Making verification processes easier, faster, and more trustworthy is of particular importance to the public sector and the services sector at large. The use of these technologies not only improves the delivery of digital services, but also makes them more user centric. These sectors are important drivers of economic activity in many Member States and better verification, based on self-sovereign technologies, is expected to positively contribute to more innovation, cost savings and higher productivity. Find out what the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure has been up to in the Self-Sovereign tech space and its three key principles:

#1 EBSI is helping the ecosystem grow

Given the importance of Self-Sovereign technologies to Europe’s digital transformation, the EBSI team has been actively engaging with the ecosystem to promote its work on Verifiable Credentials, Blockchain technology and Digital Wallets for automating verification processes in a Self-Sovereign way. Therefore, EBSI participated in the event Rebooting the Web of Trust, a design workshop focused on the creation of the next generation of decentralized web-of-trust. EBSI also presented its work on improving the verification of education credentials to W3C’s Credentials Community Group and to the European Commission’s Corporate Architecture Group. EBSI will also be present in the upcoming GovTech Summit, one of the world’s leading events for public sector innovation. Several other events across Europe will follow. By sharing our experience, we hope to help the ecosystem evolve and grow.

#2 EBSI is promoting privacy by design

Given its self-sovereign ethos, EBSI promotes the use of Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), a W3C specification, under the control of the citizen that are privacy-preserving and do not introduce additional track and tracing risks to our personal life. Unlike classical identifiers, DIDs do not depend on a centralized authority and are cryptographically verifiable in addition to being globally unique. DIDs are created and fully managed by the citizen’s Digital Wallet. This reduces the risk of their misuse.

#3 EBSI is market-friendly and is working in collaboration with Europe’s IT sector

Furthermore, EBSI continues to closely collaborate with Europe’s IT sector – the market provided the Digital Wallets used by EBSI’s pilots. These wallets are standards-based citizen-centric digital solutions which work across borders and therefore help improve participation in the digital society, not the opposite. To prevent market dominance by a few players and avoid vendor lock-in, EBSI offers a conformance testing service of digital wallets, open to all vendors interested in becoming interoperable with issuers and verifiers of the EBSI ecosystem.

We hope that you liked this article and are interested to know more about EBSI’s work on Self-Sovereign technologies.