for so long and it can be very simple like remembering your friend’s face or can be as complicated as an advance biometric like a retina scanning. The evolution of identity verification started to develop with the issuance of the first paper-based identity in the 14th century and the history of identity looks briefly like this.
like opening a bank account, you have to prove your identity to the service provider with your ID card and if you come back for a service each time, you will need to do it again, either by presenting password or other credentials. So, the repetitiveness is not only the weakness of Centralized Identity with a single domain (or even multiple domains) but also privacy issues, data leakage, and risk of sovereignty.
Decentralized Identity can unravel all that. You prove your identity only once to a trusted organization then the organization registers your Decentralized Identifier onto a blockchain (distributed ledger) which called Identity Trust Fabric (ITF). Then you will have your own verifiable credential which stored in your phone and you take fully control of it.
there is no need for a data silo. Decentralized Identity uses a tool called Distributed Ledger to create an Identity trust fabric (ITF) which it a peer-to-peer platform that we can generate our Digital Identifiers (DIDs) and get approval by a trusted third-party, then store it for a tamper-free verification to present to anyone.
by clarifying your identity with a trusted third-party, e.g. Department of Transportation, you will have an e-ID Wallet on your phone and can present it with QR code or API connection. The verifier will compare it with your record on the ITF and grant you access to your requested service. Additionally, Decentralized Identity can provide you a feature called Zero-Knowledge Proofs, which literally means that by answering the verifier’s yes-or-no question without revealing any other information other than the proof, e.g. age verification, so you can keep your privacy at all time.
