Introducing Trinsic Ecosystems

Of the 1,000+ organizations who’ve used Trinsic since we launched the world’s first self-sovereign identity (SSI) platform 1.5 years ago, a large subset are building “trust ecosystems”, or networks of organizations and people that can share trustworthy data in a standardized and privacy-respecting way. While Trinsic’s platform has always served as a scalable, easy-to-implement way for these trust ecosystems to incorporate the technical standards required, organizations building trust ecosystems had to solve other problems themselves, including developing ecosystem governance and building tools to facilitate adoption.

 

That is why we are excited to announce Trinsic Ecosystems, our enterprise-grade product for building Trust over IP ecosystems. Coined a “trust ecosystem in a box”, Trinsic Ecosystems is the only product that combines the technology and governance into a single solution to scale a verifiable credential ecosystem. Over the last year, we’ve worked hands-on with a set of customers building trust ecosystems, which have collectively achieved adoption of over 100,000 end-users. 

The key to creating a trust ecosystem

A helpful model called the “trust triangle” is a good start to understanding how digital trust can be established, but issuers, verifiers, and holders won’t spontaneously create organic trust ecosystems. For years, industry nonprofits like the Sovrin Foundation and the Trust over IP Foundation have referred to a fourth party, a “governance authority“, which could develop a governance framework for an ecosystem. A year ago, we took that one step further and introduced the concept of a “Provider”. Today, we propose driving that model all the way through to its logical conclusion by proposing that this fourth participant become a core part of the trust triangle.

A trust ecosystem needs three things to be successful: interoperable technology, trustworthy governance, and tools for adoption. Trinsic Ecosystems is designed to provide these three components in a fully-integrated, programmatic platform, built specifically for providers.

decentralized identity governance

Interoperable technology

In order for ecosystems to share and authenticate data seamlessly, standardized data models and formats must be utilized. Trinsic Ecosystems leverages the Trinsic Platform, a modular, technology-agnostic platform that allows providers to choose the tech stack they’ll build their ecosystem on—whether it’s using JSON-LD verifiable credentials that leverage existing PKI infrastructure, or ZKP-enabled credentials on the Sovrin blockchain, or other options coming soon on our roadmap.

 

As the standards and protocols evolve rapidly in the decentralized identity market, Trinsic stays abreast of changes and works to ensure continued interoperability so that you can focus on building your trust ecosystem.

Governance as code

Developing governance for a trust ecosystem used to mean sitting in working groups in industry consortiums and drafting language through committees and Google docs. While that model still has its place, it’s wholly incomplete unless the software can effectively enforce the governance rules. Instead of making governance a purely legal construct, providers can program it into their ecosystems using Trinsic. Governance-as-code can answer the following questions:

 

  1. Who are the ecosystem participants, and what are their roles?: Providers vet and admit participants into their ecosystem. These participants are automatically added to a Trust over IP-compliant Trust Registry, which allows all parties to know who to trust. Providers can be interoperable with other ecosystems by incorporating other Trust Registries into their own.
  2. What kind of data will be exchanged?: Providers determine what kind of digital credentials (ID cards, health credentials, etc.) will be issued and verified in their ecosystem. This ensures authorized issuers can issue important credentials and prevents phishing and coercion from unauthorized verifiers as well.
  3. How will credentials be bound to customer identity, and how will access be granted?: Trinsic makes it easy to deliver wallets to end-users via browser, mobile, desktop, SMS, or in-person, while enabling cross-device syncing and offline capabilities. Providers can evaluate the trade-off between low-friction onboarding methods with strong identity binding and configure the solution that’s best for them.

Adoption tools

Getting adoption from organizations

Once an ecosystem is configured, providers need to onboard participants like issuers and verifiers. Trinsic Ecosystems comes with an API that allows providers to easily build issuer and verifier dashboards. 

A frictionless consumer wallet experience

Current standalone digital wallets introduce friction and sometimes frustration for end users. The user experience of downloading an app, configuring it, scanning QR codes, accepting various prompts—all to get their first credential—is less than ideal. Cloud wallets can address this, but they’re usually build for web-first experiences, not mobile.

 

Embedding wallet functionality into existing applications people know and love is consistently the favorite way for end-users to access their credentials. But these users also expect production-grade capabilities such as cross-device syncing, backup & recovery, strong security, and offline capabilities. Developers love Trinsic for its ease of integration, allowing you to provide the tools needed for adoption in your ecosystem.

Enterprise-grade scaling

In order for customers to adopt a solution, they must know it’s scalable. Trinsic Ecosystems supports various standard technology implementations, each with varied scalability. The most scalable options support hundreds of millions of verifications per day and thousands of credentials issued per second. That’s orders of magnitudes more scalable than other options.

The Trinsic vision

Going back to the SSI trust triangle, Trinsic envisions a world of interoperable digital trust ecosystems. With Trinsic Ecosystems, the software to achieve real-world adoption of digital trust is a reality. Anyone can get started with Trinsic Ecosystems today by creating a free account

Share Post

Related Posts