Every successful society is built on trust—and trust starts with identity.
Last month, Georgetown Law hosted a Roundtable on the Future of Digital Identity Research, sponsored by the Hard Yaka Foundation.
Participants included key regulatory and standards setting bodies such as the BIS, NIST, and FinCEN; key private sector players including Mastercard, Prove, McKinsey, Omnumi, and GlobaliD; as well as representatives from the EU, Brazil, and the IMF.
The goal? To shed light on digital identity, what is ultimately a foundational technology for the rapidly evolving global economy—an area that currently receives far less academic attention than it should.
This week, Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute of International Economic Law published their final report from the roundtable, prepared by Linda Jeng and Sumedha Deshmukh:
Digital identity technologies form an important foundation of the digital economy. Policy decisions regarding digital identity models will impact the growth of the digital economy, including economic structure, market dominance, and privacy. Yet, there is little research on the efficacy of different digital identity approaches and other key policy questions as policymakers around the world are adopting digital identity policy frameworks.
This report summarizes “The Future of Digital Identity Research” Roundtable convened by the Institute of International Economic Law (IIEL) at Georgetown University on April 26, 2024. IIEL convened policymakers and central bankers from various jurisdictions, academic researchers, and digital identity leaders from both the federated identity and credential-managed identity (i.e., decentralized/self-managed identity) sectors. The Roundtable was conducted under Chatham House rules. This report aggregates anonymized insights from the participants.
One objective was to pinpoint and dig into key areas for potential future research, which the report dives into. That includes:
Technology and Architecture: Investigating advanced cryptographic methods, secure “silicon”, and cross-platform interoperability to enhance the technical robustness of digital identity systems.
Policy and Regulation: Exploring the evolution of regulatory frameworks, compliance impacts, and data protection to align digital identity systems with legal and regulatory requirements.
Ecosystem Governance: Examining different governance models, liability issues, and intra-jurisdiction coordination to ensure effective management of digital identity ecosystems.
Economic and Social Impacts: Analyzing the economic benefits, use cases, potential drawbacks, and social implications of digital identity to understand its broader effects.
User Experience: Addressing public adoption issues and the need for diverse user experiences to ensure the inclusivity and accessibility of digital identity systems.
Common Terminology and Taxonomy: Developing and adopting a common vocabulary to reference digital identity terms and taxonomy of different digital identity models. The Roundtable discussions surfaced differences in terminology between public and private sectors. For instance, the private sector commonly uses the term digital identity “signals” to refer to any type of identifying trait while the public sector more commonly uses the terms “attributes” or “claims.” Another example is “decentralized identity” is now becoming more commonly known as “credential-managed identity” or “self-managed identity.’
Additionally, the report also outlined “essential methods and techniques to ensure comprehensive and practical research” across these focal points.
Check out the full report here, which also includes a full list of participants.