foundation the w3c toaster therapy foundation and we decided to implement within the product called compatibility with the open ID connect because of the huge uh possibilities that that in that implementation brings us and of course if we are ambition in the self-sovereign ID modeling as a way of identifying ourselves not in Buenos Aires not in Argentina but in planet Earth we need to be compatible with all of the implementations that are being developed around the world the most important of them all perhaps the ID Union which is the Sovereign ID model that the idea Union is proposing with the ngi lab Sovereign which is the perhaps the first self-solving ID model which was developed and ion which is an implementation developed by Microsoft over the side tree moderna protocol marketing is also developed over for a safety modern protocol so how does quarkid Works imagine quarkid as a as a sovereign ID layer it's like a layer that goes on top of any given blockchain so the within it as I mentioned before in the layer one of the thrustography model we need it we need um distributed Ledger blockchain the first blockchain which we anchored the the quarkiddy product was ethereum layer one we made that uh that anchoring not envisioning to use really ethereum as a as a security layer because of of the gas cost which will make it impossible to mean for example I don't know one million credentials but anchoring the protocol in layer in ethereum layer one made it extremely easy to Anchorage in any evm compatible blockchain the second thing that we did is we took the ion implementation that Microsoft made of the subtree moderna protocol using Bitcoin layer 1 hence you can use Quark ID and code in Bitcoin layer 1 and then we started with layer 2 world the first implementation that we made is polygon the second one that we made is rsk rsk is an evm compatible blockchain which anchors itself in Bitcoin and the last one was stocknet as you can see the the vision in Cork like this this protocol needs to be chain agnostic and that is a for us it's a crucial definition we are planning on adding different anchoring blockchains so that any ecosystem that decides to implement quarkid may choose whichever security layer they wish we as the seat of Buenos Aires decided that the first implementation that the first anchoring blockchain that we that we would use is storment why did we chose togglet wall because they're they're CK proof technology is pretty sound and it enables us to do a huge scaling because we can do a quadratic scaling we towards case transactions in stock net and then we scale transactions in quarkid hence we are able of using the cell server 1 iD protocol quack ID protocol with not even cents on the dollar for minting hundreds of thousands of credentials that is extremely important for us took so as I mentioned before we developed this and we were able of achieving this with a strong set of Partners extremian which is a a deaf house located in Gibraltar Stark War which is a plugs that you probably all know based from Israel eye of labs which are the creators of rsk Beyond OS City X carpet Etc a very important thing what is the road map for quarkid in Buenos Aires city we're rolling out the MVP in November this year we're launching the protocol in January 2023 and what is our our adoption plan we hope to create 30 different birthday credentials that mean 30 different documents let's say birth certificate marriage certificate driver's license so have a room up of 30 different verified credentials and we plan to Mint between 300 000 and 500 000 these identifiers that mean this is their identities within 2023 just to give you an idea Buenos Aires is a three million sorry three million City three million people sitting but actually we are seven million people community why because we have nearly between three and four million people that commute every day to work in Buenos Aires so we plan to start in 2023 having between three Hungarian five three hundred and five hundred thousands sorry I speak English the second language and uh we would like us all to have and we are looking forward to that three different private sector uh organizations using this security framework to meet their credentials this is very important nobody needs to ask permission to any government to use this any given organization May mean their credentials without requesting permission from anyone and any any community in the world can use this protocol for free because it's an open source protocol so Quark Idina nutshell first it's an open standard self-driving ID protocol second is multi-chain third is interoperable with most of the solutions tackling digital ID in the world fourth every private private data is off chain five it's it's gonna have autonomous governance and I'm going to do a small Point here today the governance is being made by this ecosystem of Partners but in the protocol roadmap is generating a Dao in the next 24 months so that the protocol is being able of getting governed by the ecosystem of I mean communities Partners or whatever use the protocol this of course is a very hard and difficult thing to tackle we have all seen the problems with going both in ETC and it's something that we're working quite currently six we're creating a 4K D is creating a growing public private ecosystem and seventh and this is the most important point the government is a user we don't want users of the government we want to be users as a government that this is a change of Paradigm which for us is quite important so last but not least why didn't we choose this path what is the Dilemma that we face when we tackle digital ID are we going to prove positives where are we going to approve negatives what I mean by this a Solvang token is a negative proof it's something that you can you can say no that you receive and that proves certain negative aspects of you or I mean for example you don't have credit uh you don't have credits outstanding credits you don't have criminal records or whatever proving positives is where a just describes within the perfect relentions model which is data that you have in and that you can show or not according to your will in our view both things are necessary and both things will occur but self-ownership and positive reputational systems come first we need to develop what I was mentioned before this identity primitive that we don't yet have on top of that of that identity negatives will unleash a great power of course and that great power would be immense for disenfranchised Community which will be able of requesting loans for example just using the reputation as a collateral but it has certain potential negative things that we are we don't think that we are yet in a position to sort of deal with just to give an example if I have a negative reputation that I'm for example a woman or that I am attending a mosque in the united states in the United States that person will have 68 percent chance of not getting a job compared with a Christian woman I took this out of the podcast of Evan McMillan and bitterlic bootle which I strongly recommend you all to hear because it's it's really really interesting so thank you very much I invite you all to get into the quarkid.org website download the white paper and we hope that in the next I don't know let's say 30 days 60 days we'll have the code available in in GitHub and published in the the work ID website thank you very much Diego we have some time for questions and we want to have a questions there there is one two questions yes three questions come on four oh okay the first one uh can I mail you in Spanish or in English I think okay my friend um I am Vladimir from Ecuador I think the concept for a solo tokens and so self-solving um identity we'll converge in this in some point what do you think I completely agree I completely agree I think I think that solvent tokens and verified credentials are two different aspects of our of our identity the positives the verified credentials are the things that I I mean that confirm my identity The Sovereign tokens rebuild certain certain social interactions or resultant attestations that of course will unleash a huge potential the thing is that in our view we need to start with the verified credentials model and then evolve into the reputational aspects that The Sovereign token proposes which did and then we will because those are all all of those are Unchained and once you write something in your blockchain it's written forever so we need to deal first in our view with the perfect credentials and the digital identity in a self-solving ID model and then move to the solvent tokens uh proposal proposal next question there please so great great talk I really like thank you very much um who helped you on building that strategy sorry who helped you on building this strategy for this project and who helped you on the vendor selection sorry to find the right vendors like polygon and the others who helps you to find the right protocols and partners well actually we did this with the with a set of partners that I mentioned before with the guys with it from extremian from the guys with our iub Labs from the guys that with the guys of our Beyond with a lot of help and I want to mention this with a lot of help from the ethereum foundation from Maya from Stephen from Skyler and how did we choose in which blockchains to Anchor of course as I mentioned before we started with ethereum because it was a no-brainer and uh I was lucky enough I mean we were lucky enough of being able to chatting and And discussing with I mean and I would say every big player in the blockchain arena and they were more than willing and open to share the details of their protocol and to offer support for us and and I feel very proud about that at the end of the day we decided to Anchor the seat of Buenos Aires since Darkness because of the clubs that they provided us and because we're really believe in their technology and we think that's your knowledge proof technology unleashes a whole deal of implementations you know the self-serving ID model which we want to take next question here and there is some hands there and there can you hear me yeah so thank you so much for the presentation and then as a lot in America I'm thinking about the user experience so I imagine my family all my friends using verifiable credentials for reputation or um any other use cases but my question is what is your roadmap or user experience like if I lose my phone are you thinking about other ways that I can recover my wallet um are you thinking about other ways to a store the verifiable credentials because in Latin America for example WhatsApp usage is huge but people sometimes don't have a lot of storage to store different apps so it's better to just have WhatsApp for them so I'm just wondering what are your thoughts and user experience in general for these use cases okay just I I cannot get who's speaking could you please raise your hand oh here thanks well it's a very good question I mean use your experience when you're planning in millions of people implementations are the the thing that you need to deal with I always like to say that we're giving you this possibility with this protocol first you can use we we're starting with three different wallets the quarkid protocol wallet xcapit is building and in which is a crypto wallet it's building an implementation for the quarkid protocol and always city has a digital identity wallet that is also being made compatible with Quark ID as I said before in my talk you are able if you have the technical knowledge I mean if it's not taking that I mean if you go to settings and you export your private keys so you store your seed phrasing whichever place you wish and you do a backup of your confidential storage let's say you put it in your Google drive or you take it out in a pen drive or whatever then if you lose your phone nothing happens you take your private Keys you recreate your wallet you take your confidence or storage you signed it with your private keys and then you have your wallet you digital wallet online like online in your phone again of course if you don't have that knowledge you will need to go again to each and every one of the mint of the issuers of your credentials and requests and reissue the same way that you when you lose a physical wallet today you need to recreate all of those documents in our view we're really focused on giving users the best experience whatsoever and start sort of uh sharing how users May back up and Safeguard their own data in our view those I mean the share of people knowing how to backup the data will increase over time and we hope that in the next few years everybody will do it each time I get this question ask I share a personal experience that I have I have I am 50 years old my mother something like 30 years ago said you know what son he was 60 something I want to learn to use the computer would you show me how so I say okay sit with me grab your mouse and put it in the start bottom it was a windows 95. so she took the mouth she did like this in the screen said you know what matters now you need to get a you need to get somebody I cannot teach you today my if she hears me she will tell me that today my 83 year old mother uses WhatsApp does FaceTime sense mail configures her own email I mean 30 years passed but uh we're positive that people will get to understand web free and we think that we have the power as a government of onboarding a lot of people into web free Technologies and that is using the power for good in my humble perspective thank you very much Diego and thank you all for your questions if you want to ask anything else he likes to talk a lot