F8: Accelerate Decentralized Identity

Our challenge is an evolution of the mass decentralized identity (DID) adoption challenge from Funding Round 6, connecting everything we are learning with the first Atala PRISM Pioneer Program cohort.

The second cohort of the Atala PRISM Pioneer Program will kick off once Catalyst Fund 7 is complete. Between now and then, any member of the Catalyst Community inspired to write a proposal will get access to the Atala PRISM Pioneer Program first cohort course materials on Canvas. Please submit your proposal on Ideascale, including your email address, to get an invitation to Canvas.

With this access, you'll join the growing Atala PRISM community. Our Atala PRISM product team and engineers will be available via a dedicated Discord channel. Inclusion in our Professional Services Group governance framework foundry. Access to fireside chats with the top leaders in the SSI space, where we'll discuss trends, use cases, and much more. In addition, we will support the growth of high-value credentials and enable partners from concept, to development, to commercialization.

Areas of Focus

Interoperability

Most digital credentials sit on Hyperledger Indy ledgers, including those issued by governments in Germany, Canada, and the UK.

The best-performing platform will gain the largest market share. For many reasons, we believe our platform is superior. Therefore, Cardano and Atala PRISM must include a plan to interact with these other ecosystems to maximize market share.

We encourage Catalyst proposals to achieve full interoperability. Deliverables should optimize the user experience (UX) for Atala PRISM credentials while remaining compatible with other platforms.

Self-governance of Emergent Communities

DAO Governance in Practice

New legislation in Wyoming allows for a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to be registered with the state. We challenge the community to establish a DAO under the new laws. It could manage an impact or development goal with shared common resources governed by the DAO.

We are curious to see if our community proposes a DAO. With a funded proposal, we could facilitate introductions to legal experts in Wyoming.

The proposal should consider setting aside funds for legal expenses to establish the DAO and legal documentation.

Patterns of Commoning

We draw inspiration from the work of the Trust Over IP Foundation and the principles from 'Patterns of Commoning.' We see the potential for innovation by linking communities with shared interests under these principles.

How can these principles become plug-and-play code as technological primitives that other communities can leverage and unlock exponential growth and adoption?

We are interested in exploring a rich playground of ideas and bringing these to real-world implementations on Cardano and Atala PRISM.

Education, Career, and Emergent Reputation Primitives

Many of our Pioneer and Catalyst-funded projects support education and career programs. One of the defining characteristics of these approaches is the creation of alternatives to accredited education and career paths.

We need our community to think about developing technology and governance primitives to support any community that wants to establish new education and career paths by providing tools:

• For onboarding new experts and teachers
• For people in the community to develop and grow
• For maintaining a reputation as a skilled employee, laborer, consultant, mentor, teacher, etc.

When reputation standards change, we need ways to self-heal and self-monitor for bad actors, harmful actions, or bad outcomes.

Circular Supply Chain

The global supply chain focuses on creating a new economic infrastructure. The goal is replacing or integrating with legacy systems such as record-keeping, bills of lading, centrally managed systems of record, and distribution networks. Centralization has many challenges, the least of which is a lack of resilience in the global supply chain, as we have all seen and continue to experience in the COVID era.

Supply chains tend to start as decentralized. Markets and trade routes emerge from the bottom of the producer market and are aggregated into centralized supply chains, eventually working their way down to the consumer. We want to explore new patterns of commerce in bottom-up supply chains that could open and expand the local reputation network into markets that are currently inaccessible, such as:

• Regenerative agriculture
• Locally produced art
• Other forms of local commerce

On the other side, distribution or demand-driven commerce has the potential to build a market force from the bottom-up that can engage the industrial global supply chain in ways that are not possible without establishing the voice and economic strength of the community digitally.

For the supply chain challenge, we want to address two significant challenges:

Small Producer Problem

How can we create transparency as the bottom-up process meets the industrialized supply chains, cuts through the centralized distribution markets, and connects directly to the consumer?

For example, small producers like a family ranch in Wyoming have no way to get information about the value of their product through these global aggregation and distribution networks. Currently, a solution such as the BeefChain project is supporting small ranchers.

There are multiple issues to overcome. For example, packaging plants are the entry point to the aggregation, so there is little or no incentive to deal with the small producer. We want to address this problem by building general-purpose tooling to assist communities in self-organizing and self-governing production according to agreed standards. We propose that if these communities can connect and grow, they will either:

• Reach the market through alternative distribution channels to industrial supply chains
• Be able to negotiate as a community for better terms to have the values of their products recognized, distributed, and sold with value intact commercially and reputationally.

The Last-Mile Problem

How can a local distributor in a local market interact with global industrial supply chains and be given access to the market that otherwise would be inaccessible due to a lack of economic identity or capital to access the goods at the scale required by industrial supply chains?

This challenge deals with distributing necessary products to local communities with little market clout or access to financial tools, such as credit, to interact with the industrial supply chain. We're looking for bottom-up tooling to establish a network of communities. Delegates in those communities can access the finance and credit necessary to interact with the industrial supply chain at the economic scale required for transactions.

An example of this problem is delivering health care supplies to rural and developing countries and economies. The funds from donors, the government, and other sources are available for these medical supplies. The donors will only release the funds once delivery is verified, and the medical supply companies will only send the goods to port once payment is received.

However, local small businesses must maintain transparency and oversight of the goods during delivery and receiving. These businesses do not have the funds or the ability to borrow capital to cover medical supplies costs from the delivery at the port to the hospitals and clinics that need them.

Addressing the challenge of the financial gap is vital. We believe that there is enormous potential to create bottom-up networks of trusted individuals and small businesses to fill this gap.

A Proposed Pattern Language Outline (example)

Primitives

• Digital Identity
• Verifiable Credential (VC)
• Verifiable Presentation Request
• Verifiable Presentation Proof
• Cryptocurrency
• Non-fungible token (NFT)
• Smart contract

Patterns

• Trust Registry
• Governance Framework
• Token Curated Registry
• Community member recognition and onboarding process
• Establishing Individual Reputation
• Community as a whole group Interaction with an external party
• Community member as an individual interaction with an external party
• Community medium of exchange
• Recognition of external Trust Registry
• Recognition of external Governance Framework
• Acceptance of Governance Framework by an external party

With that as background, we are suggesting proposals in the following three areas:

1. Interoperability between Cardano and Indy anchored DIDs/VCs.
2. Self-governance of Emergent Communities
3. Circular Supply Chain

Why is it important?

By identifying high-value credentials, we can establish governance framework foundries for launching pilot programs and driving growth.

What does success look like?

Discover repeatable patterns that unlock our ability to leverage the Cardano decentralized infrastructure. Identify high-value credentials.

Key Metrics to measure

• The sum of realized production pilots or launches in 2022
• Discovery of repeatable patterns in use-cases
• The number of issuers, holders, and verifiers
• The number of verifications performed on credentials in production