Creating Identity On Dash Platform

Per Article 8 of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, personal identity is a fundamental right. At its core, identity is defined as “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.”  Today, we will see how decentralized identity, as provided by Dash Platform, helps you overcome the weaknesses of traditional official identity.

The problems with traditional identity

Your official identity plays a crucial role in establishing who you are and is required for you to function in any capacity as a citizen. Your government identity consists of multiple data points like – Name, Date of Birth, Nationality, Identifier, etc. You must use your government identity to obtain essential services such as bank accounts, healthcare, social benefits, pension, etc.

However, there are three major issues with centralized identity:

• Issuance
• Mismanagement
• Theft

Issuance

As per the World Bank, over a billion people worldwide don’t have any claims to their identity. After all, these identities are issued by a centralized body. Some people simply don’t have the means to get their identities issued.

Mismanagement
Of course, this is the perennial problem with centralized storage. When you trust a third party to store your private data, you trust them to manage it properly. More often than not, this trust could be misplaced.

Theft
Finally, when you use a centralized server to store all your data, you create an easy target for hackers. The potential ramifications and identity theft could have devastating consequences. For example, Equifax, one of the top credit-reporting companies, was breached in 2017. It is estimated that half the US population lost their Social Security Numbers during the breach.

The consequences here are pretty devastating. Identity theft and fraud have been on the rise. As per the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the amount of identity theft and related fraud rose significantly in the US in 2021. Here are some stats to ponder:

• Fraud complaints have gone up by 19% to more than 5.8 million.
• Total financial losses crossed $6 billion.
• The number of consumer complaints rose by 3.3% to just over 1.43 million.

So, what’s the solution here? Maybe, practicing self-sovereign identity is the way forward?

What is Self-Sovereign Identity?

Self-sovereignty, in general, means you have the moral right to fully control your body and life. Self-sovereign identity is a digital identity where individuals have complete control over their data. Previously, in a web2 ecosystem, this was nearly impossible.

However, things have changed with the advent of web3 and the incorporation of blockchain technology. As a result, it is now possible to deploy decentralized identity.

Before going any further, let’s see how the blockchain helps mitigate the two biggest problems with digital identity:

• Easily replicable
• Not tamper resistant

#1 Fixing replicability

One of the main things Satoshi Nakamoto solved with Bitcoin and blockchain technology is “double spending.” Double spending was a problem in previous iterations of digital currencies, wherein it was possible to spend the same coin in more than one transaction simultaneously.

So, how do cryptocurrencies like DASH fix this issue?

• Each transaction is verified by specialized nodes like the miners and masternodes to validate these transactions in exchange for a fee.
• Since every single coin is accounted for in the ledger, it is impossible to double spend it.

Now, expand the same concept to identity. You shouldn’t be able to “double spend” your identity either. After all, no two people can have the same identity, correct?

With blockchain-based identities, we can be confident that our identity can’t be stolen/duplicated because the associated data is cryptographically protected and owned by us, not by a third party.

#2 Tamper resistance

The second problem is the tamperability of digital identity. With digital identity, we have the following risks:

• A malicious party could bribe the intermediary storing your data.
• The system could be hacked.

Blockchain mitigates these issues by being an immutable source of truth. Cryptographic hash functions secure all the data stored within the blocks. As such, it is impossible to tamper with data once it has entered the chain. The only exception is if someone controls>51% of the network hashrate and rewrites the chain’s history by forking the protocol. Dash specifically mitigates this attack scenario, as well. With ChainLocks, even controlling 51% of the network hashrate can’t rewrite the chain history.

Dash Platform and Digital Identity

Dash Platform is a web3 technology stack that allows you to build dApps on the Dash network. Decentralized identity is an integral component of the Dash Platform. Users can use their identities to interact with and identify each other instead of depending on public key hashes.

So, how does one create an identity on Dash Platform? Let’s go through the steps:

• Users must pay the network to store public keys on the platform chain.
• If a new user doesn’t have Dash funds, they can still create one, provided they get an invitation from existing Platform users.
• Once an identity is created, it will have a corresponding balance of credits. These credits are used to pay for various operations on the Dash Platform. To get these credits, you must lock up a certain amount of DASH on the base layer-1 Dash blockchain.
• You may top up your credit balance anytime you want via top-up.

Learn more about the Dash Platform and identity management.