Panel - Navigating the Decentralized Identity Landscape: Opportunities and Challenges in the Next Decade

Before we start off, I would just like to take some time off to thank you for the work that you've done in the community. I think we are seeing your efforts germinate in a wonderful way across the ecosystem.

So, so thank you for everything that you've done so far before we actually look into the future of decentralized identity. I would like to take a step back and try to understand what were your motivations to work within the space Pamela first, maybe. Sure.

So, so I come from federated from the federated identity world. And so for me, this was an interesting experience in skepticism, just in some ways, right.

I, you know, I'm not a blockchain fanatic. However, you know, as part of my role as director of identity standards, you know, we were given a business imperative. And so I got to go down this great journey of learning about why decentralized identity is different and, you know, really having to decide what we care about, you know, at least as, as our tiny part of Microsoft, I won't pretend that I can speak for all of Microsoft in that. So that that's sort of my pathway here. Right.

And Kim, Yeah, for me, I got involved sort of indirectly from the educational credentials path. So I collaborated with MIT media lab to develop the block certs open standard. And that was a few years ago. And through that, I sort of gained a lot of insight into how blockchain is useful. And then also sort of this, the related standards that large communities were already working on. So these standards and how they could help so effectively there are.

So if you are really trying to build a system that in the ecosystem that supports lifelong learner controlled credentials, there's just so many things that can go wrong. And so I think that those questions are sort of what led me to want to align with this approach. And I think, you know, to what I mentioned earlier, it's really not just about the credentials that we're all thinking of transcripts or diplomas, it's really about these lifelong learning opportunities.

So yeah, Absolutely. I think that serves as the perfect segue to my next question, which is what is the relevance of standards today? So what essentially is the business value of standards in a decentralized identity ecosystem? Kim? Yeah. So before my current role, I was CTO at a company that was building a product based on standards, sort of precursors to this.

And so it was interesting for our customers, the fact that it was standards based portable in that we had a migration plan for, you know, say either the customers leaving the company or, you know, if as a startup, if the company, you know, you, they would naturally worry if the startup goes out of business, what happens to the credentials that are issued as a result? Are they still usable? So the fact that we could handle and address those problems were really compelling to our customers.

So one area, one question I get in the education space a lot is the idea of is what is sort of supporting these decentralized credentials seen as competitive to universities. And what's really interesting is I think it occurs sometimes, but I've maybe I've had luck of meeting, just very great university, administrators and registrars who are really advocates for their students.

And, you know, sort of from a, a monetary perspective, usually the, the amount of money that they get for handling credentials barely covers the overheads of, of dealing with issuing transcripts and the nuisance of it. Especially nowadays, it's becoming a more and more pressing question. What value do higher education institutions give to learners?

So, right. I think by freeing them up, they can start focusing on these bigger questions that verifiable credentials enable, Right. Pam. Yeah.

I, from my perspective, standards are important and should be valued by absolutely everyone because they allow interoperability. And what interoperability does is facilitate scale. So nobody wants to write proprietary code for every single connection they make to every single entity out there it's expensive, it's costly to maintain. And it just, it doesn't, you know, it does not allow for a predictable experience for users.

So by having these standards enabled interfaces, it means you can write once to the standard and use it everywhere and that, and so that reusability gives you predictability. And by having predictability, you can, you know, you can have a reliable dial tone service that isn't vendor locked in and that, you know, that isn't at the mercy of whoever wants to make changes to their, to their implementations. Right.

And where do you stand now in your efforts as a working group, having been work, having worked in the space for quite a while now, Pam, Well, you'll, you, you will need to be more specific about which working group we're working in a whole bunch of them. Right.

That, I mean, that is another audience question, which I will come to later, but since we're talking about standards perhaps in the development of standards. Sure.

So, so the, the big working groups that I think might be interesting to the folks listening to this, you know, one is what we call Dior sort of the colloquial name, it's in the w three C. And it's all about how to create the document that stores, the public keys that enable these decentralized identifiers, you know, enable any user anywhere to be a part of these verifiable credential interactions. That one is in a really interesting state.

It's about to hopefully go into what we would call a candidate recommendation, meaning that it's stable enough for an implementer to pick it up and play with it. So if you are an implementer out there and you do want to get involved, you can have feedback into the spec right now, but that window is closing very rapidly. So you can go the, go to the W3C, find the did working group, look at the specification and check to see if it fits your business needs.

So that would be number one I can go on, but I'll, I'll wait to see if there's more questions you'd rather, or Kim, maybe you should talk about the one, you, you know, your, your favorite, if you will, In addition to what Pamela mentioned, there's the w three C credentials community group and the decentralized identity foundation. So both of those you can see as doing the, the incubation of the next wave of standards work. And so I think I included some links about those how to get involved. So those are the credential exchange kind of protocols and all of that.

So if you don't want to go into the full, you know, sort of rigor of a work of a w C working group, those are really good ways to start implementing. And, and just talking with people about use cases, Right. I think now would be a good time to say pivot to the future of decentralized identity. So what are the most relevant challenges that you expect to be solved in the coming years from a near future perspective versus a solvable in a decade kind of time horizon, maybe Kim?

Yeah, I think in the, in the very near future, we'll see progress on decentralized identity that we can use that doesn't require aggressive replacements of the technical stack and, you know, authentication processes that, that we're using. So that's what I find really exciting and I think will be very transformative to adoption, Right, Pam, I think there's two pieces that are really important, you know, a lot of the industry, you know, because we're identity people, we focus on humans and human identity.

I do think that there's gonna be some really interesting non-human identity characteristics, and, you know, use cases, you know, there already are lots of use cases, supply chains, a perfect example of where decentralized identity can be already be used, but, you know, understanding how decentralized identity can fit into all of these contexts is something that I think is going to become much more mainstream in the next Sy while. And then the other piece is, and this is really a big piece for the, for human identity.

We have to get past the bootstrapping mode of having folks not understand what a wallet is for and how they can use a wallet. So right now we're in this stage where, you know, any given user that we tried to help by giving them a verifiable credential, we'll almost certainly need to go get a wallet and install a wallet and understand the paradigm of a wallet first. And so that is a barrier to adoption.

Once we get past that stage, once everyone has a wallet and we're putting second credentials in or third credentials in, then at that point, we, we get past what I would call the fax machine problem, right. Of getting everybody into the paradigm. And we can really start to innovate and give interesting, useful experiences that are, that are maybe different from this basic wallet experience. Right?

So Pamela, you earlier alluded to the fact that there are a wide number of working groups currently present in the ecosystem. We have a question from the audience, which is, is it a case of too many cooks spoiled abroad, or is there actually a need to have as many stakeholders as possible to drive the acceleration of the ecosystem? I love this question. The answer to me is diversity, diversity, diversity. I think the worst thing that could happen is, you know, only one kind of anything, right.

You know, we should have big companies, we should have little companies, we should have developer representation. We should have business representation. We should have voices from communities of interest, you know, in including marginalized communities who, who can help us to make sure that we're not making something in our, you know, in, in any one person's image, we want it to, to be able to serve the entire population. Right. Kim? Yeah. I'd echo what Pam says, actually, you know, I think we want, we want more people, more representation, not just the technical people is very important.

I think that, you know, there's a lot of interesting research that, that needs to happen in around privacy and, you know, present preventing algorithmic bias, but just, you know, we need, we need many people looking at these problems. We need real business use cases and yeah. Please join us. Right. Yeah. I think that serves again as a perfect segue to my next question. I mentioned earlier that we have quite an eclectic audience mix today amongst us.

So is there anything, the commons, be it industry academia entrepreneurs, is there anything they could do right away to accelerate the development? Yeah. As soon as possible in a sense, Kim. Yeah. I think where I'd really like to see a lot of engagement is in again, privacy research. So methods like differential privacy would be really interesting. Right.

Pamela, I, you know, I, I would love to see the community at the decentralized identity foundation grow, but also the CCG. So the, you know, I think both of those communities are important. And in some sense, if you, if you could do one thing, you know, if you found someone in your organization who was enthusiastic about them, right. And had them look at those two communities, pick the one that works best for them and just have them start to get to know the people.

Because I, you know, I really do feel like we're in this mode right now where, you know, the, the people will, the people in the room are going to change how the next 10 years of technology work. So that, that's what I would do get the human element in there so that you can make knowledgeable business decisions. Right. We have another audience from our question today. I'm sorry. We have another question from our audience today.

It, it pertains to the scalability of blockchain platform. So are the issues pertaining to blockchains when it comes to scalability? Have they been resolved? An example might be the amount of commutation required yeah. To get started in a sense, Pamela. So have they been solved? Nothing about this technology will solve the scalability issues.

However, the way that the architecture has been set up is that you get to choose how you anchor your decentralized identity as an individual. And so, and so you can choose an anchoring technology that fits your personal beliefs. And so there are, you know, for example, there's a protocol called side tree that has a number of different projects running off of it, where they will batch decentralized identifiers, you know, thousands of a decentralized identifiers into a single Bitcoin transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain.

So that you, you know, you don't have to worry about a, a severe environmental impact, you know, because you've registered a decentralized identity against that specification. There are others that don't use the blockchain at all. So maybe if, you know, if you're, you know, if you're really opposed to blockchain, you do have alternatives as well. You can stamp completely away from decentralized. Right. Kim. Yeah. I think that, well, I would go back to the idea of, you know, be careful what you put on the blockchain only use a blockchain where you need a blockchain.

I think a lot of the problems came from overuse of, of blockchain also to what Pamela says about side tree. There are a lot of compelling layer to approaches that help with scaling. But I think, you know, again, back to responsible architecture, blockchain, doesn't change the need to do that. Right.

And again, as identity veterans, both of you have seen the industry evolve closely over the years. What's the one thing that gets you most excited about decentralized identity. Maybe Kim could start first. Yeah. That gets me most excited. I guess just the opportunity to let people, you know, control their data and their, their credentials about themselves throughout their lives. Great. And Pamela, Yes.

When I started my career a long, long time ago, there was this concept of user centric identity, and it meant different things then, and it will mean different things again in the future, but I'm very excited to see the wheel turn on this. It's one of the things that I, I really care about. So as Kim said, control of your own identity, but also collection, you know, you think about the, the corporate world right now in the enterprise, it is all about analytics. It is all about seeing trends. It is all about understanding, you know, global impact, not just localized impact.

Well, I do believe that the user-centric, I user-centric identity in general means that I, as an individual can run my own analytics. I can understand my own impacts my own trends. And that for me is just super cool and new and different. Right? So we have another question from the audience, which is one of the problems with decentralized identifiers is the general resolving of those names. So how can standards perhaps help with this problem? Perhaps Pamela could start first. Yeah. I don't know if I'll give a, a good answer to this or not.

You know, the, the way that resolution of decentralized identifiers works is, is via a thing called did resolution. There are a lot of theories about how this will work in the future.

You know, we've basically got a hypothesis in the industry. If, if, if it is a problem, to be able to execute open source code, to be able to get to various decentralized ledgers, then I don't think that's a problem we're necessarily working on right now. To be honest, we are, I think, making the assumption that that is good enough for now, so that we can focus on the layers on top of it. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's a problem, but it's maybe a 10 order problem in my view, but Kim, I hope you have a, a much more interesting response.

Oh no, that was a good answer. So there, there is effort called did resolution. Like she said, to be able to resolve across methods in a standard way now, to her point about your ability to trust either, you know, how that resolution is happening or a certain did method like did doge, which just came out, which is great, but you may not trust that identifier method.

So the great thing about it is that we're, we're developing a rubric for evaluating how you might, might investigate how you might decide whether you trust a decentralized identifier method, as well as the other security concerns that would happen in implementation. So we do have a good idea of the standards. There are open source, implementations, even ones you can access in a browser in reality, you're probably not gonna wanna use those same methods. You'll wanna use a more hard in one.

And so we're developing all those, you get to decide what you use, but we do hope to have better guidance in the, in the near future. Right. And finally, to end this discussion, describe your, your outlook for decentralized identity in one word, Pamela, I, I am hopeful. I'm hopeful for the future. Perfect. Kim. That was my word. Yeah. Okay.

So, so we see that the working group is actually in concurrence on a, on a large number of, of, of things. I think, I think what attracts me primarily to the community is that we have a wide number of people who are passionate about a certain cause who are working together it together to create something foundation for the world. And for that, I genuinely thank the both of you for being part of this panel discussion today. And we hope to see much more of your work in the coming years. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Thank you.