The Illinois Blockchain Initiative, a consortium of Illinois state and county agencies and blockchain and fintech focused firms, has announced a project to digitize the birth registration process using blockchain technology.

For this project, the Illinois Blockchain Initiative has partnered with self-sovereign identity solutions leader Evernym. They will leverage distributed ledger technology to provide secure digital identity solutions.

Building on the work of the W3C’s Verifiable Claims Task Force, the project will use the Sovrin Foundation’s distributed identity ledger to create a secure, “self-sovereign” identity for Illinois citizens during the birth registration process, according to the official release.

“To structurally address the many issues surrounding digital identity, we felt it was important to develop a framework that examines identity from its inception at child birth. Government has an important role to play in the development of any digital identity ecosystem. Identity is not only foundational to nearly every government service, but is the basis for trust and legitimacy in the public sector,” Jennifer O’Rourke, Blockchain Business Liaison for the Illinois Blockchain Initiative said.

In the proposed framework, government agencies will verify birth registration information. They would then create “verifiable claims” or attributes by cryptographically signing identity attributes such as legal name, date of birth, sex or blood type. A tamper-proof distributed ledger protocol in the form of a decentralized identifier would store the permission to view or share these claims, ensuring that each attribute is cryptographically sealed and only accessible with the explicit consent of the identity holder or a legal guardian in the case of a newborn child.

“The successful transition to an identity ecosystem that is truly self-sovereign requires conversion of ‘breeder documents’, such as birth certificates, which serve as the basis for obtaining other documents,” said Evernym’s Drummond Reed. “Digitizing these foundational documents in a state the size and importance of Illinois will make a major contribution to the larger effort of solving the online identity problem.”

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