Yoti Reworks ID System for Government Use with Blockchain Technology

The enormous ambitions of Yoti for its eponymous identity platform are now becoming clear with the company’s announcement that it pitched a global government identity solution at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Yoti first announced its mobile app-based system last autumn. It’s designed to allow end users to confirm their identities with a selfie, paired with a photo of a driver’s license or passport; a third party can remotely authenticate a registered user by generating a QR code, which the end user scans using the Yoti app; the user is then prompted to take a video selfie, which is matched against the biometric and government ID data on file.

The system has been trialled by at least two major supermarket chains in the UK for the purpose of confirming customer IDs for the purchase of alcohol and cigarettes at automated kiosks, but Yoti is evidently aiming at some major government clients with its announcement that the Yoti system can be used with a version of blockchain technology called Hashgraph to establish virtual citizen IDs.

In a statement, Yoti explained that Hashgraph is a private ledger system that uses “an asynchronous process” that “is not reliant on the proof of work systems” required by public ledger blockchain systems. While that might raise some eyebrows about the system’s reliability and resistance to tampering among public blockchain evangelists, it means that Hashgraph can provide a ledger of citizen identity information that doesn’t require costly and time-consuming algorithmic work in order for government officials to access it.

Yoti is working with a firm called LedgerState to leverage Hashgraph technology, and the companies say that together they presented their solution at the World Economic Forum, though they have not offered details about their audience or how the idea was received.

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January 25, 2018 – by Alex Perala