# Evernym - Identity - Internet of Agreements

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [620]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2018-05-15 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Third-party ID-issuance technology.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine)
  - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine)
  - CoinDesk (2020): CoinDesk interview on an identity layer for physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: GDPR (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); interoperability (2 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); certificates (2 here; 26 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); peer-to-peer (2 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); standards (4 here; 87 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); hackathon (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); ICO (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); India (1 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Mattereum (1 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.12 (1.00 is the top), number 489 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [567] [The Fourth Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 8th Feb 2023 (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/567.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [594] [Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Online Meet-Up 27 July 2022 (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/594.md): close in content (cosine 0.93)
- On the same works, just before: [632] Law and Global Trade in the Era of Blockchain (2018); [835] [10 Apr 18 Identity – Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/835.md); [631] [The economic impact of blockchain - Panel at the second... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/631.md)
- On the same works, just after: [737] [Vinay Gupta on Smart Contracts and Mattereum ICO -... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/737.md); [614] Dean Masley & Ahsan Fazal - Internet of Agreements - Space (2018); [767] [Vinay Gupta + Regulation & Innovation panel @... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/767.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Evernym - Identity - Internet of Agreements, video, 2018-05-15, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [620], https://guptaoption.com/texts/620.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=0s) okay let's just get started well people are taking a seat and why don't we start with very quick introductions I'm David Salgado head of operations at Mattereum hi I'm Elizabeth Rainier so I'm global Policy Council at Evernham hi I'm Andy Tobin I'm the European Managing Director for evening jason la CTO eviden and I'd like to start off if we can with just a quick introduction to what evident is what what's your approach would entity what problems you solving company sure I'll cover that so um ever name is really all about self sovereign identity we're all about fixing the problem that's actually been articulated this morning already which is how do you trust who you're dealing with online we're probably best known as the inventors of sovereign sovereigns a global identity Network it's based on something called hyper ledger Indy which is code that Jason and our technical colleagues Evan M wrote and open sourced and the network itself is run by trusted parties so that the latest wants to be announced Imperial College IBM was actually announced recently as a steward that runs a network as well and the what essentially it does is it provides a couple of things first of all it provides a fairly technical audience here a decentralized key registry for public keys and it provides a protocol on top of that that allows you to share data in a way that involves no middleman and allows you as an individual to own and manage your own data and allows an organization or connected things to do the same so it essentially solves the problem that we have at the moment in the old way of sharing identity data I if David asks me who I am I can say I'm Andy Tobin and he would naturally say well says who who says I am and I could get one of these out and I could show to him like this and you can look at it and take it and see it's got some shiny information on it and some holograms and so on and David can establish a certain level of trust because I've shown him this thing and he trusts surpassed Morrison's it's probably pretty genuine but we don't have the digital equivalent of doing that on a in a way that's global and

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=150s) properly open-source and standards-based and sovereign essentially provides a solution to that problem so using a standard called verifiable credentials or verifiable claims I can be given by the pastor office a digitized version of this not a scan of it but a digitized version with all the attributes like and then present individual attributes to David and he can verify that that came from the passport office he can verify I haven't changed it he can verify it was given only to me and he can verify very importantly that it hasn't been revoked so we're talking about essentially sovereign being a global utility that allows anyone or anything to do those things can you perhaps expand a little bit on the on the issue of revocation of credentials because that's something that I think in the blockchain space we're very comfortable now with the idea that you write it to the blockchain it's there forever and in the case of identity issues that kind of has quite a conflict but I think there's an interesting balance between I know who you are and I know this is true and this is true forever versus what happens if I've got it wrong if a bad actor got into the system and increasingly with with the forthcoming gdpr regulation would the right to be forgotten yeah I think we all want to jump in on I'll just cover the first bit and then Elizabeth can cover some of the legal side and Jason some of the technical so one of the reasons you don't have lots of lots of people going around with digital passports is that there is no sensible way to revoke them until now what you don't do is you don't put this on a blockchain you don't put a hash of it on a blockchain either you give it to me and I can take it with me anywhere I can like it I can with this thing do you actually do engage I think one of my favorite myths about the GDP are on the right to be forgotten is that blockchain is inherently at odds with the right to be forgotten because of its immutability and I think too exactly the Andes point I think it depends what you're writing to the ledger and I think that there are a lot of solutions we've seen that make both inherently compatible because they're not exactly that they're not putting credentials on the ledger I think there's also just notions around me to be the immutability in general it depends on the chain it depends on whether you consider you know forking and other technical measures to actually introduce changes to the records so to speak so it's more nuanced approach yeah let me just comment about the nuanced part of it and I will try not to go too

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=300s) deep on this the credential that a person might have that they might show that to someone else the the blockchain doesn't actually hold a reference to the credential in the way that could be identified later what the blockchain allows us to do is prove that I have a credential that that credential is not revoked that it was issued by a certain party and I can selectively disclose attributes in that credential but I'm using the blockchain to allow the other party to verify that the proof that I'm giving is correct but it's not identified it is not a hash there's not a an identifier on the ledger that you could go and point to and correlate across different presentations of that same credential so the issue of revocation in that sense is you would revoke it on you broke the authenticity of that verifiable claim on your side there's there's a bit of and II I think you call this crypto magic or exotic cryptography exotic cryptography we're actually using cryptographic accumulators that allow us to allow an issuer to be able to update the the list of those credentials that are correct and then I as a credential holder can prove and this is we use zero knowledge proof for this I can prove in zero knowledge that I am one of the I hold the credential that is not revoked without you being able to see which one is mine sorry I think it's a little bit like in the real world where if you know the DMV could revoke your driver's license arts very us example but you'd still retain the but the artifacts so to speak and so it same with in the digital world where you might revoke the credential but you'd still have the the artefact controlled in your wallet and so I think there's some analogues we can draw there yeah that the issue would turn us all with revocation is the problem of phoning home so those of you who've maybe tried to rent a car although that this doesn't happen really cuz it's so complicated to do but if you need to prove that you've got a nun revoked driving license the rental car company needs to get in touch with the UK dvla so you confirm your licence is still valid so there needs to be an API

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=450s) there and all the rental car companies need to connect to it and you as a driver need to first of all go to the DVLA and get a code and that code is the token that gives permission for them to access your details around the back it's very very complicated this is why we see a complete lack of scale and actually rental car companies not even bothering to check your license is valid and if you have to replicate that across all the world DMVs and DV LA's and so on it it becomes very complex so you need this ability for the recipient to check if your credentials are valid and it could be the fact you're a doctor and you're not struck off for example could be you're a driver it could be your you may be on a terror watchlist or something I'm but doing it in such a way that the recipient doesn't have to phone up phone home because that's technically very complex at scale and also you need to not put a database somewhere that correlates everybody and breaches privacy so the way that it works on sovereign is as jason says as a one-way accumulator that is created that is put on the ledger that can be used to create zero knowledge proof that you are not revoked that accumulates can't be reverse engineered in any way so that sounds like a really interesting and valuable technical approach it kind of brings me on to another question that I wanted to ask which is if we have a global marketplace of identity solutions how do you see this working in terms of intro interoperability between the various different approaches so I think one starting point that is near to my heart is this notion of trust frameworks I think one of the things that we're very conscious about is building trust within these systems has to be tailored to the environment or the industry or the the jurisdiction so to speak so sort of a one-size-fits-all approach to trust isn't going to work so for example if you're dealing with a heavily regulated industry financial services you might need you have different elements of a choice framework that you'd have to build that would be different from say and digital rights management or an entertainment space and so we're trying to build sort of foundational level of you know the core elements of enabling trust in these ecosystems without losing sight of the unique requirements of specific industries or jurisdictions

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=600s) I'll just give a couple of things on a slightly more technical level so sovereigns are based on open standards and it's open source if everything goes away something stays right so it is vendor agnostic and a couple of the standards that are very important and Jason can maybe cover them in a bit more detail are decentralized identifies or D IDs so it's a standard that came out of work that Evan him I was doing on how to ensure you get interoperability so the the sovereign legit self contains these identifies called DIDS that's an open standard now that's being worked on that w3c level and the way you move their credentials around again the standards not yet mature but there's various working groups at w3c level verifiable claims working group is I think it's from their real name verifiable credentials working group is one of those and sovereign is the protocol that sits on top of the ledger that allows this transfer to take place is based on these verifiable credentials and there's there's a lot of work going on in this space for example one of the things that we feel strongly about is the ability for me to to get a credential or an attestation from an issuer and to be able to present selectively the pieces that I want to and in a privacy respective way and in order to do that some changes have to happen and so one of the things that we'll be doing over the next few weeks is submitting some proposed changes to w3c verifiable credentials working group we're working with folks in hypervisor Indy which is great because large companies with great capabilities have come together in this project that have allowed for the the the contributions are not encumbered from a patent perspective and so people can really kind of bring their best games because the companies that they're with have committed to this effort with hyper ledger and we can now start to take advantage of all of this great research so there's more to come and and I think that over time we're going to see more extensions of what's done with tid speck we'll start to see that happening more and more up the protocol layers so I'm excited about what's going

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=750s) to happen that's really interesting and I wanted to pick up a little bit on something that you mentioned briefly and and which is clearly quarter to your productivity even in the name this notion of self sovereign identity and I wondered if you could talk for a couple minutes about what that means to you and not necessarily from a technical point of view but perhaps even a philosophical point of view what's our selfs of an identity mean to you as an organization oh yeah maybe outside that one and so it's actually really quite simple it's not that there's often a mix of about self sovereign versus self attested right self attested ways where I say I'm Andy Tobin and you you can believe that if you want but self sovereign identities is slightly different because it is basically they're the digital equivalents of what you have now so at the moment I've got a bunch of credentials that I carry around with me and there's this sort of feeling that decentralized identities and new a brand new thing right but it's not so the government's give me this and I can take it and present it anywhere I want and in my wallet I've got a bunch of other credentials that I can take with me and I was driving license so I could present this anywhere I want okay it's the digital equivalent of that I have these things that I own I own okay they're given to me with you know this one particularly by the government but I can carry around and I can present it and not be correlated everywhere I go I can show it to you and nobody else needs to know about that and I can show you a bit of it or I can decide not to show it to you so it's the digital equivalent of doing that and that capabilities not being possible until the rise of decentralized Ledger's essentially essentially because the solution has always been let's put it all in a silo and then the question is well who owns a silo and where does it sit and so on the big advance that Ledger's bring along is the fact that there's no one organization in charge I can be given this ok so can be revoked but I still have the artifact and I could still prove that I'm a British citizen tube and you can check that it's really might say what's revoked that's fine maybe you're not a British citizen but I can still prove by my date of birth to you for it so it's about being in control and looking after these things myself rather than relying on a Facebook to do for me so I would agree with Andy that it's

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=900s) sort of digital version of the offline world but I think there are two additional pieces to that I think Jason can also speak to this but I think the the sort of audit trail and the audit ability of the the public record is key I think the other pieces the the peer-to-peer nature and the lack of an intermediary so I think one of the differences now is if I wanted to provide my bar certificate or law school diploma to some what I'd have to go through either the bar or my law school which is very different from the model that we're looking to build where I could provide that myself without you know going to anyone for permission or control I think it Maps quite well to the gdpr and principles of data Portability and the ability for the individual to as you mentioned to exercise those pieces in a way that we haven't seen before and Jason owned if you want to mention the public ledger as well yeah I went on Sunday I was one of the accelerators at the block changers hackathon let me just say it was incredible as you saw on the screen these people that were there and one of the things that I see a lot when people start to think about blockchain is they tend to one of the early mistakes that people will make with blockchain is they tend to want to put a bunch of records on this ledger when you start dealing with personal information you start dealing with correlation you start to think about okay how can we leverage the power of blockchain without creating this in the immutable record that persists forever and so really understanding is we were building solutions in the space understanding why are we putting it on a ledger that's that's the the key critical piece and we've been very selective I guess learned the hard way through a lot of trials and and doing it wrong selective about what actually goes on the ledger and making sure that you're using it to verify things not to reference things okay thank you I think we've got about five minutes left so I'd like to throw things open to the audience and because we only have four microphones I guess why don't the

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=1050s) question well the big question basis probably guys how long do you think this would take to get it sorted here yes it's a great question actually and the guy who's on first was talking about the network effect so so the sovereign ledger is there it's live it's in what's called a provisional status now there's 29 stewards who are the organizations who run it and projects have already started so we're running probably about 15 proof-of-concept projects now and that's just having him there's other people doing all sorts of things with sovereign at the moment particularly in Canada in the Nordics in Holland as well and what we're seeing is use cases where you have an ecosystem which is relatively closed so it could be a company employee identity or employees that are qualified in a certain way like they've able to trade financial instruments they need to prove that and other ecosystems like proving you're a doctor is a great one we have in the UK now which has some hospitals some universities who do medical degrees and doctors and other qualifying organisations and they're gonna create their own ecosystems which will then start start to overlap and then we're seeing much larger ecosystems like that the credit unions in the US are all getting together to create something called Cu ID credit union ID where they're going to all give all of their customers self sovereign identity which they're going to primarily use to log back into the credit union and identify themselves their own credit union obviously every credit union member will have vouched name address date of birth from their credit union that they can you use anywhere so there will be a network effect early days at the moment but it's moving ludicrously quickly though so I think some of it is adoption network effects I think some of it is what Vinay mentioned earlier this morning about you know you can't move faster than the speed of regulation and I think we still have a lot of laws and regulations that are antithetical to this model of data ownership and and the exercise of SSI so I think for example there are you know regulations on record that still require username and password so there are some that we're gonna have to completely overhaul and sort of have a better smarter regulation before any of us can actually be adopted ms so I'm not an attorney so I'm gonna say something that Elizabeth will probably correct me but regulation I think is

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=1200s) they strive not to regulate or strive not to be overly prescriptive but they can't really help it because they have to identify they have to put things in terms of what they understand in the world today self sovereign identity changes a paradigm pretty fundamentally from what's being done in the digital world today that paradigm shift is going to take some time to work through there luckily are enough use cases that are would benefit greatly from this that don't need to go through the the you know don't need to wait for regulatory change but I don't know is that a fair way to say it or would you correct I think it's a fair way to say it I think for sort of broad adoption they're still gonna need to sync with regulation and I think you know I think it's hard for the regulators to to keep up but as you say they're sort of their considerations different as well and I think this is where the sort of the distinction between things like insurance indemnity is really interesting and someone mentioned earlier that a lot of people will conflate sort of commercial risk with the regulatory risk and I think it's important to keep those distinct because one can move faster than the other and so one thing you see is serving this this ability or the desire to have reusable k-y seen in the ico space people lose sight of the fact that you can shift the commercial risk but you can we shift the regulatory risk and then you have something like strict liability offenses you know for a fact violation it's there's very little you can do if you outsource those functions so I think things are on the government's side moving quicker than I would have expected actually in a number of areas so we've we've got a couple of DMVs in the u.s. we're working with we're working with state of Illinois on birth certificates giving people birth certificates and in this way there's work with various government organizations in in Holland and in Finland at the moment as well so it's going it's going surprisingly quickly for compared to where I thought it would do on the government side so just go back to the global perspective at the beginning we had a sort of outline of three broad approaches to identity across different jurisdictions EU u.s. and India China being given its paradigms I wonder how you see your approach to identity working with each of those and does any of them present particular challenges it's a really good question about trust frameworks isn't it well I think it's trust frameworks I think so I guess the three where the the US model of sort of business as usual Wild West the EU model of somewhere

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkqYPy4-M_M&t=1350s) front moving from top down to more of a don't remember the exact term that was used flipping the paradigm and then sort of the you know the APAC model of top-down state controls I think we're pretty squarely in the middle this is my third week at Evernham but I from having worked in lots of jurisdictions practiced in both the US and the EU and the Middle East I think it's definitely somewhere in the middle these guys can speak more to that yeah I think the important thing to understand here is that the sovereign is it's an sort of infrastructural layer if you like a bit like the internet it's it's not owned by any one organization and anyone can improve it and use it and it allows you to do some things that you can never do before using my term is exotic crypto because I'm not a cryptographer but it allows you to do things like selective disclosure zero knowledge proof peer-to-peer transfer of information that can be validated and checked as not revoked without having to speak to anyone else those are things that you could never really do before so how that's then used it's a bit like like the internet okay you could look at the internet and say well how does it vary in different countries or you know what's the websites can you do here and can you do there and so on but the internet itself is an infrastructure that allows you to build websites and exchange information in certain ways sovereign's a bit like that it's like an internet for identities it's probably the best way to think of it and it allows you to take advantage of some of the most advanced crypto in the world to do some some things that you couldn't actually action before that vastly improve the way identity works so you can layer on top of that a trust framework for Eid us further EU for example you could layer on top of that something for specific to the US you can layer on top anything you want just in the same way you can build any sort of websites you want some it's off the internet okay I'm afraid that's all we have time for at the moment and please thank [Music] [Applause]

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End of [620] Evernym - Identity - Internet of Agreements. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [737](https://guptaoption.com/texts/737.md) Vinay Gupta on Smart Contracts and Mattereum ICO -... (2018); the most closely related, [567](https://guptaoption.com/texts/567.md) The Fourth Mattereum Physical Asset NFT Meetup 8th Feb 2023 (2023); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.