We believe that a well-implemented identification program is critical to preventing a myriad of human rights abuses, but also necessary for the financial inclusion and insertion of over a billion people into the world economy.
The features of core identification principles are not only naturally conducive to the financial world, but dovetail very well with a universal banking solution emphasizing the concept of Fair Access. By virtue of being a financial vehicle, the industry itself would provide solutions to self-sovereignty, decentralization, security, accessibility, and validity, but it would be fundamentally practical in its realization.
The notion of Fair Access is simple, but it is necessary for a global system providing proof of identity, because it should be agnostic about the ‘secondary’ aspects of any given person. A system providing access to identity should do so on the basis of a person being a human being – entitled to a proof of ID – and not discriminate based on gender, religion, race, geography, or any other contingent or conditional aspect of their existence. As such, a financial system providing truly universal access to an ID program would need to follow these notions of Fair Access. While such a system could account for secondary considerations (i.e. monitoring or reporting of illegal activity), the fundamental concept of access to the system must still remain absolute and non-discriminatory.
To ensure its validity across the world in our current global economy, this financial inclusion approach should also be based on the foundational unit in use: US Dollars.
A possible approach to this financial solution could be structured as a complex that meets three necessary conditions: (1) a system of documenting, verifying, and protecting the identities of enrolled individuals in a decentralized way; (2) a system that allows for the financial participation of these enrolled individuals across a ledger system that securely maintains balances and facilitates transactions; and (3) provide a way for the accounts and transactions to be underwritten, practically speaking, by a token directly representing the US Dollar.
This structure could be realized in an ecosystem with the following core components:
- Universal Namespace (UNS): A system maintaining a matrix of unique names for each identity in the ecosystem – while persons may have multiple names representing different sovereign identities, no two persons may have the same name.
- Verifiable Credentials (VC): These are simply demonstrably provable identifiers associated with any name or ID on the Universal Namespace, so they can be properly authenticated and validated.
- Universal Ledger (UL): A ledger system to record the balances held by identities on a permissioned blockchain, where only persons/identities that are compliantly named and credentials may hold balances.
- US Bank Consortium (USBC): A collection of US regulated community banks and credit unions that issue a federally insured deposit token to be recorded on the Universal Ledger for named and verified users (i.e. from the Universal Namespace). Each of these deposit tokens would always be in US Dollars, and each issue dollar would be an obligation spread across all members of the USBC.
- Card Issuance: Based on the ecosystem, verified users would also be issued virtual and physical cards tied to their UL account and USBC tokens, providing a verified and credentialed identity that could be used in a myriad of cases (i.e. payment, identification, etc.).
Such a solution is one possible avenue to securing access to proof of identity for everyone, but it is not the only one. However, by virtue of being a financial solution, it does cover the core identification principles needed to ensure that the system is working for everyone.