Hi, I am Steve Curran. I am the chair of the Board of Trustees of the Sovereign Foundation. I'm gonna talk about where we are with the sovereign foundation and the network and the ecosystem around that sovereign's.
The, the Sovereign Foundation is an unbiased non-partisan administrator. So very much driven by governance. There's lots of governance words in there. Administrator of the Sovereign Network, it's a global public utility, so it is worldwide nodes and, and the operators operate in jurisdictions across the world. And it's designed specifically for decentralized digital identity. So the types of problems we're talking about here. So nonprofit foundation, diverse ecosystem of stewards. We'll talk about some current use case. And all of this is based on open source software and, and work we're doing.
So when you look at the trust over IP type system, sovereign operates at the bottom, a public blockchain, a public ledger where DIDs and metadata, but credentials are published agents and wallets. Above that, the actual trust triangle of decentralized identifiers, the issuance to a holder, the presentation from a holder to a verifier. And then above that, all of the business use cases, the ecosystems and, and, and pieces around that. So we are right at the bottom, the utility that provides the capabilities above it.
Historically, we've been very much aligned with the Hyperledger stack.
What began as entirely within Hyperledger Indie evolved into Aries and and ons, and on credits being the verifiable credential part of this sovereign is not limited to the Hyperledger stack. It can be used with any other, DID method, any other did friendly ecosystem capability. I mentioned diversity. So this gives you an idea. We've been holding community ecosystem meetings and this shows sort of the range of countries of participants within the ecosystem.
We've got some others on our website that talk about what else we, you know, where, where are our, our node operators are, how, how spread out they are around the world.
A big part of what we do is governance. So there's a very much a technical component to this, the utility itself, but governance plays an absolutely crucial role in everything we do. Everything, every decision we make as a, as a board of trustees, as as an organization, is driven by what does the governance say?
Do we, you know, is it covered in what we do? Do we have to change or change the rules?
And if so, we need to go about a process to do that. So it's all driven by governance. The principles of S-S-I-S-S-I, the original principles were published by Christopher Allen, but a ton of work was done in the sovereign foundation around really expanding out what those principles were, what they meant, how they applied, and, and that is very much what we're based on. It is about being transparent, audible, auditable, and, and providing the, the, the core principles that allow identity for all.
Over the years, we've published a bunch of identity industry papers and white papers so that you can find those available on our, on our site. We did have fun with tokens. That was great. Sovereign started out just before ICOs became a big thing and tokens and Sovereign looked at it. There is valid reasons for having on an identity network, a a a way of incentivizing, for example, an issuer to issue and get paid by the verification that happens in a proper SSI privacy preserving system. You can't just say, oh, I just verified Bob, so here's some money.
That's, that's not appropriate that, that it was against the principles. So there is value to it, but a lot of work was put into a failed attempt to put a token on the sovereign ledger. It just didn't work. So it did result in damage to the reputation.
And we just wanted to talk about sort of where we began.
2020, a new start. We had substantial assets there. We had a community, we had technology, and we had that strong governance, and that's where we've gone to now. So where you might have heard of sovereign in in previous times, this is what we wanted to talk about is where we are.
So today, sovereign network, a digital identity network built on decentralized ledger technology, the governance framework that drives everything we do to make sure we're following the guidelines, following the principles of SSI, stable nonprofit administrator of the network. So what we've managed to do as a, as a board overall was work through the financial issues left by the token situation and, and build up a stable way of operating the network. And that's where we are today. And then we still have our stewards that operate all of that, operate the nodes that run the network.
So it is a permissioned ledger. So the stewards are brought on board, they sign legal agreements, they agree to the governance framework to follow the rules, and then they become authorized to operate the network.
So, and they are around the world as mentioned before. So jurisdictions all over six years going on seven notice July 31st, 2023 was the six year anniversary of the sovereign main net began in 2017. So we've been running for a very long time. So about to hit seven years, a hundred percent uptime for the last five years.
So the, the network's been running stable, solid, and operated professionally for this entire time since that, since the, the token thing that happened. Whoa, a bunch of things here. We just wanted to throw in some quotes and we are obviously we'll be sharing this out. So this is what Anisa, is that how you pronounce it?
Anisa says this.
So I I, I'm from the, might tell from the accident from the other side of the ocean, so more familiar with Anis side of it, but this is the, the European equivalent and so good things in their reports on digital identity that was published I believe in 2023 example use cases. My day job is a consultant at the government of British Columbia. So I wanted to highlight a couple of the government of British Columbia. Things that we do for years.
Org book, which is a credentials for every legal entity that operates in British Columbia are ba are rooted in the sovereign network. So we have a schema of a, a definition of, of the credential, the keys that allow verification of the credentials for the, I think it's 3 million credentials that we've, we've issued related to the org book as well. We run a the in in gov in British Columbia, all lawyers are eligible to get a credential that talks about their practicing status issued by the authority, the Law Society of British Columbia.
And then that is used to access a variety of government systems. So I'll, I'll show a bit. We also have, I mentioned as well in this slide supply chain we're doing for traceability and supply chain for resource extraction. And so there's a mining standard compliance certificate that is based in sovereign and issued to mining companies in Canada as part of a proof of concept.
Trust triangle is what you expect. So a lawyer in this case is issued a credential by the Law Society of British Columbia.
They hold it in their wallet at some point in the future, they need to access a government system, which is only available to lawyers. So they present that credential, it shows the status of it, whether it's been revoked and whether they are a currently practicing lawyer. So all of those happen within and down at the bottom. What the verifier gets to be, they get the credential from the holder and then they get the keys and cryptographic material from the sovereign network. All of the public information that the law society wants people to know is published on the ledger.
The credential itself does not go on the ledger. No public, no private information goes on the ledger.
The last session was about zero knowledge proofs. The an on credits format that has commonly been used on sovereign is extremely, is the most privacy preserving mainstream credential that's used. So a lot of those techniques that was mentioned in the, in the previous apply here. So selective disclosure, you get a credential and you only wanna share certain pieces like your picture to verify your age.
So I am using that first example that he gave in the previous section of, of proving your of age for some purpose. So selective disclosure, even though there's a bunch of information on the, in the verifiable credential, you only share what's necessary. Predicate proofs, this is the one, the literal one that he talked about, which is proving that you are older than a certain age. I think it's 19 in British Columbia. It's been a while since I've had to worry about that.
You can prove you are older than 19 based on your date of birth that's in the credential.
But without sharing your date of birth and prove being that the operative word there, it's not just that you're telling somebody that you're actually proving it and they can verify it. Un unlikeable identifiers, this is again mentioned previously, but crucial to the zero knowledge proof or the privacy capabilities, which is no unique identifier is handed out in order to present a credential. And that's crucial in, in all of the privacy preserving things that we're trying to accomplish. And then the last is multi credential presentation.
So for example, in the lawyer use case, now British Columbia issues a person credential, the law society issues a lawyer credential. So those can be presented together in the situation where the relying party, the verifier wants to confirm both who the person is that's coming in and that they are a practicing lawyer.
So you can do those in, in combined. One mention not mentioned here, and I thought about it in the last presentation, revocation is also done and it's done in a way that preserves privacy in the way the gentleman before me was talking about.
So this is all available today and has been available and used for the last seven years. So we wanted to stress that, that this is all today's technology. This isn't future stuff. One of the things I've been struck with at this conference is all of the topics are are looking at 3, 5, 10 years out. This is here today and you can take advantage of it in the use cases.
Now you might not get a full, you, you have access to the ecosystem that sovereign provides and you can use this in different ways, but you can create use cases, you can use the technology to accomplish these privacy preserving mechanisms today and, and make use of it.
So that's what we wanted to come and, and deliver that message is we're here ready to be used. These are our stewards that operate all the nodes.
Again, global, a broad community across the world. These are the endorsers. Endorsers are those that are permitted to write transactions either for themselves or on behalf of others. And so these are the endorsers today that are using sovereign and we would welcome a lot more board members. Three of us are here and happy to talk about that. We are interested in in con in, in people coming on board, both to use the network and to operate the network, to run the network in various roles.
So if anyone is interested in that, would like to hear more about what that means, happy to have those discussions. That's it. Thank you.
