Canadian Startup Peer Ledger Addressing Digital Identities with Blockchain
Peer Ledger is a Canadian blockchain software startup that specializes in identity management. Their primary current offering, Identity Bridge, links blockchain accounts to externally certified real-world identities. This real-to-digital identity mapping, according to the Peer Ledger vision, will bestow blockchain credentials with a trustworthiness that they lacked before this innovation. The company believes that trust-sensitive industries such as healthcare are an ideal fit for their solution. Peer Ledger recently teamed up with two leaders in the digital identity space to prove that it was possible to successfully map trusted, verified identities to otherwise anonymous blockchain accounts. In doing so, Peer Ledger believes they’ve helped pave the way for certain types of trust-sensitive software, such as clinical trial applications, to finally make full use of the blockchain platform.
Peer Ledger Ensuring trustworthy identity management with blockchain
Peer Ledger sees itself as providing the missing piece in the project of establishing verified, trustworthy digital identities in the blockchain. Presently, applications built on the blockchain verify identities by matching pairs of private and public keys. However, because users can link any identity to their blockchain account, digital identities in the blockchain have a critical vulnerability when it comes to trust. Consequently, digital identities in the blockchain lack the reliability they need in industries such as healthcare, where a trustworthy digital identity is critical to the integrity of nearly every application. To bridge the trust gap, Peer Ledger makes use of the public key infrastructure (PKI) system to certify identities outside the blockchain before binding them to blockchain accounts. The result, according to the company, is that blockchain-based applications that take advantage of Peer Ledger’s Identity Bridge solution will now have verified, certified, trustworthy identities that users can count on in trust-sensitive industries such as healthcare.
The Peer Ledger portal
The Peer Ledger portal has an interface for both admins and regular users. The admin interface primarily enables admins to issue and revoke mappings of certified digital identities to blockchain accounts. The standard user interface allows regular users to visit their security profiles and make updates to their certificate information, as well as other related fields.
Recent proof-of-concept for healthcare applications
Peer Ledger recently teamed up with digital identity standards provider SAFE-BioPharma and Synchronoss (NASDAQ:SNCR) to demonstrate through a proof-of-concept study that they could employ their solution to ensure the trustworthiness of the digital identities used in blockchain transactions. For example, clinical trials that are double-blind require known identities. However, prior to this proof-of-concept, it has been taken for granted that identities involved in blockchain transactions are anonymous. Therefore, it appeared that double-blind clinical trial transactions could not take place on the blockchain. Yet this study has shown that it’s possible to systematically link otherwise anonymous blockchain postings to proven identities, in this case SAFE-BioPharma compliant credentials. Further, the blockchain postings can remain anonymous for as long as necessary, such as for the duration of the clinical trial, before the system matches them to their verified external identities for the sake of regulatory compliance or clinical need.
The future of digital identity
Peer Ledger is building a new breed of identity management software designed to ensure the trustworthiness of digital identities attached to blockchain accounts. Their essential idea is to map externally certified identities to blockchain accounts whose identities would otherwise remain either anonymous or unreliable. Admins can perform the mappings, and users can update their certificates, through the Identity Bridge portal. This real-to-digital identity mapping, according to the Peer Ledger vision, will bestow blockchain credentials with a trustworthiness that they lacked up to this point. Peer Ledger teamed up with SAFE-BioPharma and Synchronoss for a proof-of-concept that successfully demonstrated that they could de-anonymize blockchain accounts to make certain trust-sensitive software, such as clinical trial applications, a viable option for blockchain-based platforms. According to the startup, not only the clinical trial space, but the trust-sensitive healthcare industry as whole, could make use of their demonstrated solution.
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Brennan is a blockchain technical adviser in the healthcare sector and blockchain entrepreneur who has worked on developing proprietary concepts for both artificial intelligence and enterprise blockchain. He is a graduate of Rutgers University School of Health Professions where he earned a M.S. in biomedical informatics.