Decentralized Identity: Bedrock Business Utility Webinar

Dan Gisolfi:
Okay. Well, welcome everybody to our webinar, sponsored by the Bedrock Consortium and the Linux Foundation. I'm Dan Gisolfi. And we are here today to talk about decentralized identity in the state of the industry and some of the key infrastructure associated for making that industry in that marketplace successful. Allow me to introduce our panelists. Mike, would you like to change... There you go. We're going to start off with, Bharat Prasad, from USAA, can you introduce yourself?

Bharat Prasad:
Hi, I'm Bharat Prasad, I'm the principal architect, a leading innovation within USAA with particular interest in decentralized entities.

Dan Gisolfi:
And Conor. You are on mute, Conor.

Conor White:
Hi everybody. My name is, Conor White. I am the President of Daon's America's business. I'm responsible for our business from North Pole to South Pole, to the Americas, Canada, United States, Latin and Central America, plus certain global partnerships. It's great to be here today. Thank you.

Dan Gisolfi:
Hey Michael.

Michael Engle:
Yep. Hi everybody. My name is, Mike Engel, head of strategy for 1Kosmos, which is an identity based authentication company. Also, a partner in 1414 Ventures, which is a seed round investment fund that focus is just on identity, which will be a hot topic for us here today. And lastly, and most importantly, head of the Membership Committee for the Bedrock Business Utility that we'll be talking about here today. Dan, over to you to set the stage.

Dan Gisolfi:
Yes. Thank you. First of all, I want to thank our panelists. These are all representatives from some of the companies that are members of the Bedrock Consortium. I am, Dan Gisolfi, founder and convener of the Bedrock Project, which is a formal Linux Foundation project, which you're going to hear some about today. The purpose of our webinar is not only to help you get familiar with the positioning of the Bedrock project relative to all of the hype you're seeing in the marketplace around the digital identity, decentralized identity, self sovereign identity, and all the other different terminology associated with the marketplace. But to also get a perspective, a perspective of why some of these businesses are beginning their journey, not just at thinking about digital identity at the credential level, but at a full stack perspective. And how they are going to ensure that their company's journey is going to be grounded in some sort of company sponsored infrastructure. And also to collaborate with other institutions as they begin this journey so they're not taking on all the burden themselves.

Dan Gisolfi:
We're going to be talking about a lot of different topics here. Many of the folks that I see in a participation list, the attendee list here are familiar with some of the topics of decentralized identity. You're following a lot of the concepts like those that are conveyed by the Trust over IP Foundation, which we are affiliated with. But hopefully, today's webinar will give a different spin. The different spin is going to be more about not only understanding some of the concepts around or the trends in this marketplace, but why public identity utilities are important and how Bedrock is different from other utilities in this space? To lead us off, I'm going to ask, Michael, if you can just give us your perspective on the D digital identity marketplace, and then we'll jump into some other conversations.

Michael Engle:
Sure. Thanks, Dan. I'm going to start with something that seems very basic, but you usually get a different answer depending on who you ask and what they do for a living. It's been said by many people who follow social, that if you aren't paying for a product, then you are the product. This is especially true when it comes to our online identity. The advertising led services like those logos you see here have taken it upon themselves to tell their partners everything they can about us, where we live, what we do online, where we travel, et cetera. And if you've ever clicked on login with Facebook or Google, you're telling a third party to trust their identity or how they convey themselves to the world about you. Imagine if you try to log in with Facebook into your bank. Nobody on this call would even think about doing that, because not only does it reduce your security to that lowest common denominator, Facebook authentication, but at any time Facebook could take that identity away from you. And now you can't log into your bank. In that model, they control your identity.

Michael Engle:
And so, while not perfect, if we think about the way identity has been done today, the identity documents that we've used. I've done a pretty good job. And so going way in 1414, King Henry V, passed something called the Safe Conducts Act and this involved into what has become the modern day passport. It was a trusted credential that could move around. It was recognized as the first form of a broadly accepted physical I identification. Today, these documents are used in all aspects of our lives, right? We rely on them for personal, for business, getting into an airport and they're not foolproof. Bad guys can forge them, but they're pretty good for in-person transactions. And you can prove who you are and you trust the document and you match the identity with the face on that document typically.

Michael Engle:
Just spelling this out the way it flows, we all know how it works. You get your credential from somebody that you trust such as a government or university and you take it. And here's the key part. You hold that document in your possession. And when somebody say your bank or an airport agent needs to verify your identity, they inspect it. They look at the photo and they have a good level of assurance that you are, who you say you are. And it's very simple.

Michael Engle:
The parties involved trust the source of the identity document and can validate it. And you can see where I'm going here. You can't take this document and share it with somebody, thousands of miles away online, or can you? And you can see where I'm going with this. You need a way to do this in a digital world with the same, or even a better level of trust. Imagine if you could take any or all those identity documents on the prior screen and share them with somebody across the ocean without having to send them a copy of the actual document. And we refer to this basic capability as digital trust.

Michael Engle:
First, let me reference two terms that describe how online digital identity is being defined today with standards. The first is decentralized identity. This is the practice of removing centralized data stores to prove who someone or something is. It's a very simple definition that we're going to explore moment entire and a key component of this will be covered on the next slide. But I wanted to point out this, I got this from a Gartner IAM conference, which is happening right now, actually started at 11 o'clock the same time. And this was their exact quote of how they define decentralized identity. And you can see, without reliance on central arbiter. And that's a key part of this.

Michael Engle:
Now extending that to decentralize identifiers or DIDs. This is a key component that allows someone to control their own identity information. That's often referred to, as Dan mentioned earlier, self sovereign identity, or bring your own identity is what Gartner likes to call it. The key to this working is a common framework of how identities can be shared between multiple parties and we've already discussed the need and how a move away from centralized identity is key. And we're not the only one saying this. In terms of the size of the market and how this is evolving, we're going from $100 million in business, in this space today to billions over the next three years. This is from that same deck that I stole this from today.

Michael Engle:
Now, it's not just the analyst saying this there's dozens of Fortune 100 companies that are pouring development and working group resources into decentralized identity. And why would they do this? It's not really an established business yet. And it's evolving a little frothy. But they realize that creating this framework is essential for them to provide their goods and services in a safe and secure way. They do not want to be sitting on the sidelines as an entire industry passes them by. Nobody wants to be the Kodak of the digital identity world. Here you see big brand names like Microsoft, MasterCard, Verizon, IBM, Accenture, Samsung, et cetera, they have dedicated teams focusing on decentralized identity and the standards that go around them, the working groups, et cetera. I think that sets the stage. We're going to get into the nuts and bolts. I'll take it over to you, Dan, to frame us up for what's coming next.

Dan Gisolfi:
Yes. Thank you, Michael. For everybody on the webinar, we are not here to dive into all of the details you've heard in many other places and in other webinars. The point, Michael, is trying to convey here is that the time is now. This is beyond hype. The marketplace is there for us to act upon. And again, as I mentioned earlier, businesses need to explore and answer the question, how do they begin their journey? How do they contribute? How do they collaborate with others? And representatives here on this webinar are just a subset of those who've answered that call and joined the Bedrock project. With that backdrop that, Michael, provided us, I'd like to just ask some of the panels to give some of their perspective on what problems they're seeing and why their institution has actually joined and began their journey. To start off with, Conor, can you give us some insight on why Daon had began their digital identity journey?

Conor White:
Sure, Dan. Thank you. Daon is a global digital identity company. We're in the business of helping establish and assert trusted digital identities. And many of our customers, are banks, financial institutions and healthcare organizations. And these organizations, banks, [inaudible 00:11:22] are trusted by their customers. In fact, surveys have shown that most people trust their bank above all of their institutions that they interact with. They don't trust government and they certainly don't trust social media companies. And so banks, for example, recognize the trust that they have from their customers. I have two banks that I bank with. I don't bank with 100s. I have two companies, two institutions that manage my money in the [inaudible 00:11:47] I have in the main. And these banks, these institutions are actively seeking ways to enable their customers to leverage that trust of relationship beyond simply logging into the bank app or beyond making a payment.

Conor White:
There's a term that we started using about 10, 12 years ago that I see being used a lot now, which is identity is the new money. And if you're a financial institution, you have this ability now because people trust you to manage their money, to also take a role in managing their identity. And I don't mean storing it, banks are not looking to do that. But what they're looking to do is create a framework that allows me as their customer to leverage that trust that I have done with that bank and use it in other parts of my ecosystem, in the world. These banks are heavily regulated. They walk through this process of validating that identity to a very high level in the first place, commonly known as the KYC, know your customer problem.

Conor White:
The bank looks at it from a selfish perspective, sometimes. Every time they have to do that, it's expensive for them. And it's a painful process for the consumer. And it only needs to be done right once. And from there, we have a trust route that we can then build on to assert that identity in more and more places. And quite frankly, most of the friction that you're seeing in people's lives today, dealing with the banks is the KYC problem because of the regulations. Okay? And so decentralized identities help solve this problem in a major way. And it's particularly easy for consumers to do it once and leverage it multiple times going forward. Another example is a customer of ours. It's a digital learning company. And their classes are accredited by a major globally renowned university.

Conor White:
And they have to establish the identity of the person undergoing that class at the very beginning of the class. It's actually part of the module where you onboard yourself to a high level of assurance. And then they want to make sure that the person sitting in that class is the right person throughout the process. But then when you're done, what happens? Well, you can say I did this. But the value is being able to prove that you took this class. And having a digital certificate that you can then take and show to somebody. And they're looking at these centralized identity as a way to solve that because this university will sign a digital token we'll get into the science and the math in the moment. But they'll sign attribute around this identity that says, "Conor White, did this class."

Conor White:
And then I can take this as a person who took the class and allows me to assert that in a cohesive way to people that want to understand if I'm qualified. But it's non coupled. They don't have to have a link directly back to that university. And so there's today more and more fraud you're seeing in learning is people saying they have certificates and degrees from these institutions and they don't. And so there's yet another model there where we're seeing in the financial services space, in the healthcare space and in the digital learning space, we're all seeing reasons why decentralized identity can really help that process and help take that trust that's been established and allow a person to assert that quickly. And allow the relying party, who's looking at that person to say, "You know what? You're right. You did do that course. And I can tell immediately that you did it."

Dan Gisolfi:
Yeah. That's spot on, Conor. I totally agree with the notion of reducing friction around KYC, especially in the financial institutions, when the institution wants to establish a 360 view of the client. You have a relationship with the bank portion of the finance institution. What about brokers? Do you have to still go through this KYC process again? You shouldn't have to reduce that friction. Spot on. Bharat, thoughts from USAA?

Bharat Prasad:
Yeah, absolutely. And talking about finance institutions, you see the same kind of issues today with identity across different vertical. But if I want to touch upon specifically financial services and USAA in particular, the mission of our company is actually to facilitate financial security for our members. Our members are what we call are our customers. They're the military members, their associates and their families. And everything hinges upon the word trust. The trust that they have placed with USAA to do their financial transactions, but also the trust that we have with our membership. All of this leads to similar kind of problems that you see with identity. User experience has extremely high friction today. I mean, you can think about the repetitive identity flows that customers or members have to go through when they're dealing with whether it's online or retail or a banking institution, or even walking into a doctor's office.

Bharat Prasad:
How many times you have to reprove your identity all the time? Plus you have a lot of personal data sharing that happens. And that's trying to reduce that friction is a really important message that we need to bring in here where identity utilities like Bedrock can help a lot. And another thing with USAA in particular is we cater to the military. Military don't have just the driver's license, they bring in other unique forms of ID, the military identity. And you can think about how our members get deployed all the time. They move from state to state and in many cases, even international. And what happens there is essentially you're trying to reprove yourself. You're trying to reestablish yourself. And that again, brings in this whole chain of sharing identities all over again. You can imagine the frustration that the member can go through. But if you think about the company itself, USAA, or any other financial security company or a service company, you can imagine the amount of risk in compliance you are talking about when you're managing personal data.

Bharat Prasad:
First of all, we don't really want to have personal data if you we can avoid it. But once you have it in, you come up with a lot of regulations, risk compliance, and all those that you had to manage around managing the personal data. Plus, there's a huge investment in terms of identity fraud. You can think about identity theft and countering the fraud around it. These are all not small investments that companies need to do. And finally, if you can share an identity, that's proved somewhere else to be trusted and brought into the company, that's the real nirvana for most of the financial service companies, where we can, in a trusted manner, share our identity proofing, and also be able to accept those as true identities or trusted identities into your company. And that doesn't exist today. These are some of the common problems that you see, and we would really like to be part of Bedrock to see how that can help us streamline some of these things going forward.

Dan Gisolfi:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:18:35] Building the foundation to enable that reduction in KYC processing. Yeah.

Bharat Prasad:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Dan Gisolfi:
Michael, 1Kosmos.

Michael Engle:
Yeah, sure. Just getting back to the real root of the problem, which it comes down to not being able to prove who you are remotely, and both Conor, and Bharat, have talked about KYC and how being able to reuse that's a real game changer. But the symptoms of not being able to do that are actually really basic, but pervasive. You can link 80% of all breaches by act to lost or stolen usernames and passwords, which is what happens when you don't have a trusted identity.

Michael Engle:
We've been taking the frameworks that we're going to be discussing here today and packaging them up that an individual organization can use. And when they're ready to pop it into a trusted framework that we'll be covering here such as Bedrock, you'll be able to create the consortium that makes all of their customers lives easier in the use cases that both of my colleagues here have been sharing. It's going to change the way we interact with services. There's no such thing as a username or a password anymore. It's your identity, same way as when you walk up to any type of checkpoint in the real world. We're super about what this is bringing to the table. And I think let's jump into it, Dan, and show everybody how it works.

Dan Gisolfi:
Sure. Thank you, Michael. Conor, can you maybe bring us through some of the mechanics of the infrastructure for how this can all come together?

Conor White:
Sure. Thanks, Dan. Let me give a quick short overview of Bedrock. Bedrock is not the first identity consortium. And in fact, there are several others within the remit of the Linux Foundation, including for example, sovereign, that you may have heard of, ID union and DCL. And they're all based on the Trust over IP Foundation guidelines and standards that Dan mentioned earlier start of the call. They're using the same underlying technology, meaning that if the need arises between... Bedrock is being built on this Trust over IP framework as well. And we are all using the same underlying technology, meaning that if the need arises, the trust can flow between these networks. And this is very important because we are building interoperability into the foundational framework from day one. Okay. But each of these consortium services the specific needs of their stakeholders. For example, ID union was established by the German government for its citizens and potentially will expand to pan EU over time. And DCL was developed for the travel vertical.

Conor White:
But here's the important thing about Bedrock, Bedrock is developed by industry for global consumers. Okay. This isn't a government to citizen, or a small domain, specific domain identity consortium. This is a global consortium made up of some pretty substantial companies here who are basically creating this permissioned distributed ledger for all global consumers. And you can see that we have representation from tech companies, from manufacturers, and very importantly, from organizations for which the digital trust is very important, such as financial services companies and healthcare companies. And Bedrock is being created to bring internet scale digital trust to businesses and to their customers.

Conor White:
Next slide, please. If I try to walk through a bit more detail and give you a little bit more of analogy to the physical and the digital world, because sometimes it can be hard to understand. As mentioned earlier, Bedrock is built [inaudible 00:22:23] framework developed by the Trust over IP Foundation. And this framework has four layers. The bottom two are technical trust, and the top two are what we call human trust. It's a utility. We have not mentioned, I don't believe the word blockchain in this entire conversation. And to all intents purposes, it's somewhat irrelevant so far because this is designed to be a utility. It's not a blockchain solution. It's a utility. Think of it like electricity or power things that we take for granted every day, but deliver so much value. That's the goal at Bedrock.

Conor White:
And if you think about it, there are many examples throughout our history of utilities that have made a profound difference to society as we developed from living in caves and thousands of years ago, as to where we are today. Today, we're at a point of social interaction and connected commerce that the world has never seen before. An analogy I like to use sometimes is to compare the digital identity infrastructure that we're building to another critical infrastructure, which is transportation, because we could not do what we do today without transportation, without the public utilities and the benefit we get. And using transportation, as an example.

Conor White:
In this example, layer one is the foundation and it's the foundational component of these public utilities. In the transport world, it's the road system itself. The core foundation that you build these roads on and roadways have standards about how they're built and how they're laid out. And similarly, in the digital identity space, Bedrock is the core foundation that supports distributed identity. On top of that, now that we have a roadway, if you like, we bring in the equipment. And here the equipment in this case, if you think about it in the transportation world, it's cars and trucks and buses.

Conor White:
And in the digital world, it's the wallets and the communication mechanism by which these wallets can communicate and trust each other. Okay. Or the various parties can trust each other, and so on. Then we go to the rules. We've now established a level of digital trust, but we still need to govern this thing and imagine a world, in the roadways, imagine if every traffic light went offline. All the highway speed signs disappeared, there was no lane markings. We would've a free for all. And in fact, nobody would get it done. You couldn't go anywhere. And system would collapse. Without that governance framework that we have in the transportation industry, it would be unusable. We would just have blacktop everywhere and just congestion.

Conor White:
And we need the same thing in the distributed identity world. And this is where the governance framework come in. The rules by which the schemes, the consortium govern themselves and how trust is established and what different levels of trust actually mean. Okay. And then if you take it forward to finally what this infrastructure does, if you think again, in the physical world, the transportation system allows us now to build higher level things for people. Layer four is where these market applications and equal systems come together. It's where it all joins up very, very well.

Conor White:
Think of these of ecosystems, such as Uber or Lyft, or DoorDash, or ride-pooling, or bus companies, that get you from A to B. These are higher level things that are formed on the back of the technical infrastructure and within the governance framework that's been defined. And within digital identity entity and distributed digital identity in particular, you're starting to see that now as well, where we have these interoperable consortia that are beginning to bring these capabilities to market built on the online technical fabric and the governance framework itself. Those four layers are the four key layers to this whole distributed identity process and to Bedrock in particular.

Conor White:
Next slide, please. I will leave you with one thing, because we're going to talk a lot about technology and technology is very important, and that's what gives us the root trust that we have on the integrity of the scheme and the various things going back and forward. But governance is also very, very important. And without the governance we can't scale, and we can't adapt. And governance actually allows us to define, create and manage those rules that we need to make it a long term value generating utility for businesses and for consumers. And with that, let me hand you over to, Bharat, from USAA to take us through a bit more of how the trust model works.

Bharat Prasad:
Thanks, Conor. I just want to quickly go through what a digital trust model can look like. Mike, if you want to click through, that'll be great. Thank you. First of all, there is the ecosystem of issuers. These issuers could be government organizations. They could be actually leaning on government organizations to do some kind of a KYC or a proofing on basic documents. It could be driver's license, it could be your passport. These issuers are primary to this ecosystem, and what we call here in this ecosystem as digital identity providers. And tied to that, as you click through next, we can see that it's tied to a blockchain registry, even though we didn't mention blockchain all this time, you can think of this utility implementation could have a blockchain registry under the covers, a decentralized ledger that actually allows you to put some artifacts on the ledger that will enable you to do validation and verification.

Bharat Prasad:
In this case, you can see that the Bedrock utility is actually based on foundational open source, like Hyperledgee Indy, and also it's based on standards. W3C actually has clear standards around DIDs. It has clear standards around the notion of verifiable credentials, verifiable presentations. And the whole ecosystem works on those standards. But also it leverages lot of open source, like Hyperledger Indy. Hyperledger Aries that, Conor, showed in the previous slide. All those become the plumbing to enable this whole ecosystem to work. Once you have the digital identity providers, they now can be enable to issue a verifiable credential to the holder. The holder could be an individual. It could be on your mobile wallet. The digital wallet can be actually housing these credentials that you get from multiple issuers. And it enables you to have control over your identity. Who you go to, who you get your identity proof with, and who are those issuers that you want to work with.

Bharat Prasad:
And finally, the holder in turn has the ability now to actually submit it to the verifier. Think of it as the holder is trying to do business with the financial service institution, like USAA, or the holder needs to do some retail transactions on an online service, all these become those identity verifiers. The ability for the holder to pick and choose the kind of identities or verifiable credentials in their wallet, and present it as a proof to the verifier is enabled again by Hyperledger [inaudible 00:29:50]. The toolkit that enables you as a holder to do that. Now, the verifier on the other hand has the ability to come back to the ledger, again, layers of Hyperledger Indy here and all the standards, and come back and verify with their public key, what kind of identities that the issuer provider provided and also can be validated and get that level of trust in real time.

Bharat Prasad:
This is the high level ecosystem of how the triangle of trust between issuers, verifiers and holders work. But one thing to keep in mind here is every entity, whether you're an issuer, verifier or a holder, you have that set of tools that needs to be implemented in each of these areas. If you have a wallet, if you have a mobile device, you need to have a wallet that actually has a notion of a private key cryptographically protected, and also the notion of a public key. Same thing with an issuer and the verifier. You have those plumbing tools that go into each of your organizations.

Bharat Prasad:
And again, even though we are talking about Bedrock here, the concept around the issuer being part of multiple public identity utilities still exists. It's a conscious decision that companies make to say, "We as a company have Bedrock as a consortium that brings in like-minded companies to interact with the digital identity framework." At the same time, there might be other utilities, other things that they're doing like business logic on a separate blockchain. Every company that's part of this ecosystem needs to have a decision around, what kind of tool are implemented? Who are the issuers you partner with? Who are the verifiers you give your identities to? Who gets to validate and who does a KYC and proofing? Whether you're identity provider or you're a financial service institution. Dan, do you want to take that back?

Dan Gisolfi:
Yeah. Thank you, Bharat. And the more and more I see this kind of description, the space can be so complex. And we can get into some of the technical GOP. But just understanding this at the higher level and trying to keep it very simple and being able to position solutions like Bedrock to the model is the message we're trying to convey here to everybody. Layer one, thank you, Bharat, Bedrock is one of those public identity utilities that provide the discovery and verification information or metadata for the cryptographic exercises here for validation. As you pointed out, no personal information goes on to Bedrock or any other utility of that layer. With that, now that we have some of, I'll say, mechanics behind us, Bharat, maybe you can give us an understanding of, what are the benefits of this infrastructure, this stack that we're talking about to USAA's approach?

Bharat Prasad:
Yeah. As I mentioned before, one of the things we see with integrating with Bedrock and being part of that whole ecosystem that trust and receives trusted identities, and also be able to provision trusted identities is a notion that now you can reuse approved identity several times. The concept around here is reducing friction. You don't have to keep sharing the same data over and over. Eliminating personal data sharing. We would like to not get any personal data if possible, and get away from that liability, risk and compliance that's tied around managing personal data. But if we can get that attestation of the data, be in a trusted manner, that's all organizations like us need, that through attestation that comes across. And I think Bedrock and the DID framework can allow that to happen.

Bharat Prasad:
Members are also in control of their personal data. It'll be selective disclosure, concent driven. And they have the visibility of who's using their data, which is very important in today's world. And also it reduces things like you might have heard about synthetic IDs, identity theft, fraud, all these things can get eliminated or drastically reduced by leveraging something like the DIDs in the marketplace. Faster authentication is certainly possible because we almost have near real time verification that happens. And that leads to speed. And again, from a technical point, it is ecosystem full of open source and standards based. And that's where we want to go, where we are always tying ourselves to open standards, open systems, and being able to use and leverage the open source.

Dan Gisolfi:
I love it. I mean, USAA, you have a view of the entire stack and making decisions up and down the stack. And if at layer one, you said Bedrock is a utility with the right governance model for you to participate and begin your journey. I love it. Conor, a thought from Daon about how the mechanics of the stack address the benefits of what they are seeking in this journey?

Conor White:
Absolutely. We talked earlier about the password problem and honey pots of passwords and the KYC problem. And the KYC problem is a friction. It's a problem of friction. And everybody hates friction. And you mentioned it, and I'm [inaudible 00:35:46] mentioned it, when I identity proof you, I now know who you are. But today's model, I can then move to different departments in the bank, for example, or in the institution. And in many cases I get reproofed. It's expensive for the organization. And it's a pain for me. At Daon, we look at the identity problem as one of identity continuity. How do I create continuity for that identity through all my interactions and trusted continuity?

Conor White:
And so if you think about it from the backend systems, a lot of companies are looking at it by integrating orchestration engines and saying, "Okay, I remembered over in distilled pipe, I did a KYC process. Over here, I won't ask anymore at some rules based engine." And orchestration is not continuity. They're different. But orchestration is a stopgap to get there. But real continuity comes from actually understanding real time, the previous interaction that you had with that person, and be able to trust it real time. And the orchestration solution today, and the continuity that's been looked at today is really intra-enterprise continuity. My company looking continuity across the identities of the people we're dealing with.

Conor White:
And what distributed identity does is gives us global extra-enterprise continuity where I can actually do something over here, establish myself and the level of trust in me, and then take it somewhere else and do an immediate frictionless onboarding. An immediate frictionless understanding of a level of trust or some credential that I can assert that this organization at the other end, can say, okay, great. I can now trust Conor White's assertion that he did his class, or that he is who he claims to be, or that he has his over 21, or that his driver's license is valid, whatever.

Conor White:
That continuity doesn't exist between organizations today and the companies that are trying to do it like Google and Facebook, they're the wrong companies to do that. It's just the wrong approach. And what we don't need is social media companies being the center of a web of trust. I want to be the center of my web of trust. Okay. And I'm sure, Dan, you want to be the center of your web of trust. And distributed digital credentials, this is what they do. And it's profound in how it changes how we consumers can interact with each other and to create immediate, real time on-demand trust.

Dan Gisolfi:
Awesome. Well said, Conor. Michael, your thoughts from 1Kosmos on the benefits of the stack?

Michael Engle:
Yeah. Now imagine trying to do this yourself. If you were to try, let's say, for example, in the US, we have a consortium of banks called Zelle. They already have this trust. Imagine if they were to now take that. I've used Zelle like yesterday. I've proved myself to my bank. Chase knows who I am. Imagine if I could take that identity and go use it somewhere else. The framework to do all that has already been done for us. Trust over IP and Bedrock have defined all the rules of how that happens. And take it over to another scenario. I'm going to go open a new telco account. I'm switching from carrier one to carrier two. Again, my telco identity, they know a lot about me. They know where my phone is, the state of my phone, my SIM. They know my account tenure, my address. Why am I proving myself to these separate entities?

Michael Engle:
And then in the telco world, you have this type of identity framework being established in something called ZenKey. There's these things popping out there and they need a way for their identity to be able to go cross industry, cross company, cross country, even. And so we're tracking this, not just the United States, but globally, we're seeing these efforts and it'll be this layer of trust that actually makes it function. And we don't want to be reinventing this wheel with our customers, with the telcos and the banks of the world. We want to plug into something that already has the governance in place. That's why we're here and helping to build this thing.

Dan Gisolfi:
Okay. Thank you, Michael. Maybe you can just follow up on the next question. Why Bedrock? Yeah, we understand it's benefits. We understand the stack. But why Bedrock particularly for 1Kosmos?

Michael Engle:
Yeah. Now, we've been watching the space closely. As we mentioned earlier, there's a whole bunch of different types of identity frameworks popping up. But Bedrock, as Coner pointed out earlier, is an organization by businesses for customers. It's not niched into one particular vertical, or one particular use case. Our customers come from all walks of lives, my B2B customers, and in turn, they're called B2B to C. I need to fit them into a framework that they will all want to participate in. And that is Bedrock. I'm not going to mention any other of the other consortiums out there. But that is the main reason. This is the first one globally, that is of its type. And that's why we're participating.

Dan Gisolfi:
I love that response because as convener and founder of Bedrock, this was not meant to be the business network. It's the first one that's there. It's one that's necessary to get folks started on their journey in a collaborative way with others. As Conor mentioned earlier, we have members across all different sectors and all different geos. Why? Because they want to collaborate because there's so much to learn here. It is a complex space and the market hasn't really solidified yet, but so in the early days, why not collaborate? Over time, you can join other networks and in addition, or consortiums. But this is a starting point. And that's a message. Conor, thoughts from Daon?

Conor White:
Yeah. No, I would just echo what you, and Mike, and Bharat said. For us, the reason we joined is because we see this as being an identity work and identity consortium that actually adds value. And it's one word, consumers will trust the organizations who are governing it. It's got the right governance framework in place. It's got strong, open standards based foundations from a technical perspective. It brings together all the things that I think are needed to create this platform on which we can create on-demand, real-time trust between consumers and businesses. And so it's run by businesses. It's run by businesses for consumers, it's permissioned, it's governed properly, and it's got a right technical underpinning. And so I think that's really the reason why we joined. And if you look at some of these companies, they've got potentially millions of users that could participate it in this very, very quickly. It's not a build it over here and see what happens. There's an impetus behind this thing, and there's clearly a demand and a need for it.

Dan Gisolfi:
And because it is a decentralized identity utility, no single company is running the show. And the fact that we've done it all in the open, within the Linux Foundation under its governance, makes it as open as possible. Yeah. Spot on.

Conor White:
Absolutely.

Dan Gisolfi:
Bharat, maybe you could bring us through a little bit about, as an introduction to Bedrock in terms of [inaudible 00:43:07].

Bharat Prasad:
Sure. Yeah. So as you can see, this is more like trying to bring together all the things we discussed today. You have the four layer stack that's based on the Trust over IP Foundation principles. And that the layer one is where the Bedrock sits as a public utility. And this utility is for companies to work with companies and have your customers as part of the ecosystem. And then, of course, you have layer two and three, which are solidifying the whole data exchange part of it. And this is where the holder, as end user comes into play if you have your mobile phone and have a mobile wallet, a credential wallet that goes on the phone, now you are part of the ecosystem and can play in this whole architecture. Now on top of that is layer four on the technology stack, which is where applications come in.

Bharat Prasad:
And this is the biggest interest to most companies. How do I integrate my existing applications or create new applications and opens new avenues to leverage DIDs? But more importantly, on the left side is the governance step. You have a governance layer at every layer. Layer, one layer two. Every layer has its independent governance framework. This could be policies, they could be legal policies, they could be technical policies, but ultimately, there might be players who are only specifically playing in layer four or layer three, and they just need to follow the governance at that layer. There might be players who play in all four layers, and they will have to follow the policies and the governance in all four layers. It gives you that element of freedom of, what is it that you are wanting to use Bedrock for? Where do you want to play here and follow the governance stack?

Dan Gisolfi:
Thanks, Bharat.

Bharat Prasad:
Hopefully, it answers your question, Dan.

Dan Gisolfi:
Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Next slide there, Mike. For everybody who's attending here today on a webinar, this is meant as an introduction. We're hoping that if you want to learn more about Bedrock and for that matter, even Trust over IP, you will consider exploring those opportunities to join those communities through an exploratory briefing. And I'll get more information on that on the next slide. However, I do want to point out that when we think about the benefits of public identity utilities, such as Bedrock, you need to think about the business benefits as well as the technical benefits. Where there's a lot of time spent debating, do you want permission, permission list? Do you want public, you want private? Does it need to be blockchain or something else? What are the technical governance that we talked about in some of these slides earlier?

Dan Gisolfi:
Those conversations are all things that an institution who's beginning its journey and the digital identity needs to make. And those are personal decisions that they have to make. They also have to make business decisions. And what many of us who have come to the Bedrock project have talked about because we all come from a business perspective, we realize that over time, the answers to these questions may change. But some company, we sometimes they're called laggers. We'll decide not to ask/answer those questions. You just wait to see where the marketplace goes. Others will say like many that you see on the panel here as well as many that are part of the Bedrock Consortium today have said, wait a second. How do I leverage and get it involved early and leverage the collaboration from others, learning at the same time and get in early? Now, if everyone of the ledgers that are out there, there's a cost. A cost about, how do you transact to a ledger? At some point, you have to pay for the infrastructure.

Dan Gisolfi:
If you remember at the top of the call, Conor, talked about that. The analogy to the roadways. Someone has to pay for the roadways. Well, we have an approach with Bedrock to make sure that members don't have to worry about that. It's a membership, you pay for membership. You put up the infrastructure, you're entitled to all those transactions unlimited. Mike, if you can give me the next slide, please. If you want to learn more, please request a briefing. And by the way, if you want to learn more, if you haven't joined Trust over IP, the information is here, how to join. And also for the Bedrock Consortium, please reach out to us. Mike, is our leader for the Membership Committee at the Bedrock project. And we have an active campaign to bring on more members.

Dan Gisolfi:
We are currently standing up our Dev Environment. Those are the current members, are putting up nodes today. But as we get to a threshold of somewhere around mid 30 companies as a member, we will go live with Bedrock. If you're interested, as your business is interested in joining and getting involved, please request a briefing. And with that, let's open it up to some questions. I know there have been some questions that are already been asked and answered in the chat. But if there are any questions that you'd like to raise your hand and ask the panel, now's your time.

Michael Engle:
Yeah. There's one question that came in. Dan, what is the current state of the Bedrock project?

Dan Gisolfi:
Yeah. The Bedrock project was created within the Linux Foundation as a formal governance utility project within the Linux Foundation. The project itself will not go live until we reach a minimum of 36 members. That allows us to have a budget to address the financial needs of the project and to stand up all of the environments that we require. To meet that, no member is actually being charged in the Bedrock Consortium until we get to the 36. Members who are joining are committed to participate in the various working groups to get the infrastructure up and get the project underway. If you're interested in joining the monetary commitment is not required until we hit a minimum of 36 members. But you are required to provide resources to all the working groups and we have different levels of membership that you can participate. Please request a briefing. Other questions?

Michael Engle:
Yeah. There's another one here, is the utility live today?

Dan Gisolfi:
Yeah. Like I said, the technical committee is actually standing up the Dev Environment so that we can get some of the kinks out. As we bring on new members, it'll be easier to stand up nodes. The Dev Environment is being stood up as we speak. One question I thought that may come up and I'll just answer in advance here is about interoperability. We look at interoperability on the stack in different ways. What is important for everybody to note, whether you're part of sovereign, part of ID union, part of Bedrock or any of the other ledgers that are out there, public identity utility, utilities out there, every one of them, if you're supporting a specific stack, like Bedrock is all the vendors who are creating wallets, I think, Bharat covered this, all the vendors who are creating wallets that talk to a specific set of APIs, like the Indeed method, we'll be able to work with utilities like Bedrock. Interoperability vertically is put in place for those vendors who are building support for that stack. Other questions?

Michael Engle:
No. I think we had a bunch that were already answered in chat.

Dan Gisolfi:
Okay.

Michael Engle:
With that, I'll just put up a final screen here with some contact information. There's a website at Bedrock Consortium. If you just Google that, you'll find it. It's listed here as well. And everything that Bedrock and the Linux Foundation does is public. There's no secrets, everything's out there for you to learn. Next step, if you're interested in plugging into this utility and learning as we grow and evolving with decentralized identity is just reach out to us and we'll get in the weeds briefing. We'll go over the mechanics of how Bedrock works in some more detail, talk about the governance, what the participation looks like and what the next steps would be to join this organization. And we're going to be doing regular sessions like this every month or two as well. Anybody wants to participate in any of these industry efforts, feel free to reach out as well, connect with us all LinkedIn, et cetera. Conor, Bharat, anything else to finish up before we call it a day?

Bharat Prasad:
I think there are a couple of more quick questions there on Q&A. Mike, if we want to take a stab at that, the last minute ones.

Michael Engle:
Yeah. One second. Will there be more webinars? I just mentioned that one. Yeah. Can you guys see the answered questions? I believe everybody can see them once they're answered, right?

Conor White:
Yes.

Michael Engle:
Yeah. Okay, great. And how many members are committed today? There's been about, I don't know the exact number, Dan, but we're between 12 and 16 signed members today. We're about halfway there and interest is growing very quickly.

Dan Gisolfi:
And again, if you request a briefing, we can go into one of those detail. To be a member, because the Bedrock project is part of the Linux Foundation, you have to be a member of the Linux Foundation. But once you're a member of the Linux Foundation, you can join all projects, like Trust over IP, like Bedrock, like Hyperledger and others. It's just a dependency for joining any of the projects within the Linux Foundation. But we can get to more details for that if you're interested in an exploratory briefing. With that, I want to thank everybody who attended the webinar today. I also want to thank our panelists for your insight and sharing, and your continuous collaboration. I truly appreciate it. Thank you everybody.

Michael Engle:
Thank you.

Conor White:
[crosstalk 00:54:14] Thank you. Take care, everybody.

Bharat Prasad:
Thank you.