Northern Block Joins the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC)
Northern Block to contribute towards making self-sovereign identity successful in Canada
Toronto, February 10, 2020
Today, we’re excited to announce joining the Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC), a not-for-profit with a mission to secure Canada’s full and beneficial global digital economy participation by delivering a digital identity and authentication interoperability framework.
Northern Block (NB) has ongoing projects that use digital identities. The company’s work has evolved to what we are actively building today, a real-life application that implements self-sovereign identity (SSI), the first real commercialized application which is going to production in May of this year. The DIACC’s recognition that putting control of identity data into Canadian hands requires a paradigm shift is very much aligned with our vision and our pioneering work in SSI.
“Canadians should know what data exists about their identities. Citizens, Governments and businesses need tools to manage the sharing of that identity data. We’re glad to have Northern Block join our organization, joining the other organizations pioneering trusted digital identities,” — Joni Brennan, President, DIACC.
Since 2012, the DIACC has brought together some of the top thought leaders and has helped develop and recommend harmonizing policies, standards, and regulatory changes with international benchmarks that further the strategic direction of digital ID. As a contributing member of the DIACC, NB looks forward to working with these leaders to keep advancing Canada’s position as a long-time leader in digital identities.
“We gained our initial experience in 2018 by developing a digital identity project for a Canadian Provincial Government. Since then we’ve been convinced that trusted digital identities are a societal game changer. Achieving adoption of trusted digital identities requires a paradigm switch, which requires a strong community of advocates. The DIACC has done an exemplary job at assembling the right people for the right conversations. We’re lucky to be part of this group ,” — Mathieu Glaude, CEO, Northern Block.
In today’s world, none of us actually owns a digital identity. We simply rent identities from each of the websites or apps we use, resulting in an inefficient, fraud-riddled, privacy-invading mess. Additionally, each organization we interact with must store our personal information in massive databases, resulting in gold mines to hackers. A siloed approach to identity may have worked in the early days of the Internet, but with practically every business and billions of people now online, problems such as fraud are growing rapidly. The identity problem already represents a severe impact to Canada, costing $48–97 Billion annually (3–6% of GDP). Identity for the digital economy is broken and causing more damage — the costs of these problems will soon balloon as billions more identities come online with the Internet of Things.
NB has been building commercial grade enterprise software solutions that use blockchain for the past three years. With its client base of innovation leading companies looking to NB for solutions, NB continually looks for the latest innovations that are standards based to help its clients.
Although many solutions use a blockchain to decentralize certain features, these solutions cannot be completely decentralized without a vital component, decentralized identity management. For example, to participate in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Ethereum, all a person needs is a blockchain address and a wallet.
For enterprises, due to regulatory compliance, they typically require certain criteria from customers if they wish to use their services. This is a big reason for which they’ve mostly turned to permissioned blockchain technology, rather than using public networks. In these permissioned networks, administrators control the users and user onboarding is done through a centralized process. Although the systems can achieve some levels of decentralization, user management is controlled by a central authority, while personal information remains in siloed custody by the network owner.
Since it’s too early to gage what blockchains will gain the most network effect as adoption grows, there needs be a flexible identity solution that works for any type of blockchain.
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is the solution.
In the past year, NB has contributed towards the advancement of self-sovereign identity, implementing it into our products. Just this past December, NB joined forces with SSI industry-leader Evernym, announcing a partnership to commercialize more solutions together. We have great, innovative projects in development that utilize SSI.
As data breaches continue to occur almost daily, solving the identity silo problem begins with a digital identity that you literally own, not just control — a “self-sovereign” identity.
As one of the few organizations pioneering SSI, NB is eager to share knowledge with a wider community and facilitate conversations that can help create more effective SSI solutions.
Join us on February 11th at our downtown Toronto office, as we host the inaugural #SSIToronto meetup event, to educate the community about the many benefits of self-sovereign identity and how to implement the technology.
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About the DIACC — The Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada is a non-for-profit coalition of public and private sector leaders created as a result of the Federal Canadian government’s Electronic Payments System Task Force. Visit DIACC.ca for more information.
About Northern Block, Inc. — NB is a blockchain consulting and venture creation firm. We fuel the creation of disruptive business models and user-centric applications that achieve trust through open, transparent and fair systems. To learn more, visit https://northernblock.io.
