coindesk.com
Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina with a population of 2.89 million as of the latest census in 2010, has begun work on a self-sovereign digital identity protocol with the aim of giving citizens control over their personal data.
The city on Tuesday published a whitepaper with the proposal, which will be operational between the last quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of next year, Diego Fernández, secretary of innovation and digital transformation of Buenos Aires, told CoinDesk.
The goal of the protocol is to be decentralized, public and non-permissioned, said Fernandez, adding that it will be available for use by any organization, government administration or company wishing to mint verifiable identities, without needing the approval of the city.
From the whitepaper: “[The motivation is] to give rise to a new paradigm in which secure transactions are agile; where verification of necessary documentation is fast, reliable and private … that people are in control of their identity, and they decide where their information is stored and who can access it."
Tasks over the next 90 days include defining the protocol architecture, and what blockchain the project will use. Following that, said Fernández, the development of the protocol is expected to take approximately six months. "There are a lot of very relevant architectural decisions to be made in the face of preserving privacy and allowing it to be a non-permissioned public network.”
Another goal of the project, he said, would be for future interoperability between the protocol and other blockchains.
Among those involved in the project so far are Santiago Siri, contributor to the Proof of Humanity project and developer of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) ERC20 token; Leo Elduayen, CEO and co-founder of Koibanx, a Latin American asset tokenization and blockchain financial infrastructure company; Diego Gutierrez Saldivar, founder and CEO of RSK, a smart contract blockchain secured by the Bitcoin network.