Atala PRISM DID Mass-Scale Adoption

Atala PRISM DID is a gateway to the Cardano blockchain and ecosystem. Building technology and marketecture that on-boards users is crucial.

Many high quality ideas will be proposed that can substantially grow Cardano's user-base, network-utility, network-value & ADA circulation.

* The number of proposals that directly address DID use cases in a quantifiable manner.

* The quality of proposals measured by community interest and engagement.

* Results of any Fund5 funded projects significantly impacting mass-scale adoption of DID's and their utility on the Cardano blockchain.

INTRODUCTION

VOTERS PLEASE UNDERSTAND: This is a Fund 5 COMMUNITY CHALLENGE others will make proposals to the challenge. It is NOT a proposal itself. Therefore do not expect to see the same thing you see in proposals, like teams, solutions and budgets. The proposals who apply for this CHALLENGE create those things.

THE CHALLENGE:

Propose a means or way to drive mass-scale adoption of DID usage as an easy-to-use onramp to the Cardano ecosystem (preferably Atala PRISM when released). This can include any method that will offer users or entities a decentralized ID to start defining their digital self-sovereignty. Think about how this is implemented at scale drawing millions of users, who, once onboard, can become customers for dApps, tools, DeFi and other services.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT TO GROW CARDANO

We are a community of thought leaders and it is time to demonstrate our thoughts with actions. Using a Decentralized Identification (DID) technology to establish self-sovereign presence and ownership of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) advances decentralization of institutions; benefiting individuals and entities.

This Challenge is about small ways we can incorporate DIDs into the Cardano ecosystem to start the ground swell at the grassroots that demands PII be secured and controlled with DID technologies and standards.

It is about signaling to the world that the Cardano community plans mass-adoption of DID that is interchangeable, interoperable (by WW DID standards) and we care deeply that the origin of our personal DID is tied to our home blockchain—Cardano.

While we prefer to support Atala PRISM's instantiation of DID, this is more about building ideas and concepts that require DID to draw users to the Cardano platform. And since PRISM is building to the open standards, those are available for anyone to imagine possibilities and offer proposals.

It won't be lost on IOHK how the community responses to this Challenge. Should IOHK see a ground swell of great ideas and proposals, that could help them justify expediting timelines for their planned open sourcing of PRISM components.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Will Atala PRISM be open source? Yes, in a phased approach while keeping some items proprietary, has been explained in several TH and CH videos. This offers lots of room for the community to build on those standard protocols that will be open source.

PUBLIC INFORMATION ON ATALA PRISM

IOHK is working on Atala PRISM and will be releasing it in phases with protocols open source.

Below are details that have been publicly released from the Product Management team of Atala PRISM:

Mark Griffin, Product Manager TH Jan 28, 2020 Comments

• There is a mobile app on IOS device. We also have Android app too.
• The next release of the mobile Apps will have a lot more features and functionality!
• Not just educational degrees but it will be generic to handle the issuance of all types of credentials . E.g civic records.
• Currently Atala PRISM mobile apps are native. Please check them out. We have some exciting features coming in next update.
• The browser wallet is not available publicly yet.
• We are currently working on SDKS and these will be available in development portal.

Dynal Patel, Senior Product Manager TH Jan 28, 20202 Comments

• Hi everyone, We intend to open source the PRISM platform. We're working through when that will happen
• Also it will be possible to build many front ends for PRISM. We should mobile Apps right now but plan to extend that to other platforms, hardware included. We hope the community will build some of these too
• We are aligning the PRISM architecture to what is specified by DIF / W3C. Many things are specifications and not standards yet. We are tracking them and contributing to standardization.

RATIONALE

Feedback suggests most people need help imaging use cases for PRISM beyond turning large governments on with DIDs and can't imagine other use cases in smaller entities or organizations.

To our thinking, while taking 4-5 years to close a country is on par for the government adoption route, addressing smaller organizations who can benefit from DID solutions, feels like a promising parallel go to market strategy the community can advance—seeding the market with DIDs by using a grassroots, early adopter, crossing-the-chasm approach.

Similar to the route crypto in general took, even now, government is slow to fully adopt crypto, so use cases in other entities can lead the charge into DID utility and best if we can bring those into the Cardano ecosystem. While 5MM DIDs in Africa is huge, 7.5B to go still leaves a lot of upside potential!

This Challenge is about increasing self-sovereign ID worldwide, starting small with organizations and entities who can easily benefit from DID technology and not necessarily be a nation sate.

WHAT SHOULD BE PROPOSED

Proposals should be framed towards specific use-cases, and the community will know of specific cases where DIDs or Atala PRISM can be used to solve identification problems. Focusing on DID in general may be most productive, with a strong focus on Atala PRISM if it is appropriate.

We believe many community members will have good ideas on where it could be adopted and believe at a functional level, the community has a lot to say about it.

This is important for Cardano's future and could be the base for many dApps on Cardano where it is vital to uniquely identify the other party. This is a call for exploring the possibilities where DID or specifically Atala PRISM could be one of the services that drives mass user adoption of Cardano.

This is a huge topic with importance to not only Cardano, but blockchain and cryptocurrency in general and will have a global impact.

EXAMPLES FOR PROPOSAL INSPIRATION

Identifiers and Discovery

A key piece of the decentralized identity equation is how people, organizations, and devices can be identified and located without centralized systems of identifiers (e.g. email addresses).

Authentication

Designing and implementing DID-based authentication across a wide variety of exchanges and use cases.

Claims and Credentials

The ability to verify the claims and assertions of identities is key in establishing trust among entities on a decentralized system that lacks a centralized hierarchy. Integrate DID-signed claims into apps and services.

DID Communication

Enable secure, private and (where applicable) authenticated message-based communication, where trust is rooted in DIDs and depends on the messages themselves, not on the external properties of the transport(s) used.

Secure Data Storage

Establish ways for secure data storage (including personal data).

POSSIBLE CAMPAIGN BRIEF

DID use case development is mission critical because user adoption will have a key role in determining the future utility and value of Cardano. That's why we are looking to the Project Catalyst community to refine and answer our challenge.

Over time, development opportunities on Cardano will evolve to include everything from DIDs, metadata to KEVM/IELE, Plutus, Marlowe and more. Ultimately, the goal here is best summarized by the question:

Did the funded DID use cases manage to drive user-adoption?

To find out, we might track the following metrics:

• How many daily active users?
• How much daily local token volume increased?
• How many transactions were made?
• How much funds were transacted?

Guiding questions
Where are gaps in the market where DIDs originating on Cardano have a unique advantage?
What kind of DID solutions can already be developed in the next six months?

Inspirational potential directions

The community open roadmap contains a "Use cases" section and "Driving adoption" section that can serve as an inspiration for proposers.

Developer resources

For access to all currently available developer tools and guides, visit our developer site. Further documentation can be found here.

Meanwhile, here are some quick links you can start with:

https://atalaprism.io

DID Standards

Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF)

https://identity.foundation/

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

https://www.w3.org
https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/

Metadata

Metadata tells the story of transactions made on the blockchain. Cardano is working to provide cutting edge tools for embedding data into transactions and while adding robust search functionality in the block explorer. Check out our blog on metadata or look at our documentation for more information.

The Marlowe playground

Marlowe is our bespoke domain specific language (DSL) built for creating robust financial smart contracts on Cardano. For a closer look at Marlowe check out our recent blog or check out our overview on the Cardano Developers page.