12K/ Credential Marketplaces

Credential Marketplaces

Wednesday 12K

Convener: Martin Riedel, Stepan Gershuni

Notes-taker(s): 

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

VC Marketplace

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps: 

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WOXgHhgAwG0Im45pZkTAhsadpd8xbck0xjlnsuVGGhI/edit?ts=60803bc8

The goal of this session is to present the idea and get community feedback regarding this.

Credential Marketplace is quite high up the SSI stack but we want to start this discussion.

1. What is Credential Marketplace?

   1. We have a Trust Triangle of Issuer-Holder-Verifier. This does not need any centralized entity except schema hosting.

   2. However, we want to solve the problem of discovery of Issuers and Verifiers.

   3. Example: I’m traveling to a new country. I need to get what healthcare VCs are needed to go there, in an automated way.

   4. How can we solve this without relaying on a centralized registry of Verifier requirements and Issuer capabilities?

2. How it works

   1. In order to discover issuers / vc types, there should be a registration step where issuers/verifiers actively OR passively provide metadata about their capabilities.

      1. Credential Data — can contain some filters or constraints on the data from within the VC. E.g. As a Verifier, I only accept passport VC from only certain governments: only German nationals.

      2. VC Metadata

      3. Issuer Metadata

      4. Reputation mechanism for credential issuers

   2. Marketplace can also implement value transfer: paying for issuance by the verifier, for example. Even if they are part of different SSI ecosystems. This is optional but can help incentivize different participants.

3. Question: does marketplace need to know Verifier related information?

   1. For example, Where can I use the VC I have to get a service?

   2. Another example: What VCs do I need to get a certain service?

   3. Does the marketplace need to coordinate both sides to calculate the rep score?

4. The motivation behind desiging VC Marketplace is to provide seamless experience for the Holder, who just want to get a service and they don’t want to struggle with trying to understand what VCs are needed and where that VC can be issued.

5. Approach for the WG is 3-fold:

   1. Come up with business use cases

   2. Standardized functional requirements

   3. Feed these requirements to existing working groups

6. Governance System

   1. VC Marketplace doesn’t focus on this; it probably is independent of the marketplace.

   2. There can be multiple marketplaces: decentralized and centralized marketplace with alternative governance models.

   3. More marketplace with different governance models will create a competition and evolutionary path to develop different working governance systems.

7. [Scott Perry] For an Issuer there’s value in getting an authority VC that certifies them as a valid issuer.