Our Journey
It all started in Q1 2017 with Reservar, An Aadhaar/UPI (India’s National Identity) based savings and investment application which seamlessly integrates into the online banking ecosystem. Reservar needed the interfacing with banks to enable deliver the full potential of its functionality and application.
Though Aadhaar-based KYC was a great enabler for our purpose, but it still did not help fully leverage some key services Reservar was aiming to deliver. This was the instance where we felt the need for having an identity system that is self-sovereign irrefutable and seamless in its interfacing and the functionality.
Further Q2 2017 saw multiple hacks and attacks on centralized ID management systems (India's Aadhaar, Yahoo!, Equifax etc.) and complexity of KYC and other functions these identities offer. So we started looking for an alternative, that would be more secure and privacy-preserving solutions, that could encapsulate everything we were looking from an Identity framework.
The work by Belenkiy, Camenisch et al. on "Randomizable Proofs and Delegable Anonymous Credentials" fit the problem and the future solution we had envisioned.
In Q3 2017 we first designed a databases based on Camenisch work, with some restrictions, e.g., no possibility of revocation, centralized solution.
Subsequently in Q4 2017 we transitioned this onto Distributed Ledger based solution using the concepts from IBM IdeMix and the cryptographic techniques designed by Camenisch. This lead to the birth of OneID, A self-sovereign digital identity framework that Trusted. Sovereign. Irrefutable.