Decentralized identity needs its iPod moment, identity veteran says

The message came from Charles Walton, principal at Agosti Group and former SVP of Identity at Avast and Mastercard. He, along with Martin Kuppinger, principal analyst and founder at KuppingerCole, were invited to discuss if decentralized identity can be the future of digital trust in an online event held by Dock Labs.

While centralized identity has been dominant, and remains so, decentralized identity could be the “biggest fundamental change” seen in decades, Kuppinger said. The analyst and founder said that siloed, centralized identity can’t be the foundation of digital trust, referring to the millions of stolen passwords and hacks that have occurred. “So if you have decentralized identities the risk is limited to an individual identity, not to millions or hundreds of millions,” Kuppinger said.

However, both Walton and Kuppinger mentioned the slowness of progress, while the latter wants to see more innovation, more openness, and more speed. “What we need in this industry is more vision,” Kuppinger said. “To think much bigger and tell a visionary story that is going way beyond the use cases we have today.”

Walton stressed the importance of a “fourth actor” – as distinct from application service providers, issuers and verifiers – and was pressed on what he meant by the event moderator, Dock Labs CEO Nick Lambert. What Walton meant was a market maker: “The network, the scheme, the governance authority, the organization that sets the table for the commercial identity service.”

Walton, leaning on his previous experience with Mastercard, mentioned marks on ATMs which have become common knowledge (letting people know if VISA or UnionPay is accepted, for example) as a practical example of how decentralized ID could become better known. But the fourth actor would need to go big. “That network-scale player needs to have a very large foundational vision and mission, needs to operate globally, needs to be locally relevant, needs to be capable of scale, of non-trivial investment, and has to deliver stakeholder value,” Walton argued.

Walton took us back in time to the early era of digital music downloads, which was fragmented in the 1990s and early 2000s, before Apple released the iPod and a store to buy downloads. This took deals with record labels, a reliable service, and a “cool device” to turn what was fragmentary into something more mainstream. “We need a moment like that in this industry,” Walton said.

While the EU is pushing ahead with its digital wallet (EUDI Wallet) and there are initiatives for large-scale pilots, Kuppinger noted that the majority of these are government orientated. “How many interactions with government [do I have in] daily life use cases?” Kuppinger asked.

Walton said that an international player is needed, something along the lines of a PayPal, an Uber, an Airbnb, a multinational. Scale was mentioned frequently and the need to embed decentralized identity into everyday activities such as consuming content, messaging and social media, digital working, shopping.

Kuppinger observed that there is still a need for education, on the messaging, and to work on the elevator pitch, the easily understood story about the incredible potential that decentralized identity wields.

Article Topics

Avast  |  decentralized ID  |  decentralized identifiers (DIDs)  |  digital identity  |  digital trust  |  Dock  |  KuppingerCole