2021’s first Vienna Digital Identity Meetup

Identity Wallets – The Vienna Digital Identity Meetup #19 from Michael Shea on Vimeo.

We thought Identity Wallets (the place where your personal DIDs and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) are stored) were the topic for our 19th Vienna Digital Identity Meetup* on 25 January. It was much more. We had two presenters:

• Riley Hughes, CEO from Trinsic in the US. (04:26 in the video)
• Thomas Zeinzinger from Lab 10 Collective in Graz. (41:20)

Riley Hughes, Trinsic

A few slides from Riley. Trinsic is hosting more than one hundred thousand VCs. He started with the mandatory explanation of a Verifiable Credential…

Trinsic built its technology on the Hyperledger Aries toolkit.

And while they are known for their Trinsic Wallet…

They’re really in identity platform business. They make it fast, easy, safe, and cheap for developers to work with VCs. Remember how Twilio made complex and risky telephony and telecom accessible through fast, easy, safe, and cheap APIs? Trinsic is doing that for VCs and SSI.

Trinsic’s business model: if you make money from our APIs or our white-labeled wallet, we make a little money.

Identity wallets are either mostly hosted in the cloud (below, “Full Cloud” on the left) or on a personal device like a phone or laptop (“Light Cloud” on the right). Riley sees a convergence toward a hybrid model, enabled by a software agent that syncs cloud and local services.

Riley said SSI platforms like Trinsic get their value from network effects. Two effects of this. First, that cooperation and interop make the social graph bigger for everyone. And that this is a slow-slow-slow-FAST kind of business.

Riley predicted we will see a great SSI schism as large companies deploy centralized wallet services to their ecosystems and billions of customers. But decentralized wallets will also build traction as they become widely used for money, payments, and commerce, and for private communication outside the big tech leaders and national governments.

Look under the covers at Trinci’s wallet reference app on github.

Thomas Zeinzinger, Lab 10 Collective

Lab 10 fights the climate disaster with technology. They are on a deadline.

They assembled the Minerva Wallet as a decentralized commons infrastructure. The plumbing brings together identity, data, and money (the digital information layer) for individuals, devices, and organizations (the social organization layer).

The Minerva Wallet is a mobile app, used in Thomas’ demo by Österreichischer Automobil-, Motorrad- und Touringclub (ÖAMTC), as a membership card for their Austrian auto club.

The proof of concept was for members to get data from partner clubs when traveling, exchanging credentials, authenticating their ÖAMTC memberships. Eventually for the clubkarte to work with stranger clubs to access services.

Coming up:

• February 3. Unlocking Decentralized Identity, KuppingerCole
• February 22. Vienna Digital Identity #20, IoT
• March 8, 10, 12. Thoughtful Biobetrics Workshop.
• March 9. Vienna Digital Identity #21, eIDAS and SSI
• March 22. Vienna Digital Identity #22.
• April 20-22. IIW #32.

We continue to have online-only events. Stay safe.

You’re invited to upcoming events. Join the free meetup at: https://www.meetup.com/Vienna-Digital-Identity-Meetup/

*Vienna Digital Identity Meetup is hosted by The Dingle Group and is focused on educating business, societal, legal and technologists on the new opportunities that arise with  a high assurance digital identity created by the reduction risk and strengthened provenance. We meet on the 4th Monday of every month, in person (when permitted) in Vienna and online on Zoom. Connecting and educating across borders and oceans.