By: Roman Pavlov, Technical Director – CTO Office, SecureKey Technologies

SecureKey and our partners at Notarius were invited to participate in the first-ever Sovereign Legal Identity Challenge (SLIC), a part of the Computational Law and Blockchain Festival convened by the Boston Legal Hackers in March of 2018. With SecureKey’s blockchain-based Verified.Me quickly approaching, we thought it would be an excellent opportunity to showcase the power of our platform and how we are solving today’s broken digital identity.

The Challenge 

SLIC’s organizers invited participants specializing in digital identity innovation from around the world to develop a prototype displaying how individuals can use blockchain technology to have more control and effective use of their own digital identities.

The Solution

SecureKey, in collaboration with Notarius, developed a blockchain-based framework for fast, online real estate transactions.

Real estate transactions typically involve multiple parties, so the availability of a controlled, private and entirely secure digital identity verification process is essential to creating a more streamlined experience.

In our scenario, joint buyers delegate authority to their real estate agent in order to complete the purchase of a home. Acting on their behalf, the real estate agent uploads a document to Notarius ConsignO for the buyers to sign electronically. Using both iOS and Android devices, each buyer verifies his or her digital identity using Verified.Me, completing their portion of the transaction by providing legally reliable and secure e-signatures via Notarius ConsignO. This process is repeated on the sellers’ side.

Watch the demo here: https://youtu.be/dENpR9ebzVw

The key to our solution is that the digital identities and professional active status of signatory parties could be confirmed with the level of trust and security required to do so through Verified.Me. Once the buyers delegated authority to their real estate agent, a tamper-proof and immutable audit trail linked the signatures in Notarius ConsignO to all other parties’ digital identities.

Verified.Me’s triple-blind model and Privacy-by-Design’s architecture provide the foundation for the entire process and ensure that no single party involved in the transaction—be it an identity provider, relying party or broker—can decrypt and/or trace the transaction. This architecture maintains privacy for end users of the network, while allowing regulated institutions to comply with strict regulations. Here, users are always in control, and their data can never be shared without explicit consent; they are free to review, select, approve or decline specific identity attributes, and consent to sign documents.

The Difference

Our solution isn’t just a prototype, pie-in-the-sky idea.

It’s a real use case, with real industry partners behind it, and will be coming to market soon.

The Result

We and our partners at Notarius are thrilled to announce that we won!

“What the team was able to share with us was quite impressive,” said Dazza Greenwood, co-organizer of SLIC, founder of CIVICS.com, a digital identity consultancy. “As digital identity experts, we have an obligation to explore collaborative solutions that solve the problems of data management and digital identity for tomorrow. Among other innovations, the team using SecureKey showed how a person could use their own sovereign identity as one of the inputs that can create a legally valid and enforceable signature for commercial transactions. I look forward to seeing how SecureKey’s Verified.Me and Notarius continue to protect digital users.”

“As always, working together with SecureKey makes us proud of the digital identity solutions we’ve been able to collaborate on,” said Patrick Drolet, Vice President of Strategic Operations and Products, Notarius. “The future is digital, and we’re excited to be building the digital safeguards of tomorrow, today.”

We’re already looking forward to next year’s SLIC! Check out more about this year’s SLIC at Dazza Greenwood’s blog, here: https://medium.com/dazza-greenwood/sovereign-legal-identity-challenge-9cdbfdc9489d