The Future of Decentralized Identity
Bitcoin Wednesday on 7 November, 2018 features a presentation from Martin Riedel, Product Manager of Civic, an Ethereum-based identity management solution that reached a market cap of nearly $47 million in October 2018. Civic aims to change how people share and verify information about their identity with the goal of enabling individuals everywhere to independently, safely and cheaply prove who they are.
Martin leads the development of Identity.com, Civic’s decentralized platform for secure identity verification that gives the individuals control over their own information. He writes:
The ability to prove who you are is a fundamental need. Identity is how we engage with the world, but the way we currently prove and verify identity is broken. Today, our identities are tied to physical documents, like birth certificates, driver’s licenses, passports and social security cards. Our identities are verified by citing information from those documents. Yet it’s relatively easy to copy them, and not hard to impersonate someone else with this stolen information.
Blockchain technology opens up opportunities to transform the way we think about identity and privacy, and this transformation presents us with many challenges. Martin’s presentation will cover:
- An introduction to decentralized identity and why an identity ecosystem is critical for the future of digital identity;
- How Identity.com will enable identity ‘Requesters’ and identity ‘Validators’ to transact for identity verification services without ever interacting directly; and
- How Identity.com is incorporating critical identity standards like DID and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and why these specifications are important.
Martin is a software engineer with over 10 years of experience in software architecture and development, project management, and team leadership. As Product Manager at Civic, he manages the development of Identity.com, a decentralized, open-source ecosystem that enables the secure exchange of credential information between ID Requesters and ID Validators that gives people more control over their personal information.
Before joining Civic, he worked in Germany as a developer for Xavo AG, Westernacher Solutions AG, and Robert Bosch GmbH. He received his Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Tübingen and was a visiting graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also published independent academic research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.
