Over a billion people are kept out of traditional identification systems due to time-consuming identification paperwork processes, costs, a lack of access, and a simple lack of knowledge about personal identity. To gain access to the existing financial system, you must have an identity. 60 percent of the world's 2.7 billion unbanked people own mobile phones, paving the way for blockchain-based mobile identity solutions tailored to the needs of the most vulnerable citizens.

Currently, we store our most sensitive identification data in centralized government databases, which are supported by legacy software that has multiple single points of failure.

Hackers are allured to large, centralized systems that contain the personally identifiable information (PII) of millions of user accounts. In 2018, 2.8 billion consumer data records were exposed at a cost of more than $654 billion, despite regulatory legislation and corporate efforts to improve cybersecurity.

We now have the tools to build new identity management systems based on the concept of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) – potentially including a new subset of decentralized identities known as self-sovereign identity (SSI) – thanks to the growing sophistication of smartphones, advances in cryptography, and the advent of blockchain technology.