The recent study from the European Union blockchain initiative highlighted the importance of Digital Identities within the Blockchain framework and is recognized as a principle identification system in the new world of digital economics.

Based on the European Union’s Blockchain Observatory and Forum, the “Blockchain for Government and Public Services” report, is an initiative spearheaded by the European Commission, to promote, plan and identify the necessities in accelerating Blockchain within the region.

While the concept of Blockchain is being leveraged through popular use cases and studies for its potential, the EU focused on identifying the fundamental aspects that are essential requisites for embedding Blockchain into governance and commerce.

Digital Identities are Needed

The of Digital Identities has been around ever since users took up the internet and signed up with popular services through user-accounts. Today, providers such as Facebook and Google’s Gmail are utilized as identity keys that can be used to signup quickly across various services ranging from mobile apps, games, services and other third-party services.

While people are reliant on their digital profiles to access their services online, the profiles today are all scattered, fragmented and are literarily littered across the internet. This is an issue raised by experts where fragmented information lying across the internet opens up vulnerabilities and security / privacy issues.

Blockchain has a premise of a decentralized but highly secured user profiles through digital identities. The aim of Blockchain is to bank upon the fundamental information stored on digital identities and digital passport profiles to enable an interoperable and open-ended digital economy.

In the sense of societal governance, citizen information is also scattered, fragmented and often the information are all out of date. This results to slower information processing on government and social services. With digital identities, citizenship and personal information will be enrolled under serial digital identities that will be managed by the government’s information security program. These records are permanent and will always be up-to date thanks to Blockchain’s capability of decentralized chronological information pooling.

Economies Based on Digital Identity

The need to secure, utilize and properly manage information of users, citizens and people are tantamount as society is nearing an industrial revolution with the advent of new technology such as Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) among others. Today, personal information stored in the government are mostly scattered, fragmented and out of date. While technology has made tremendous leaps in information gathering, processing and storage, people’s information management have been found both lagging and wanting.

The inclusion of Blockchain in managing a person’s personal information allows automated administration that is geared with the best practices.

Digital Information and its mechanism under a Blockchain utility is key to support information management under the emerging digital economy.