This page provides a quick and simple introduction to Self-Sovereign Identity, Sovrin itself, and Evernym’s toolkit for Sovrin. It takes you through the very high-level, through to instructions on how to get started. Please review the information below and let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.
If you are able to trust who or what you are dealing with online, you can remove massive amounts of friction, improve user experience, and simplify processes.
Sovrin is a dedicated ledger for identity, and a protocol for establishing trust and securely exchanging verifiable data between parties, with no middle-man.
Sovrin enables you to prove who (or what) you are to anyone or anything, peer-to-peer, using data that the other party can verify.
The receiving party can check who issued the data to you, that you haven’t changed it, that is was issued only to you and that it hasn’t been revoked by the issuer.
Most 1st generation “identity-on-the-blockchain” solutions try to put too much on a blockchain, and tend to miss the downstream privacy (and safety) implications of throwing things on a blockchain.
Sovrin is more sophisticated than other “blockchain identity” solutions. It stores less on the ledger, and its elegance means that it can fulfill more use cases, more simply, with higher security and greater privacy.
This paper describes what goes on the Sovrin ledger, and what doesn’t.
A core building block of Sovrin is decentralized identifiers (DIDs), a standard that Evernym created and has now been taken up by many organizations as part of the W3C.
The Sovrin ledger is operated by Stewards. Each Steward runs a Sovrin Node.
Stewards are trusted organizations who abide by the Sovrin Trust Framework. Through the Trust Framework, the Stewards give authority to the Sovrin Foundation to administer the Framework on their behalf.
You don’t need to be a Steward to use Sovrin. Anyone can use it. The Stewards enable Sovrin to exist. Regardless of whether you are a Steward or not, the method of interacting with the Sovrin ledger remains the same.
A Sovrin node is an instance of the Hyperledger Indy codebase.
Hyperledger Indy is a global open source project. It is part of the Hyperledger initiative under the Linux Foundation.
Evernym contributed the initial Indy codebase and continues to contribute innovative new features to that codebase.
To interact with Sovrin, you use functions specified in the open source LibIndy SDK. This SDK is part of the main Hyperledger Indy codebase.
You can create your own Sovrin test network and use it to try things out. This page is the main starting point from a technical perspective.
The link in the previous step will direct you to the various repos, where you’ll find getting started guides to set up a Sovrin test network and create a credential exchange capability using the Indy SDK.
If you want to get going fast and start using Sovrin for real use cases, you can use Evernym’s commercial Verity product.
With the Evernym Verity ecosystem, agents talk to the ledger and talk to each other. We’ll be releasing Verity API information shortly. For more on Evernym’s current offering, visit our Product page.
Our Early Access Plan is a members-only community of like-minded organizations, with special access to tools, content and experts, to help accelerate the adoption of Sovrin enabled solutions.
Please visit the Early Access Plan page for more details.