11
Aug
2020

What’s new in Verity?

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A new milestone for the world’s most advanced verifiable credential platform

 

In 2018, we launched Verity 1.0 (or “VCX” as it was known) as the first reliable, end-to-end solution for connecting decentralized identifiers, issuing credentials, and verifying proofs using Hyperledger Indy and Sovrin. Since then, it has powered pioneering decentralized identity projects for over 100 customers across six continents.

Today, we’re proud to say that several Evernym customers have deployed live implementations, in diverse industries including financial services and healthcare, with both consumer and employee use cases based on the secure exchange of portable, private and instantly verifiable digital credentials. The momentum continues to grow, too, with organizations rising to meet some of the trust and user experience challenges posed by the current pandemic and the need for touchless identity verification that comes with it.

The insights we have gleaned from the thousands of hours spent working with our customers to solve real-world problems for their users have translated into a regular stream of updates to the product, as well as numerous contributions to community specifications and open source projects. And as our customers have gone live and scaled up their user bases, we have honed our ability to provide the support, stability, and scalable performance that they depend on.

Yet while we’ve been fine-tuning Verity based on customer feedback since day one, we’re excited to announce the largest improvement yet, with a new update we’re internally calling ‘Verity 2.0.’

Verity 2.0 is the result of us rethinking the solution architecture to incorporate what we learned and is intended to position us and our customers for the future. This release of Verity includes over 50 new features, some of which I’ve outlined below.

And the best part? Customers can use it now, absolutely free of charge, through our Sandbox Plan. Although we’ve been too busy building to actually ‘announce’ it, this new version of Verity officially launched in June, after months of beta testing with several of our customers.

Here’s what you can expect:

 

Verity 2.0: An orchestration platform for decentralized protocols

Verity 2.0

We often describe Verity as a simple toolkit; but at over 90,000 lines of code, Verity is a sophisticated protocol engine capable of orchestrating a wide range of current and future decentralized workflows.

Optimized for Hyperledger Indy and Aries, it manages much of the back-and-forth associated with establishing DIDComm connections, issuing credentials, validating proofs, and exchanging secure messages—allowing you to focus on building the all-important application layer of your solution and making it easy to integrate with your existing business infrastructure.

Verifiable credentials enable organizations to have trust in their data; trust that it’s credible, accurate, up-to-date, secure, and private. In turn, trusted data allows companies to power a vast number of use cases:

  • Passwordless single sign-on;
  • Remote user and new account onboarding;
  • Cross-domain authentication;
  • KYC/AML checks;
  • Personalized customer communication;
  • Pre-employment screening;
  • Supply chain integrity;
  • Open-loop loyalty campaigns;
  • Data breach mitigation;
  • Automation of clerical tasks;
  • And many more.

Put simply, this all adds up to the possibility to automate and digitize business processes that require the exchange of trusted and verifiable data from individuals. This enables greater security, reduced overall costs, and improved customer experiences.

 

Enterprise-grade stability, performance, and scale

Knowing that adoption of portable credentials is poised to skyrocket, Verity was designed for massive scale from the very beginning. The clustered server architecture is built with Akka for resilience and elastic scalability, allowing it to handle the large number of concurrent interactions that come with enterprise and citizen-scale use cases. We have validated the platform’s performance well in excess of our current requirements so that our customers can go to production with confidence.

 

SaaS now available by default

Enterprise workflows are increasingly moving to the cloud, and part of enabling our customers to focus on building their applications means allowing them to forget about the infrastructure layer. For that reason, by default we offer Verity as a managed service, hosted in the same highly reliable cloud infrastructure that powers the backend for Connect.Me. 

At the same time, we recognize that some adopters of verifiable identity technology require the full benefits of a highly decentralized architecture, including the ability to run their own servers and manage their own encryption keys. For those users, we have always supported private cloud and on-premise deployments and will continue to do so.

 

Built with builders in mind

Verity is primarily a tool for builders. Our customers are crafting industry-specific solutions based on digital credentials, and our job is to make that process as straightforward as possible. With that in mind, we have a full complement of developer materials available:

 

Proven interoperability

Evernym has collaborated extensively with fellow community members in order to ensure that our products don’t just work well with each other, but that they exist within a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of interoperable solutions. Both Verity and Connect.Me comply with Aries Interoperability Profile 1.0, and we have demonstrated practical end-to-end interoperability between our products and those of other prominent community members, including IBM and Trinsic. This means that our customers can be confident when choosing our products that their users will be able to seamlessly interact with those of their partners, regardless of which vendor they have chosen.

 

Building a movement, not just a company — our commitment to open source

From our initial donation of the Sovrin code, which became Hyperledger Indy, to the millions of dollars worth of code and specifications contributed to Aries and Ursa, Evernym has always been a champion of open source. We’re passionately committed to the belief that a thriving open identity system must be built on open standards and open source code, not proprietary platforms and vendor lock-in — and that does not stop at the network layer. For this reason, we are committing to releasing the source code for our commercial products as well.

 

We’re just getting started, too

One of the most exciting things about working at Evernym is the tremendous pace of change in our industry. We have made incredible strides over the last few years, but there is much work left to do and so many opportunities ahead of us.

If you haven’t already, I’d like to invite you to give Verity a whirl and join us on this amazing journey to put individuals back in control of their personal data. Alternatively, you can join us for a Verity-themed webinar on September 8, where we’ll be talking through the many new features and give a sneak peek at what’s coming next.

We can’t wait to see what you build.

Try Verity for free in our new Sandbox Plan

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