What is Self-Sovereign Identity?

And how does it work?

Max Thake
2 min readAug 30, 2021

Who are you? Who decides if you are really you? Can you be trusted?

We live within the realms of two separate, yet intertwined worlds. They are the physical and the digital, and to accept the latter is necessary to survive within the 21st Century.

Much of our identification is represented in physical form, and to many this is somewhat comforting. We can carry ID cards in our wallets, keep birth certificates in safes, and can hold in our hands the original and certified document. Whether they are organized neatly into a folder or thrown into the compartment known as “the drawer,” we have grown up with being able to touch our identity.

‘The drawer’ is now consigned to history
But the physical world is not keeping pace with the digital one, and even less so with the pandemic forcing millions to work, consume, and socialize remotely from home.

And rightly so, people are also getting frustrated with the bureaucracy that comes with paper documents, contracts, and ID. The solution comes in the form of Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI). The last thing anyone needs is another acronym, but this article will help you navigate this technology, and its many technicalities, to prove why it’s worth the effort to acclimate yourself to it.

Read the full article on peaq’s blog here.

--

--

Max Thake

Building the Web3 machine economy — and writing about it too. | peaq co-founder | https://linktr.ee/maxthake