The Crypto Valley Association partners with the Sovrin Foundation to find new ways to help manage digital identities

The Crypto Valley Association (CVA) today announced a partnership with the Sovrin Foundation, an international non-profit that governs the world’s first open public self-sovereign identity (SSI) network, to explore new ways to help business and people manage and store personal identity data on their own devices, and provide it efficiently to those who need to validate it, without relying on a central repository of identity data.

The CVA will become the first Sovrin “steward” operating in Switzerland. A steward is a trusted organization who meets the security and privacy requirements defined in the Sovrin Trust Framework for operating a Sovrin validator node (the nodes that achieve global consensus) of the Sovrin Public Distributed Ledger for Self-Sovereign Identity.

Two of the founding members of CVA – Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) and Luxoft, a global IT service provider – have joined together to make this possible. In particular, the dedicated server running Sovrin’s node is hosted in the HLSU’s award winning Data Centre facility in Lucerne and is operated jointly by the experts of HSLU’s Department of Informatics and Luxoft.

The teams will also work with other members of the CVA and members of the general public to explore Self Sovereign Identity use cases and onboard new applications.

“Today’s identity management is highly centralized and siloed, forcing us to create new accounts, provide personal details and login credentials each time we decide to consume services from a different provider,” said Vasiliy Suvorov, Vice President of the CVA. “At the same time, we trust each of the service providers to manage the provided data carefully, hoping it will not be stolen by hackers. This forces companies to become identity and security experts in order to avoid any security breaches, applying an unnecessary financial burden and deviating funds that could be used elsewhere.”

“A way to tackle this issue would be by decentralizing identity management, creating something like an Internet for identity, in which ownership of identity is pushed to individuals, allowing them to control their identities themselves,” said Dr. Phil Windley, Sovrin Foundation Chair. “An Internet-like identity system would allow any person, organization, or thing (IoT) to have an identity relationship with any other; and to do this without the need for permission from someone else.”

Dr. Windley continued, “Because anyone can use these identities and the resulting relationships without an intervening authority, they’re called ’self-sovereign.’ The Sovrin Foundation has built a system that promotes self-sovereign identity, providing the basis for an easier and more secure identity management.”

Procivis, a Zurich-based e-government specialist that counts the Canton of Schaffhausen among its clients, is already exploring how SSI can work. The company is currently looking into implementing emerging Blockchain ID protocols for their eID+ platform and the forthcoming VALID project and is now working with Sovrin. For this reason, Procivis has established a partnership with the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and the Crypto Valley Association.

About the Sovrin Foundation
The international, non-profit Sovrin Foundation is led by a constitutional Trust Framework that ensures its independence from government or industry influence and codifies its dedication to providing self-sovereign digital identity for all. The Sovrin network is operated by independent stewards and uses the power of a hybrid distributed ledger as a fast, private and secure framework for providing every person, organization, and connected device a permanent identity with which to transact online and operate securely in everyday life. Learn more about the Trust Framework underlying the Sovrin network here.

About the Crypto Valley Association

The Crypto Valley Association is an independent, government-supported association established to take full advantage of Switzerland’s strengths to build the world’s leading blockchain and cryptographic technologies ecosystem. For more information visit the website.