The following is an update from the Ethereum Foundation Fellow Chuy Cepeda.
Our identity has immense power. In an age where people take great pride in using multiple aliases or personas, we often think about how to identify ourselves. I identify as a native of Monterrey, Mexico, a Latin American, a son, a brother, a father, a husband, an engineer, a PhD, an entrepreneur, a dog lover, a hitchhiker, and a believer that democracies suffer.
Looking back at a time when I began to meet people from different countries and better understand their access to public services, I remember becoming aware of how distant this reality was for Mexicans. I realized that as my hometown grew, many decisions made by the government were unplanned or colluded. I learned that my home country, Mexico Corruption Perception Index. I realized that these problems are not limited to me and my home country, but affect people everywhere.
I now feel deep empathy for anyone who cannot turn to government for better transportation, good education, and health services. All the while, I see technology having increasingly significant impacts in the daily lives of people all around Latin America and beyond. Think about this for a minute: as people become more digital and expect personalized, real-time services, public institutions are unable to meet these expectations.
Citizens face inefficiencies, a lack of transparency and red tape, and a terrible experience when it comes to interacting with their governments. This is a global crisis of institutional agility and trust that is eroding opportunities to thrive, and that is why democracy as an ideal is suffering.
So I decided to incorporate a new part of my identity: I co-founded OS City to improve the landscape of government services in the modern world, primarily through Bringing public institutions into the web3 paradigm. In other words, using blockchains to digitize government services and give citizens their decentralized digital identity.
The OS City team
Improve bureaucracy
From birth certificates to driver’s licenses and academic records, when we are asked to identify who we are as citizens, it involves sharing our personal information or credentials, usually notarized by the government of the place whose we come. Depending on where this is located, these records could be located in a fancy networked database (as is the case for Estonian citizens), but more likely What we need when we need an “official identity” actually resides in the specialized passport printers of a stuffy government building, or spread across the filing cabinets of various branches of the State Bank, or maybe it’s nowhere!
When we “use” these representations of our identity, what we are really doing is getting separate bureaucratic systems to interoperate. If the visa holds a customs office in Country A fit passport pages Country Bit’s “good enough” for us in most cases. But when that basic interoperability has more stringent requirements, or when it breaks down, that’s when we get into trouble. Office A requires an original stamped document from Office Bwhich is closed after 3 p.m., and requires a notarized letter of Department Cwho is in another part of town and needs approval first from Office A…Some of us are all too familiar with being trapped in this kind of paperwork prison. This is where collusion and corruption are born, where we begin the snowball effect that ends up in a terrible response to social distress, economic growth and climate change.
The fundamental challenge is that everyone must have an identitybut it is simply not true that everyone has a interoperable representation of identity. This is where I believe we can do better. It won’t be easy, and it certainly won’t happen all at once, but if we start in the right direction, we might find ourselves in a place where we want to be. Part of our work to address these issues led us to develop an app-specific wallet called Soberana, which is meant to be used to hold and manage digital identities.
Blockchains are by design built from interoperable, standardized components that can combine and integrate in all kinds of ways. Any blockchain built to be Ethereum or EVM compatible will follow the same set of standards. So in Soberana is our starting point. Unfortunately, we work in a design space that must allow for some degree of centralization, i.e. a government authority must approve a record or identity.
Nevertheless, we start with a small core of identity which is still compatible with The open, permissionless systems of the Web3 world. From this compatibility facilitates the improvement and construction of more complex systems around time – a network economy of digital services, both centralized and decentralized. The goal here is maximum compatibility For a digital identity: Whether you use it for a centralized government notary, a proprietary banking transaction, or a public NFT ledger, your ID should move between these systems seamlessly and securely.
As we add more and more features, we will be able to verify, carry and share this identity across a whole suite of government services that all connect to each other. From weddings to mortgages, all documents that require identity could be diverted and made painless by using the right infrastructure. By starting small and with this first piece of the puzzle, we open a path to broader institutional reform, using technology wisely to increase the legitimacy of the public sector as a whole.
Last year, we focused on rolling out an official citizen digital identity through an online government-run portal, where citizens obtain a wallet that serves as their digital identity and digital document document. Citizens can carry and use official documents in their digital wallets, as well as share and renew these documents.
Currently, these documents are limited to business permits, building permits, city inspector credentials, taxpayer statements, among others; But we are working to expand and integrate as many documents as possible to be compatible with local governments in Mexico and Argentina.
The long view
I now understand that bureaucracies are just inertial inefficiencies of governments that have lost the excitement of innovation. This is why I believe blockchains have enormous potential to lead us into a new era of openness and collaboration that helps increase the legitimacy of the public sector. With the help and support of public sector leaders, we can create radical change in the public sector, and even make it a thriving area for business, driving our nations’ digital, economic and social transitions.
My short-term vision is to be able to provide citizens with the ability to own their official records, eliminate duplicate efforts in every government process, make government transactions traceable and transparent, and foster the government’s first standard for credentials verifiable on the blockchain. We hope this will show the international public sector that interoperability can succeed when we put citizens at the center, when innovation drives regulation and not the other way around.
In the long term, I hope we can all work together to rethink governance and identity. We start by rethinking and reinventing how governments, individuals and businesses interact with each other; In a decentralized digital world, interactions are not state- or market-centered, but community and citizen-centered. This involves a new ecosystem vision where government, startups, academia and civil organizations jointly explore public problems, seek (and transfer) appropriate solutions and feed off their learnings. It is not the state of hiring suppliers, but the state interacts with other actors to solve society’s most pressing problems. I believe a new digital identity is a step that will enable governments, citizens and communities to make the most of blockchain technology, driving prosperity through a network of citizen-centric digital services.
To learn more about the Ethereum Foundation Scholarship Program, Read this blog post.
