1 Management Summary
The KuppingerCole Market Compass provides an overview of a market segment and the vendors in that segment. It covers the trends that are influencing that market segment, how it is further divided, and the essential capabilities required of solutions. It also provides ratings of how well these solutions meet our expectations.
The KuppingerCole Market Compass Decentralized Identity: Blockchain ID & SSI Solutions covers solutions for managing identities (ID) based on blockchain technology. This includes solutions for self-sovereign identity (SSI), enabling individuals to securely access and interact with other parties based on the principles of Privacy by Design and Security by Design. It also includes solutions with a primary target of supporting and simplifying Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, specifically by making KYC information reusable. Furthermore, several solutions have an emphasis on a reusable authentication, with less emphasis on the KYC and SSI angle. Some of these, as well as some of the SSI solutions, are targeting the promise of delivering a Universal ID, i.e. an ID that can be used globally and across a broad variety of business cases.
Blockchain presents a previously untested opportunity for digital ID management. The current but contradictory push for both data privacy and transparency poses a challenge for traditional Identity and Access Management (IAM), but has created the competitive space for Blockchain ID and SSI to emerge. The rising consumer demand for SSI is a direct result of recent data breaches and misuse of private data, and blockchain is a timely technology development that makes it possible to move ownership and storage of PII data to edge devices. By leveraging its immutable and time-stamped ledger, blockchain can create an Identity Fabric that enables the secure sharing of information without divulging private data.
The market, as of today, is very heterogeneous with respect to both the technical approaches of the vendors and the maturity of these companies. We expect that only few of today’s player will survive, while others will be acquired or simply disappear from the market. Furthermore, we expect that the market will evolve rapidly, driven by the business models that prove successful but also impacted by the current phase of disillusion in the overall Blockchain technology market. While we expect that to change, being a typical stage in every market evolution after an initial hype, this will affect also the decentralized ID market.
Notably, the decentralized ID vendors compete with a variety of other solutions, such as Identity Verification technologies e.g. based on video identification approaches, and with other approaches for delivering reusable and potentially universal ID schemes. However, this Market Compass looks specifically at the decentralized ID market as a specific segment, where the underlying blockchain technology can deliver specific benefits regarding the trustworthiness and, based on that, the security of IDs and – in the SSI context – Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
