Nikolas Sargeant
Decentralized blockchain network Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) announced on Tuesday, June 18th, that it has introduced Verified Credentials (VCs), a walletless solution that enables efficient and trustworthy sharing of personal data while maintaining privacy and control.
In a press release shared with Cryptowisser, ICP said the new feature was unveiled at the Digital Identity unConference Europe (DICE) 2024 in Zurich, Switzerland. Verified Credentials has become the first application designed to prevent the manipulation of public discourse on social media by eliminating the problem of bots and fake accounts.
ICP added that its VCs are a walletless infrastructure that issues, shares, and consumes credentials in a privacy-preserving fashion. VCs are built on top of the Internet Identity (II), a decentralized identity solution running end-to-end on the Internet Computer blockchain.
The team explained that verifiable credentials are digital representations of data (qualifications, achievements, or attributes) that are cryptographically secured and portable. The VC is tied to a user through a digital identity provider like Internet Identity.
While commenting on this latest development, Jan Camenisch, CTO of the DFINITY Foundation said,
“The new Verifiable Credentials feature of Internet Identity addresses long-standing problems for online privacy-preserving authentication: all a user needs is a computing device that has a passkey (all recent ones do) and a browser. Apart from dApps on the Internet Computer, traditional systems can also plug in with Internet Identity and allow users to authenticate with Verifiable Credentials, e.g., proving that they are a real person, that they did KYC, or that they are over 18.”
In the past, users authenticating with Internet Identity to a dApp were assigned a unique and pseudonymous identifier for each dApp without any additional attributes such as name, age, or residency. However, the Verified Credentials framework allows users to assign identity attributes to their Internet Identity.
Users can manage and reuse the credentials without dApps tying it back to them. With VC, users are in control of who they share their credentials with and how much information they want to divulge.
When end-users authenticate to an application, Internet Identity creates their unique identifier for that service. This way, different applications cannot track users as they explore the web.
Furthermore, the Verified Credentials framework solves the problem of dApp interoperability in a privacy-preserving fashion. Internet Identity serves as the trusted intermediary between a Relying Party and an Issuer.
OpenChat Launches the Proof of Unique Humanity (PoUH)
DFINITY revealed that Proof of Unique Humanity (PoUH) is one of the first applications of Verified Credentials in the ICP ecosystem. PoUH is implemented by the decentralized on-chain messaging app OpenChat and was developed by Decide AI.
The identity issuer links a credential to biometric data such as facial, finger, or palm print recognition, requiring users to prove that they are human and possess only one account on a platform.
With Proof of Unique Humanity (PoUH), it becomes easier to combat the activity of bots and foster more virtuous discourse on social media. Proof of Unique Humanity (PoUH) prevents people from piloting multiple online accounts by linking a credential to biometric data. Furthermore, it eliminates the risk of a user creating hundreds of social media accounts, or taking advantage of token farming or airdrops by using more than one account.
The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) is a decentralized cloud 3.0 protocol that allows developers to build and run services and enterprise systems directly on a public blockchain network with unprecedented scalability. Services running on top of ICP are tamper-proof and can natively interact with the outside world in a trustless manner, both with traditional Web 2.0 services and with other blockchains.
