Spotlight on LatAm: Identity Solutions for Govtech

Here is an update from an Ethereum Foundation Fellow. Tsui Cepeda.

Our identity has tremendous power. In an age when people take great pride in using multiple aliases or personas, we often worry about how we identify ourselves. I’m from Monterrey, Mexico, a Latin American, a son, a brother, a father, a husband, an engineer, a PhD, an entrepreneur, a dog lover, a hitchhiker and a believer that democracy is suffering.

As I look back on the times I met people from different countries and began to better understand their access to public services, I remember realizing just how far away this reality was for Mexicans. As my home city grew, I realized that many of the decisions our government made were unplanned or conspiratorial. I learned that my home country, Mexico, is one of the most underprivileged countries according to Transparency International. Corruption Perception Index. I realized that these problems are not just limited to me and my country, they affect people everywhere.

Now, I have deep empathy for everyone who can’t look to their government for better transportation, decent education, or health care. Meanwhile, I see technology having an increasingly greater impact on the daily lives of people in Latin America and beyond. Think about this for a moment. People expect increasingly digital, personalized, and real-time services, but public institutions are unable to meet those expectations.

Citizens face inefficiencies, lack of transparency, bureaucracy, and terrible experiences when interacting with government. This is a global crisis of institutional agility and trust that is eroding the possibilities for prosperity, which is why ideal democracies are suffering.

So I decided to integrate a new part of my identity. OS City Essentially, to improve the government service environment in modern society. Transforming public institutions to the Web3 paradigm. In other words, Use blockchain to digitize government services and provide citizens with decentralized digital identities.

OS City Team

bureaucracy upgrades

From birth certificates to driver’s licenses and academic records, when we are asked to verify who we are as citizens, it is usually by sharing personal information or credentials notarized by the government of where we were born. Depending on the location, those records may be placed in advanced network databases, e.g. Estonian citizen), but more likely What you need when you need an ‘official identity’ In reality, it may be on a professional passport printer in a stuffy government building, scattered across the filing cabinets of several state bank branches, or perhaps not at all!

When we “use” these identity expressions, what we are actually doing is making separate bureaucratic systems interoperable. If you have received a visa stamp from a customs office Country A Fits passport page country B, which is ‘enough’ for us in most cases. But problems arise when requirements for basic interoperability become more stringent or break down. Office A Original stamped documents are required. Office BClosed after 3pm, notarized letter required. Department CThey are in other parts of the city and require approval first. Office A… Some of us are all too familiar with being locked in this kind of prison of paperwork. This is where collusion and corruption are born, and the snowball effect begins that leads to social suffering, economic growth, and a terrible response to climate change.

The fundamental challenge is that everyone should have one. IdentityBut it’s not true that everyone has it. Interoperable Identity Representation. This is where we believe we can do better. It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen all at once. But if we start in the right direction, we might end up where we want to be. In an effort to solve these problems, we developed an application-specific wallet called Soberana that is used to hold and manage digital identities.

Blockchain is designed as interoperable, standardized components that can be combined and integrated in all kinds of ways. Any blockchain built to be compatible with Ethereum or EVM follows the same set of standards. At Soberana, that is our starting point. Unfortunately, we work in a design space that must allow for some degree of centralization. This means that a government authority must approve the record or identity.

Nonetheless, we start with the small kernel of identity that still exists. compatible It is an open and permissionless system in the web3 world. Starting from this compatibility makes it much easier over time to improve and build more complex systems around it, a network economy of centralized and decentralized digital services. The goal here is maximum compatibility For digital identities: Whether used for central government notaries, proprietary banking transactions, or public NFT registries, identities must move seamlessly and securely between those systems.

As we add more and more capabilities, we will be able to verify, port, and share that identity across the entire suite of interconnected government services. From weddings to mortgages, the right infrastructure can take the bureaucratization out of all the paperwork that requires your identity and make it simple. Starting small, this first piece of the puzzle allows us to use technology wisely to increase the legitimacy of the public sector as a whole, paving the way for broader institutional reform.

Last year we focused on launching official citizen digital identities through government-run online portals. Here, citizens can obtain a wallet that acts as a digital identity and holder of digital documents. Citizens can not only use official documents by porting them to a digital wallet, but they can also share and update these documents.

Currently, these documents are limited to commercial permits, construction permits, city inspector certificates, and taxpayer statements. However, we are working to expand and consolidate as many documents as possible to ensure compatibility with local governments in Mexico and Argentina.

long term perspective

Now I understand that bureaucracy is nothing more than an inertial inefficiency of government that has lost the joy of innovation. That’s why I believe blockchain has enormous potential to lead us into a new era of openness and collaboration that will help increase the legitimacy of the public sector. With the help and support of public sector leaders, we can bring about radical change in the government sector and even transform it into a thriving business sector, fueling the country’s digital, economic and social transformation.

My short-term vision is to give citizens the possibility to own their own official records, eliminate duplicative efforts across all government processes, make government transactions traceable and transparent, and provide the first for blockchain-verifiable credentials. government standards can be fostered. We hope this will demonstrate to the international public sector that interoperability can be successful when citizens are at the center and innovation drives regulation.

In the long term, I hope we can all work together to rethink governance and identity. We start by rethinking and reinventing the way governments, individuals, and businesses interact with each other. In a decentralized digital world, interactions are community- and citizen-centric rather than state- or market-centric. This represents a new ecosystem vision in which governments, startups, academia, and civic groups jointly explore public problems, find (and deliver) appropriate solutions, and learn by doing. Rather than the state hiring suppliers, it is the state interacting with other actors to solve society’s most pressing problems. I believe that new digital identities are one step toward enabling governments, citizens, and communities to make the most of blockchain technology and foster prosperity through a network of citizen-centric digital services.

For more information about the Ethereum Foundation Fellowship program: Read this blog post.