Microsoft has announced that it is collaborating with Blockstack Labs , ConsenSys and developers across the globe on an open source, self-sovereign, blockchain-based identity system that allows people, products, apps and services to interoperate across blockchains, cloud providers and organizations.
The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals include giving everyone a legal identity by 2030. As a first step, the U.N. wants to develop scalable identity systems by 2020. The inaugural " ID2020 Summit ‒ Harnessing Digital Identity for the Global Community," held at the United Nations headquarters in New York on May 20, brought together policymakers and technology companies to develop an action plan.
“While we don’t profess to have solutions to these overwhelming problems today, we can start where the open source community is best: collaboration,” said Yorke Rhodes III , blockchain business strategist at Microsoft. “To progress toward these goals, we have been working with partners to address identity using the self-owned or self-sovereign qualities of blockchain technology.”
The Microsoft strategist said that the Redmond, Washington, giant is working with Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys to leverage their current Bitcoin and Ethereum-based identity solutions, Blockstack and uPort . Through this open source collaboration, Microsoft and its partners intend to produce a cross-chain identity solution that can be extended to any future blockchains or new kinds of decentralized, distributed systems. In the coming weeks an open-source framework for developers will be made available on Azure.
Blockstack ‒ an open source blockchain application stack ‒ permits building decentralized, serverless apps by plugging into Blockstack’s services for identity, naming, storage and authentication.
According to the Blockstack team , Blockstack is the largest, most popular blockchain identity system, with 50,000 registered identities that come with profiles and globally unique names. Identities can be registered for people, companies, websites, software packages and more. Profiles can contain both […]
