Technology Vision 2023 | When Atoms meet Bits #TechVision Core digital identity: centralized vs. decentralized Already, digitally-born core identities are starting lacking entirely)—fast track into the digital era by to emerge. Unsurprisingly, many of the biggest implementing identity capabilities built digitally efforts are spearheaded by governments, though from the ground up. It is currently being used in there are a number of public-private partnerships Ethiopia and the Philippines, and there is a planned and grassroots efforts as well. It’s a complicated 68, 69 inter-country effort across West Africa too. landscape, but every enterprise needs to take note of these evolutions as they will quickly become a Centralized efforts tend to be easier to deploy and primary way to engage customers. to build for purpose, and for those reasons may come to dominate much of the core identity The best way to make sense of these efforts is ecosystem. However, as with any centralized system, to look at them across a spectrum of centralized challenges include concerns over a single point to decentralized, each with advantages and of failure and privacy fears over who controls the disadvantages. centralized platform. The Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) The other, increasingly popular, approach to is an example of a centralized effort. It is based off core identity has been to create decentralized, or India’s Aadhaar system, but is completely open distributed, platforms. These efforts, sometimes known as Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), are based source and modular, meant to 昀椀t various countries’ requirements. Governments can leverage the code on blockchain and distributed ledger technology, as a starting point to build digital identity systems so rather than one central authority, they rely on which they then have complete control over. consensus mechanisms from multiple parties to MOSIP is intended to help countries—particularly validate identity. In late 2022, the World Wide Web in regions where physical institutions are weak (or Consortium (W3C) published a speci昀椀cation for