Indy Solving Digital Identity problem

Project Indy by Sovrin concept of verifiable claims

Phil Windley, chair of Sovrin Foundation has come up with an idea to reach a middle ground between permissionaless ledgers and permissioned options to solve one of the biggest challenges of digital identity systems, which is to produce an online equivalent to your driver’s license at a convenience store.

Project Indy, developed b Sovrin Foundation is trying to fix this problem using a hybrid distributed ledger platform. Accordint to Windley, “ "One of the key philosophies of Project Indy is that private information is never written to the ledger, even in encrypted form, It gets anchored on the ledger so there's proof that it existed on a certain day."

Elements of identity are then updated on the distributed ledger to be verified by an agent. In the example of a digital driver's license, an agent could be the Department of Motor Vehicles (in the US). However, the idea is that the system is used by third-party operators, but not owned or controlled by them.

Project Indy subscribes to the concept of 'verifiable claims' – a method of cryptographically authenticated online identification, where no private data is written to ledger, returning some ownership to the user. Sovrin Foundation is contributing Project Indy’s code to HyperLedger nonprofit consortium to hasten the development of the project’s proof of concept.