Zilliqa Chain For Identity Apps
14 October 2020, Singapore — In this post, I describe why and how we use the Zilliqa blockchain for issuance of verifiable digital credentials.
A successful blockchain must build a community which creates and runs apps on its chain. Failure to achieve either a critical mass of apps or a sufficient number of users for those apps will lead to a lack of support from miners and a death spiral for the community as a whole. The market cap of a chain’s native token is an indicator of success in establishing the use case of the blockchain. But no amount of airdrops and tokenomic stimulus can make up for a lack of useful apps — so blockchains are keen to attract app developers to come on board.
For app developers, picking a chain is similar to choosing a development language or framework. A developer is looking for good documentation, ease-of-implementation, robust security and technical support. But an app developer also wants a chain with sustainability and a promise of future growth. Every transaction made by the app is anchored to that blockchain, so if the chain itself languishes or dies, the users of the app will suffer loss of data and functionality. This is a huge issue for identity apps.
Our company NextID is building an infrastructure for decentralised identity management, initially consisting of an app to issue verifiable digital credentials. Version 1.0 of our certificate issuance app known as NextCert™ was launched on Ethereum in late 2019.
We chose Ethereum for a number of reasons, but foremost because: (a) it provided support for smart contracts, (b) it was already in use for the Singapore government’s OpenCerts project — which we relied on for a jump start, and (c) because Ethereum had already achieved a critical mass of apps, so Ethereum developers were readily available in the market. High transaction throughput and low cost were not issues for NextCert since certificate issuance can be done in batch and it’s a relatively infrequent activity.
Since launch, we have been enhancing the modularity of NextCert in important ways. We’ve introduced support for JSON schemas other than OpenCerts, added support for HTML/CSS layouts and we started to look at blockchain independence. Our thinking was that we should be in a position to say to our users that NextCert is blockchain-agnostic.
NextCert can issue certificates for any business need, with any visual layout and using a choice of blockchains.
Zilliqa is a well-known Singapore-based startup with its own chain. We were familiar with the team through our collaboration on the successful Social Pay initiative for Covid Heroes.
Although the Zilliqa chain is often promoted for its sharding and high transaction throughput, this was not a crucial factor for us. We were keen to use Zilliqa because it supports smart contracts with a language Scilla that is very much like Solidity. And there are fast growing developer and user communities coalescing around Zilliqa. We expected that if we forged a relationship with Zilliqa, we could stand out as their identity services provider and benefit from the momentum they have established.
On 1 September 2020, we announced our alliance partnership with Zilliqa and began development of a new module in NextCert that would support issuing credentials anchored to the Zilliqa chain. It took us very little time to complete this work. The first batch of certificates anchored to the Zilliqa chain was issued on 24 September, to recognise a group of developers who participated in a workshop which is part of Zil Hive, the educational and startup accelerator arm of Zilliqa.
Our next step will be to implement a verification utility to demonstrate to recipients and relying parties that their Zilliqa-based certificates were issued properly, are tamper-proof and have not been revoked. This will take some time because we are striving to ensure that verification can support different types of certificates. For now, we have provided a knowledge base article that explains how to manually verify these certificates.
We are very proud of the alliance between NextID and Zilliqa and are really excited by the progress they are making to establish a sustainable ecosystem. We are actively working together to extend the reach of certificate verification technology into new business use cases such as health certificates and proof of ownership.
Bill Claxton — Founder and CEO of NextID Pte Ltd
