By Palashendu Bhattacharya, Vice-President – Growth & Alliance at Dhiway
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has emerged as a game changer when designing for nation-scale services. With the availability of the Confidex network from ONDC, a blockchain-based trust layer providing the foundational infrastructure is now an actual implementation of the objectives of the National Blockchain Strategy. The growth of a digital trust ecosystem around such DPI needs to be driven by use cases.
Building and nurturing a digital trust ecosystem requires overcoming the “cold start problem” and enabling good governance that provides long-term stakeholder incentives. These incentives need not always be about money—the ability to design for value exchange throughout the workflow also creates enough drivers for adoption. Getting all this done requires a good selection of use cases that address high trust deficit issues, and the digital transformation can demonstrate maximum impact.
Many citizen-facing services are digital, and each has single window portals through which these services can be accessed, requests raised and documents received. This approach ends up creating silos of data, many kinds of digital identifiers and records and the inability to seamlessly exchange data among various requesting parties. The result is that supplementary information is added at each hop, attestation is required, and verification by any relying party takes time, making the process digital but cumbersome. The availability of digital document stores such as Digilocker has addressed the issue of having one location to store documents. Still, more can be done to improve the experience for the holder of a record.
This is where blockchain-anchored digital records in the form of Verifiable Credentials (VCs) come in. VCs shift the present model of the publisher (issuer) centric exchange of records to one where the holder or recipient better manages their records. They can be offered notice/consent paths to share information – either all of it or selectively. VCs also enable near-instantaneous verification by relying parties, thus reducing the time needed to complete a transaction flow. VCs are secure and tamper-resistant and help establish the provenance and authenticity of the record state. This means that with the correct set of drivers – regulatory and economic – the entire hybrid mode of record creation can be transitioned into a VC-based approach.
The generation and issuance of VCs also necessitate the creation of data repositories called trust registries. These authentic sources of information can provide the relying party with the contextual information necessary to accept the VC presented. An example of such a registry could be one of health service providers registered to offer various forms of elderly care. While an individual interested in a new opportunity in this domain can present their learning and skill credentials to an employer, the employer, in turn, can verify the VCs along with the information from the trust registry to determine if the claimed skills are accurate, whether the organization issuing the credential has been accredited to a body and whether the credentials are active.
A representative flow like the one above addresses the trust deficit in the system and replaces guesswork or gut feeling with actual data. Many more use cases can be pattered with the same approach. The critical aspect is to ensure that the holder has full governance of their data and that the data flows follow the state of the art in privacy and data security practices. The availability of DPIs like Confidex provides the necessary sandbox for designers of new services to bring about this pivot without any need to set up and run their blockchain infrastructure. As IT architects adopt this new approach and deploy new services, foundational infrastructure such as Confidex enables a better exchange of information using reusable digital identifiers.
VCs open up the potential for a wide range of use cases. For example, more commonly understood objects such as warranty cards can be represented as VCs, reducing the friction a service provider has in requesting, verifying and delivering against the assurance of the warranty. Items such as purchase receipts can also be represented as VCs, which help the holder/buyer share it later with relying parties that require the information contained. VCs anchored on blockchain infrastructure as DPI open up the technology value chain, the business value chain, and the ecosystem value chain. Together, these allow the adopters to understand the return on investment in this digital transformation and seek to receive positive benefits.