Buenos Aires’ moves from centralized to decentralized digital identity with QuarkID

Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires is incorporating a blockchain-based self-sovereign identity (SSI) protocol into its digital identity app.

Starting in October, the integration of the protocol will allow around 3.6 million users of the city government’s miBA platform to have a decentralized digital identity (DID), according to Buenos Aires Secretary of Innovation and Digital Transformation Diego Fernández.

Since last year, Argentina’s Ministry of Innovation and Digital Transformation has been incorporating the open-source QuarkID digital trust framework into miBA, an app allowing Buenos Aires citizens to access government services and documents. The platform was turned from a centralized system into a decentralized one with the city government issuing DIDs, unique identifiers that can be used to identify someone without a centralized authority.

The city claims that the move will make it the first in the world to hand ownership of digital credentials to its residents. The government will also no longer have visibility where the identity documents are used, according to its announcement.

“When we developed the QuarkID open source protocol, one of the main objectives was for the Government of the City of Buenos Aires to become another user and for the more than 3 million citizens to be able to have their official documents in their miBA wallet with the security that blockchain provides,” says Fernández, who is also the co-founder of QuarkID.

Based on international standards such as those from W3C, Trust Over IP and the Sovrin Foundation, the QuarkID protocol aims to give people more control over their information and allow users to create and manage digital identities using asymmetric cryptography and blockchain. The framework was developed in collaboration with companies such as digital identity firm Extrimian and is anchored in ZkSync, a zero-knowledge Ethereum scaling protocol.

The decentralized digital identities (DID) are secured by QuarkID’s wallet and settled on Era, a Layer 2 blockchain from ZKsync.

With the new update, the miBA app is also broadening access to more than 60 documents, including birth certificates, citizen credentials, marriage licenses and others.

The city has hopes for even more applications. Private companies are currently implementing QuarkID to offer their users decentralized verifiable credentials. Through the protocol, the government will be able to prove that a citizen is eligible to vote or allocate benefits. Private entities will be able to create loyalty programs while banks will be able to use citizen credentials for Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, says ZKsync.

In September, QuarkID was recognized as a Digital Public Good for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. The city also released the QuarkID’s under the Apache 2.0 license.

Article Topics

Argentina  |  biometrics  |  blockchain  |  Buenos Aires  |  decentralized identifiers (DIDs)  |  digital ID  |  digital identity  |  digital public goods  |  miBA  |  mobile app  |  QuarkID  |  self-sovereign identity  |  zero knowledge