RootsID production-ready GLEIF witness on Cardano

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Lance Byrd

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

3

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

RootsID will improve the KERI backer Proof of Concept delivered in Fund 9 to reach production readiness quality, and deploy it as a cloud instance to be adopted by vLEI GLEIF ecosystem participants.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependencies

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

Project will be fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution.

Introduction

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 2.5 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 as you can see in the linked close out report. The proof of concept code is now part of the WebOfTrust repositories and can be found here. Additionally, a working cloud instance is available to try at the following URL: https://backer-dev.rootsid.cloud

Our Goal

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 adopted by those Organization and is part of the identity solution selected by Cardano Foundation. You can find useful to hear the following interview at the Cardano Summit 2023 to Thomas Mayfield, team lead of Cardano Foundation's Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions, talking about their Technical Development and Progress where he explains the technology and adopted open source libraries including our Cardano backer that is the PoC that we plan to convert into and MVP in this proposal.

Our Solution

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, also referred as MVP, that can pass the high quality standards required by large and medium organizations.

We will redesign the service to support:

• 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 infrastructure.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

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.

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.

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 have been helping Cardano Foundation to deploy its own instance of the witness and help promote the adoption. You can find useful to hear the following interview at the Cardano Summit 2023 to Thomas Mayfield, team lead of Cardano Foundation's Decentralized Trust and Identity Solutions, talking about their Technical Development and Progress where he explains the adoption of that technology and mention the partnership with RootsID.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

The RootsID team has been delivering Open Source building blocks for the Self-Sovereign Identity ecosystem in Cardano. We have been funded in several Catalyst projects since Fund 6. Our funded proposal are listed in lidonation, where you can find that we have delivered successfully and on time 18 out of 19 funded proposals. Proposal links, reports, and final videos can be found in those links.

The team is constantly engaged in all Self Sovereign Identity Cardano activities such as Atala Prism Astros, Atala Prism Pioneer Program, Prism+SSI After Town Hall break rooms, and meeting periodically with partners or related Catalyst projects with the aim of collaboration and help adoption and growth of Cardano in the Identity world.

Additionally, the team participates actively in the worldwide SSI community by attending and collaborating to several working groups in the Decentralized Identity Foundation, the Hyperledger foundation, the Trust over IP foundation, and the KERI community.

We’ve been providing technical services and consultancy on Decentralized Identity to several companies and organizations including:

• IOG
• Cardano Foundation
• GLEIF
• Provenant

The main goal of the project is to deliver an open source production ready MVP for KERI witness on Cardano for the GLEIF ecosystem. Since this is a continuation improvement project from a funded proposal on Fund 9 where the objective was to deliver a Proof of Concept, we are using the successful outcome achieved as a validation of feasibility of what we are proposing.

The direct measurement of the success is the open source code that will be delivered in a public GitHub repository, hat can also be validates in the a deployed instance in RootsID AWS cloud instance. Real transactions into Cardano mainnet will also serve as evidence of success.

Our cloud instance will have a public web page with a dashboard to track usage metrics.

[Project Milestones] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

The design documentation of the project available in a public GitHub repository as well as issues created for each individual task

• Design new architecture and features (1 week):  this is a technical design of the new architecture to provide high availability and the proposed new features.
• Documentation (1 week): documentation on how the witness interacts with the Cardano blockchain and how the service should be deployed and maintained
• Project planning and task allocation (1 week): definition of individual development and operational task using an Agile methodology and allocation to developers and devops

The acceptance criteria for that milestone are the documentation available in the public GitHub repository and the activity task created on the same repository as individual issues.

The open source code of the KERI Witness available in a public GitHub repository

• Development (7 weeks): actual development and coding activities as defined previously

The acceptance criteria is the open source code available in the public GitHub repository that can be built and run. The repository must include instruction on how to build and execute the code.

This team adopts Agile methodology based on the tools provided by Github. Besides progress reports, the advancement will be tracked by public Github issues, project views (like Kanban board) and commits.

A working cloud instance hosted on AWS pointing to mainnet

• DevOps and deployment (1 week): containerization and deployment of the service in RootsID AWS cloud instance in testate
• Test and improvement iterations (1 week): iteration cycle of testing and improving performance and reliability

The acceptance criteria is the availability of the cloud instance. It should be showcased in a video.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

This project will be delivered by:

Rodolfo Miranda is a co-founder of RootsID and contributor on several of our projects, including RootsWallet. 

His background includes a MS EE degree at Stanford University and more than 25 years of successful work experience in both large multinational companies and owned startup projects. His main activities involve architecting, developing, and implementing large scale software solutions for the Telecommunication Industry. Lately, he was engaged in blockchain technologies and became an enthusiast of Self Sovereign Identity. He’s an active contributor in the Aries, DIDComm, KERI and Anoncreds Working Groups.

He’s also involved in the Cardano Community, participating as a veteran Proposal Advisor, member of the LATAM Cardano Community, and the Cardano Community SSI Alliance.

LinkedIn

Lance Byrd is a co-founder of RootsID, a group of decentralized identity specialists building open source software for digital identity. Several of their projects have been funded by Catalyst. He is primarly focused on RootsWallet, the end-user identity wallet.

His background includes a BS in Computer Science (UMBC) and MS in Information Assurance (Capitol College) and more than 22 years of software development as a consultant. He has developed massive scale data analytics and visualizations, machine learning analysis pipelines, and worked with University researchers to bring their work to market. He has also built and taught technical certification courses for several different topics in data analysis, big data, and compliance.

He completed the first cohort of the Atala Prism Pioneer program and is now part of the Atala Prism Astros program.

Linkedin

Alex Andrei is an experienced open source developer who has a passion for architecting decentralized data solutions. With vast knowledge and expertise in data, Alex is able to create, secure, and scale systems that have the most demanding needs . He’s currently working on the open source identity wallet, RootsWallet. He’s actively participating on standards at Hyperledger, DIF and IETF.

Linkedin

Rodolfo will be leading the project counting with Alex and Lace as supporting developers of KERI technology. We are also including two extra developers currently working for RootsID that will help with the efforts of UI design and DecOps.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Budget is mostly composed of development hours at a ratio of $100/hr (aprox ₳400/hr), plus the hosting costs. Based on the activities defined above the requested breakdown budget is:

• Design: 20hr = $2.000 = ₳8.000
• Documentation: 20hr = $2.000 = ₳8.000
• Project Plan: 20hr = $2.000 = ₳8.000
• Development: 200hr = $20.000= ₳80.000
• DevOps tasks: 50hs= $5.000 = ₳20.000
• Test and improvement iterations: 50hr = $5.000 = ₳20.000
• Yearly AWS instance: $500 = ₳2.000
• Domain name + SSL: $25 = ₳100

TOTAL BUDGET: $36.525 = ₳146.100

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The cost of the project goes directly for the development of an open source product that can be deployed by anyone interested. Likewise, we envision that the product will help onboard Legal Entities/Organizations that participate in the vLEI GLEIF ecosystem. The real value is provided when those Organizations anchors their Organizational Identities in Cardano, producing actual transactions in the blockchain that contribute in the trustfulness of their business operations. By this means, not only the transactions fees contribute to the Cardano ecosystem, but also consolidates the benefits of Cardano Business community.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agrees to Fund Rules and also that data in the submission form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept