1 of 22

Value proposition of SSI tech providers

Why is it hard to send the right message and be understood?

Vladimir Vujovic

Senior Digital Innovation Management at SICPA

2 of 22

SSIMeetup objectives

Empower global SSI communities
Open to everyone interested in SSI
All content is shared with CC BY SA

Alex Preukschat @SSIMeetup @AlexPreukschat

James Monaghan @james_monaghan

Coordinating Nodes SSIMeetup.org

3 of 22

About me

Vladimir Vujovic
Product Manager for 8+ years
In the broader internet identity domain for 10+ years
Decentralized identity or SSI for 6 years
Previously Product Manager at Evernym for their B2B SaaS product - Verity
Currently Digital Innovation Management at SICPA

4 of 22

Challenge - getting the right message across

So today I wanted to discuss about the topic I’ve been experiencing in my current company at SICPA and that is how to convey the value proposition for your Issuer/Holder/Verifier software and be understood by an audience that is not the typical SSI/Decentralized identity audience. At SICPA we do interact with a lot of governments and public institutions and their representatives in lines of business that are not related exclusively to digital identity or SSI. And over these 2 years I had the opportunity to present our offering to these people where I found it wasn’t really that easy to communicate the value proposition of our product. Or perhaps I found it easier to “sell” the idea of SSI, its properties and benefits, but I found it more difficult to explain what is my company’s role, or our contribution to this new SSI model. The thing is that the SSI community, although growing, is still relatively small and most of the people and companies within these communities are familiar so when we discuss our offerings within this circle of people, we are relatively well understood. But when we step outside and when we try to speak to crowd that is coming from much more traditional lines of business or from certain public institutions, then you realize this is more challenging and you need to be really crisp about what you are saying.

5 of 22

SSI has (had) an Identity problem

Self-Sovereign Identity or Decentralized Identity
Web3 tech or Web5 tech or SSI tech or ID tech
Communities, Standardisation bodies… where do I go to contribute or influence (DIF, ToIP, W3C, Hyperledger, IETF…)

First let me start with this… SSI has had an Identity problem since the very beginning. Is it Self-Sovereign Identity or Decentralized identity? People are nowadays using that term interchangeably. The Self Sovereign Identity as a name was never particularly liked and people tried to ditch it so many times… I remember back in 2017-2018 at Evernym, we had some internal discussions about what other term to use instead of SSI as SSI had this negative connotation. But here we are, and SSI is here to stay, and it seems that it is becoming, or it already became mainstream as it found its way into the official communication from government bodies. If you read the communication for new e-ID law from Swiss confederation, you will read “based on Self Sovereign Identity principles”

Then there are these other terms, whether this technology is a Web3 tech or is it a Web5 tech, or SSI tech or ID tech. But this is also confusing. I understand this is a marketing thing and this is how you make yourself stand out among the competition, but I’m not sure that is it helping with the overall narrative. Nowadays I believe people are mostly using the term Verifiable Credentials or DIDs and Verifiable Credentials when they want to explain what is the underlying technology their products are based on. And in reality, this technology of VCs and DIDs is applicable to so much more than the identity for People, Organizations and Things. The digital identity was a first application of this technology but we all know that the applicability is so much bigger.

And finally, you have all these different communities, and standardization bodies that are all working on these different specs used in SSI. And even that is confusing as you don’t know where certain discussions are happening and whether those are relevant or not. I’ve been in this space for 6 years but sometimes it is hard to follow what is happening where.

6 of 22

The value proposition of SSI

Issuer

Verifier

Owner/Holder

Verifiable credential

Proof

Trust

7 of 22

SSI tech market today - Holder side

Holder Wallets or Agents?!

8 of 22

Enterprise Wallets

Digital wallet for Individuals with VCs for legal representatives
Standalone server-side application
Integrated within other business systems – Logical wallet

9 of 22

SSI tech market today - Issuer, Verifier side

Microsoft Entra Verified ID is a managed verifiable credentials service based on open standards.
Trinsic’s Branded Studio - Get your product to market faster using Trinsic’s white label wallet and issuer portal.
Meet Gataca Studio, the all-in-one platform facilitating the integration of Self-Sovereign Identity into your website or application
Lissi Agent - Scalable and easy to integrate relationship and credential management
SELF-SOVEREIGN IDENTITY CONSOLE - A user-friendly GUI Console for managing Verifiable Credentials lifecycle, from issuance to revocation.
NB Orbit Enterprise is a no-code self-sovereign identity platform that facilitates the storage, issuance and verification of verifiable credentials that are held and owned by end users in digital wallets.

10 of 22

A good deal of terms

System

Service

Console

Platform

Studio

Agent

11 of 22

Current product definition

12 of 22

Product Definition

Digital Identity platform for generating, issuing and verifying Verifiable Credentials

WHAT

WHO

Digital Identity platform is to be used by the governments, public and private organizations

HOW

Platform is exposing its functionalities via APIs. It can be consumed as a SaaS or it can be deployed «on premise».

13 of 22

But what is it really that you are offering

14 of 22

The high level answer

The specialized printer for passports and id cards, that prints out the id card with relevant identity attributes and all the security features

So if I needed to provide an illustrative high-level answer that non-SSI people would understand, I would try to find analogies and examples which they would understand.

And the example I use would be that our product acts as some sort of a digital printing machine that once you supply it with the identity attributes, our product is able to produce a type of a digital document with all the necessary security features, the same way when you supply the high security printer with the data, and it produces you the passport or ID card or driver's license. So it is like this special printing machine, but it is digital. And I found that it works relatively well.

But when you simplify your wording that much, then you dilute your value proposition, and then you need to add additional explanation just to make it attractive, like “it is like this special printing machine that prints passports, id cards, and etc but done digitally and with privacy preserving features”.

15 of 22

The value proposition

SSI Community Spec

Your SSI implementation

16 of 22

The value proposition

We provide generation, issuance and verification of Verifiable Credentials.
We do the job of creating the right format, following the data model of credential type
We perform cryptographic operations like hashing and digital signatures
And finally, we run specific protocols for interacting with digital wallets of other parties
We can provide a managed service - SaaS.

17 of 22

The EUDI Wallet perspective

I also wanted to touch a little bit of how these SSI products are perceived by the policy makers/regulators or buyers. The most known initiative today when it comes to adoption of SSI technology is the EUDI Wallet initiative that is being driven by the EU commission and is expected to see initial pilots in 2024 and 2025. And the EUDI wallet will become a mandatory for all EU member states to implement.

So, when you read the Architecture and Reference Framework from the EU Toolbox group, which is supposed to define the technical specifications and standards for the EUDI Wallet ecosystem, you will see plenty of mentions and uses of the term EUDI Wallet, of course. But when it comes to the Issuer or Relying party software that is supposed to interact with the wallet, there is no mention of that at all. For example, you will see what protocols and credential formats are supposed to be used by Issuers and Verifiers, you would read about Issuers of PIDs and QEAAs, but you won’t see any diagram or any mention that PID issuers and QEAA issuers would use a software, a component that satisfies their needs.

18 of 22

The EUDI Wallet perspective

This is another diagram from ARF, and as you see there is no a single box that would fit nicely for this Issuing or Verifying software. It is somehow assumed that PID and QEAA providers will be capable of performing issuance to EUDI Wallet.

Therefore, for us, the tech providers of issuing and verification software who are aiming to satisfy the needs of issuers and relying parties, it is not easy to explain where we fit into the overall picture as we cannot just point to a diagram or paragraph and say, yes this is the box that we can fill in, or this part here is what we are providing.

I’ve recently spoken with an organization that is tasked to be building the necessary infrastructure for the EUDI wallet for one of the EU member states and they have defined this box as “PID and QEAA software” that is performing the packaging, formatting, etc and to which the authentic source is connected to. So these two boxes of Authentic source and PID Issuing software are representing the PID Provider or PID Issuer.

19 of 22

The EUDI Wallet Feedback Loop

Toolbox (ARF)

Reference Wallet Implementation

Large Scale Pilots

Legislative process

Here is the diagram of the main workstreams who are shaping the EUDI ecosystem. Each of these workstreams plays an important role, providing each other feedback and supporting iterative development. So here we have a common toolbox working group that is producing the famous ARF – the Architecture and Reference Framework which is consisting of architecture, common standards and specifications, as well as implementation guidelines. The ARF is supposed to provide standards and specs for the implementation of the reference wallet. Then we have reference wallet implementation that is supposed to be an open-source project created to support interoperability and helping Member States develop their own wallets. It is also supposed to be used with the Large Scale Pilots as well. And then we have Large Scale Pilots who are developing and implementing real worlds use cases using reference wallet implementation and providing feedback to both the ARF process and the reference wallet as well.

All this is supposed to provide feedback to he legislative process.

What is interesting thing here is that you have the open source reference wallet implementation that all the actors are supposed to use and test, but do you don’t have any open source reference issuer or verifier implementation. It is up to the different entities and technology vendors to figure out this part. And of course this is what we are doing, but it is making our story a bit more difficult.

20 of 22

Wording in tenders

Ministry of Digitalization invites tenders for the design, specification, modeling and project management assistance within the framework of the POTENTIAL project for European Digital IDentity Wallet.

Latvia State Radio and Television Center invites tenders for the development of the Latvian "European Digital Identity Wallet“.

Purchase of equipment necessary for Latvia's "European Digital Identity Wallet" infrastructure
Development of the Latvian "European Digital Identity Wallet" pilot

Recently I’ve also seen what I believe are probably among the first public tenders or tender announcements related to EUDI wallet. And here its also interesting to notice the wording.

I’ve seen two examples. One from Luxembourg and the other from Latvia. And it is interesting the wording from the Latvian tender as here they inviting the tenders for the purchase of the equipment necessary for the EUDI Wallet infrastructure. So, they use the term infrastructure which I assume would encompass both the wallet and everything else that the wallet would need in order to be useful, so Issuing and Verifying software.

While a the same time when you look at the tenders for some traditional PKI technology, in case you compare the VCs with a PKI certificate, you’ll read something like “State Agency invites tenders for the procurement of digital certificates” or digital signature certificates. So apparently in PKI world, when you say you need 20k digital certificates for this and that, it is well understood, but we are still not there yet when it comes to VCs. We still don’t have a tender that requires 20k of VCs to be issued. And I do think it is because the SSI market is still maturing and we are yet to define our place in it.

21 of 22

Where do SSI platforms fit in the Digital Identity landscape?

Biometric Service Providers

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Identity and Document Verification services

Mobile Wallets

SSI Platforms

22 of 22

Wrap up

Market is still maturing
SSI Vendors are still searching for product market fit
SSI vendors are still finding/refining the wording and terminology
The business models are yet to be confirmed