Why Universal Identity?

The idea of self-sovereign identity has been getting a lot of traction in the past few years, and a good number of projects have claimed to take on its mantle. So what makes Universal Identity unique and worth pursuing? In short, Universal Identity has an inherent focus on human usability of its solutions, which results in a unique mix of goals, ideas, and approaches to tackling the self-sovereign identity problem.

Universal Identity starts with the idea that the internet should have a native identity layer, that similar to the web, should be a usable public good. It then focuses on the people and organizations that the technology is setting out to serve, defines the solution from their point of view, and works its way back through the various business and technology implications.

This is inherently different from the approach of starting with a set of promising technologies, and then working through design and business implications.

Despite this difference, these two approaches do not necessarily need to compete and negate each other. Especially when it comes to advancing public good causes and goals, the two approaches can be complementary, help challenge each other, and potentially unify at some point in the future, assuming their technical differences can genuinely be bridged.

DIF

Digital Identity Foundation (DIF), with partnership of the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), and the set of Decentralized Identity (DID) standards they champion, represent the most notable effort in self-sovereign identity to date, one that has similar goals to Universal Identity. Their fundamental difference of approach however comes from DIF’s inherent bias for technology, as they actively work to enable a decentralized identity ecosystem of people, organizations and devices.

DIF has a large number of advantages in pursuing this mission however, including: a sustainable and sizable budget, brand-name recognition, support of powerful tech players, consensus-based decision making, experienced members, and intellectual horsepower, just to name a few. But some of these same attributes, in addition to an inherent technology bias, also create a potential for it to develop a myopic focus on technology at the expense of usability and universality.