We’re excited to share some notable news: Trinsic has volunteered to be the sole Steward of the last-remaining nodes of the Sovrin Network—a full circle moment for our company story. As caretakers, we’re preserving the now-defunked piece of digital identity history for archival (read-only) purposes and as a constant reminder of our ideals.
While Trinsic’s origins branched from the world of Sovrin and decentralized identity, Trinsic pivoted in 2024 to an identity acceptance network. Today, Trinsic helps businesses accept all types of digital IDs–from mobile driver’s licenses, to European eIDs, and proprietary reusable IDs. While Trinsic no longer offers decentralized identity infrastructure, our vision of a future where everyone has access to a secure, private, digital representation of their identity remains.
Sovrin’s Impact on Digital Identity
Is it difficult to overstate the impact the Sovrin Network had on the digital ID industry—the direction of the industry, including decisions about digital ID infrastructure by nation states around the world, would certainly be different had Sovrin not been created.
Established in 2016, Sovrin emerged when self-sovereign identity (SSI) was beginning to gain traction. It was unique because it was the first blockchain built from the ground-up for identity, pioneering the concept of storing personal details securely off-chain within verifiable digital containers held in a user’s wallet.
This paradigm became foundational to what we recognize today as the primary pattern for modern digital ID systems, including verifiable credentials, mobile driver’s licenses, and numerous digital wallet implementations around the world.
Obviously, the Sovrin community (composed in large part, especially early on, by Sovrin’s “parent company” Evernym) didn’t come up with these ideas out of thin air. The early Sovrin team was also influenced by the brilliant minds that came before. But Sovrin uniquely brought a level of talent, capital, and attention to digital ID that is impossible to deny. Some of the earliest contributors to Sovrin have gone on to be involved in digital ID projects with governments and the world’s largest enterprises.
Sovrin represents a certain kind of idealism that we, at Trinsic, don’t want the industry to lose. At its finest, Sovrin was a network driven by uncompromising principles and a lofty vision of “Identity for All”. At the same time, our observation is that its strongest characteristic (its idealism) was a primary source of its demise.
Part of the motivation for volunteering Trinsic the caretaker of the Sovrin Network archive is because of the powerful reminder the network represents: Idealism MUST be balanced against pragmatism. The true imperative of any digital ID system is adoption–nobody reaps the benefits of a digital ID until it is used! And if systems are so uncompromising that its would-be implementers/customers are driven to adopt an alternative, the idealism is actually harming the very objectives it exists to strengthen.
To reiterate: The Sovrin Network Archive is a potent reminder of how uncompromising idealism can backfire and harm the very outcomes it seeks to improve.
Trinsic’s Foundational Connection to Sovrin
Trinsic was founded while I was an employee of the Sovrin Foundation–the now-dissolved governance body for the network. I was the first employee and helped grow the Foundation to a few dozen people. I wrote about that journey here.
After a few years at Sovrin, my cofounders and I observed that Sovrin was too difficult to build upon. So Trinsic’s first product was designed to help developers easily build solutions on Sovrin. Our first launch was at the Internet Identity Workshop, the very conference where many of the ideas that formed Sovrin were incubated, where we empowered 35 people to issue their first credentials using Sovrin. A year later, after more than 1,000 developers had used our APIs, Trinsic provided the Internet Identity Workshop ticketing solution via verifiable credentials issued on Sovrin (check out the credential schema [here (link coming soon)]).
At its peak, Trinsic accounted for 75% of the traffic on Sovrin’s StagingNet and about ~half of all MainNet activity (excluding revocation entries). Ultimately, the adoption of the StagingNet vs MainNet tells the story: the stringent requirements of the technology attracted developers excited to build, but made real-world adoption difficult.
Today, Trinsic is pursuing the same mission from a slightly different angle. We took the learnings from hundreds of customers building with decentralized identity and pivoted to digital ID acceptance. Instead of depending on decentralization and interoperability (forces outside our control) for our growth, we build an identity acceptance network that allows companies to realize value immediately. I documented the rationale behind our pivot in a blog post here.
Why We Chose to Preserve Sovrin
Clearly, Sovrin was foundational to Trinsic’s founding. We chose to volunteer as the caretakers of the Sovrin Network archive because we believe there are important things worth preserving:
Sovrin Network is worth saving. No rational justification compares to the emotional conviction. Sovrin is worth preserving. If I had to put the primary motivations into words, these are the primary motivations that guided our decision:
Preserving Ideals: As stated above, Sovrin serves as an enduring symbol of the ideals and aspirations behind self-sovereign identity. It is a beacon of what the future holds. At the same time, it is the most objective evidence of the importance of pragmatism and adoption, which we believe should be elevated as ideals in their own right.
Self-sovereign Identity: Sovrin’s motivation for a decentralized network was to ensure that even if the Sovrin Foundation went away (which it did), the Network would continue through the community of Stewards who hosted it (which continued uninterrupted, for a number of years). By continuing to host the network archive as the sole Steward, we enable any identity credentials issued to people around the world to remain verifiable, honoring the original decentralized promise. Of course if something ever happens to Trinsic, we’ll do our best to find another caretaker to continue making the network available in perpetuity.
Sentimental Value: I would be foolish to deny another aspect of the decision. As a foundational aspect of Trinsic’s founding story, and a key part of the start of my career, I wanted to assume stewardship of the network.
Looking to the Future
Looking backward, it’s easy to see that Sovrin accomplished something amazing. It powered many of the world’s first production verifiable credential deployments across every continent, generated tens of millions in aggregate revenue for its ecosystem participants, and maintained a remarkable 99.9999% uptime over the last three years of its existence. All while being operated by, initially, a lean staff, and ultimately, a volunteer community.
And if you ask anyone in the identity industry about their vision for the future, you’ll almost certainly hear the influence of Sovrin’s leadership in their answers.
At Trinsic, we believe billions of people will hold digital IDs whose privacy and security characteristics will be derived from concepts forged by Sovrin and its early contributors. Today, Trinsic already helps businesses seamlessly accept tens of millions of such digital IDs, and our coverage is growing rapidly.
As we aim to preserve Sovrin’s legacy, it’s critical we remember the price of idealism without pragmatism—without abandoning our ideals. If you’re interested in taking a look at the network, check out our instance of IndyScan. And get in touch if you want to work with Trinsic to accept digital IDs in your business.
