IOTA continues its mission of redefining trust, value, and ownership with a foundation that provides for the permissionless ecosystem.
The IOTA foundation has taken its first step towards a “Unified Identity Protocol” This is a protocol meant for digital identity implementation, which is built on Tangle. The economy of things and trust interactions are the core objectives of this protocol.
The paper talks about how important it is for people in an organization to have a shared layer of trust. The internet has created a lot of business opportunities, but building trust in this network is indeed a challenge. When the essential parameters of trust and privacy are taken care of, it will help improve customer experiences. The decentralized digital identity protocol provides for those requirements.
The estimation of identity provided by Facebook and Google, according to the IOTA blog post, might be inaccurate. IOTA feels that the identity estimates will be without sufficient depth into the user profiles. Further publishing that in some cases, the information might be completely wrong.
The line of criticism propelled further by stating that these companies build their business model based on this information and that impersonation and fraud are common in these cases. This eventually leads to a lack of trust. Several online transactions also forward such trust issues, and the concept of trustworthy businesses and customers continues to be an unresolved issue.
There is less room for fast, cheap, and trustworthy identification methods. When it comes to the business-customer relationship, the concept of identification is solved by making use of time-consuming Know Your Consumer (KYC) methods.
Several proposals have been drafted by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) for Digital Identity Standards, which will be enabled by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The concepts like verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers provide for online identification of something in a verified and trusted manner.
IOTA is focused on creating a neutral environment in digital identity implementation as opposed to permissioned DLT or DLT that has profit-seeking consensus. In a neutral environment, none of the parties will have power over identities. The unified identity proposed by IOTA is not only suitable for the identities of people but is good for the organization of things.
IOTA will become the invisible trust infrastructure for everyone and everything when the Unified Identity Protocol is added.
IOTA has stated that they will be releasing a series of blogs in the year 2020 about how the Unified Identity will affect different industrial sectors.
