Blockchain-Based Digital Trust, Innovative Scenarios for Evolution of Services

Let us take a look at the future and formulate hypotheses on the new trends that will characterize the technological scene in 2020 and beyond. We will try to do this by focusing on the predictable areas of application in the Digital Trust sector, i.e. services and solutions that guarantee the security, confidentiality and legal certainty of cryptocurrency transactions, such as blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT).

According to a global research and advisory firm providing information, and tools for leaders in IT, Gartner ( report titled “Innovation Insight for Decentralized and Blockchain Identity Services” of June 2019), and Deloitte's 2019 Global Blockchain Survey, a lot of companies including InfoCert, Rejlers Embriq, ZNQ3, LuxTrust S.A, Soltrus Inc, etc, are planning to invest a lot of resources to develop blockchain-based digital identities (DIs).

An initial forecast, of a general nature, is that the Digital Trust sector will continue its growth, driven by the incessant transition to the digital world in place in any economic sector: More and more, in fact, the processes underlying the operations of each business area will be based on algorithmic interactions, increasing the need for tools and solutions for the certification of data exchanged in online transactions.

Blockchain-Based Identities

The issue of the risks of exposure, abuse or theft of personal data in the current models of centralized management of DIs by large service providers is foremost in the public debate. The widespread perception, even at the level of the European legislator, is the need for a new model of management of distributed and decentralized DIs (Self-Sovereign Identity - SSI) which allows to raise the levels of protection.

Such a system already exists and meets the name of Sovrin Network, an initiative launched by the Sovrin Foundation. Sovrin Network is based on blockchain technology and allows the creation of DIs of which the citizen is manager and owner with full control.

The distributed registers are managed by a pool of actors and not by a single administrator and transactions are redundantly managed in different nodes, with a guarantee of reliability and resilience to external attacks.

The turning point for the development of this model is the possibility of assigning legal value to identities. A concrete step was taken by some companies that provide scanning and dematerialization services market, certification authorities for certified electronic mail, digital signature and digital document preservation services so as to achieve a distributed DI with full legal value.

If digital transformation continues its course, in fact, the DT continues to keep pace with the weapons of innovation and research, those that have always represented the value of blockchain technology.