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How best to define an adoption roadmap?

Question: What are the necessary foundational pieces of the ecosystem that can be stood up / enabled tactically while standards continue to mature and evolve?

The Trust over IP model itself, founded on the dual governance and technology stack, and driven by the insight that the business rules and policies that apply to a trust ecosystem must be made explicit before technologies are assembled to produce credentials, reflects the foundational pieces that need to be in place.

First and foremost, it is necessary to completely understand the problem that needs to be solved, the benefit that adopting verifiable credentials can offer and the real-world constraints and parameters that apply to the business or government-service context. Technology and standards cannot be a substitute for this intelligence.

Borrowing from Timothy Ruff's analysis on the trust domains, most organizations today operate “in separate, unconnected trust domains, unable to directly exchange trusted data and reliant on manual processes, often through third-party data brokers acting as intermediaries.” Overcoming these siloes is made especially difficult by the overlapping sets of barriers that, together, block the ability to achieve “transitive trust with rapid verifiability.” These barriers include:

  • Having many usernames and passwords
  • Cumbersome forms and onboarding processes
  • Verbally authenticating when calling a service center, and re-authenticating when being transferred
  • Waiting for agreements to be signed or consent to be given
  • Waiting for any kind of application to be approved
  • Slow verifications of any kind of documents, records
  • Many slow and/or tedious processes that rely on verifications

Understanding which kinds of barriers exist in an organization, and targeting those which can be eliminated to support the use and benefits of verifiable credentials in a given context, is critical no matter how the standards develop. The technologies, DID methods and interoperability requirements for decentralized credentials will continually evolve. Being the sort of organization that knows itself, and deeply understands the problem it is trying to solve, is foundational to supporting the emergence of digital trust ecosystems that work.