DIGITAL BAZAAR INC — Department of Homeland Security SBIR Phase II: H-SB016.1-002

Description

Blockchain technology shows promise when applied to identity management ecosystems. However, current blockchain technology stacks have been designed and optimized such that they are tightly coupled to a specific application area. More often than not, they focus on the transfer of financial value, not identity management. If ledger technology is going to be used to solve a wide variety of problems, a more generalized, modular design for producing many different ledgers may be a better alternative to trying to solve many problems using the same ledger instance, such as Bitcoin. Digital Bazaar therefore proposes to build a blockchain technology stack that is capable of producing many instances of "fit for purpose" decentralized ledgers. During Phase I, Digital Bazaar created a proof-of-concept for a generalized, configurable ledger technology stack from which many different ledgers can be instantiated, each narrowly-tailored for their own use case, while using a common, extensible core data model. In Phase II, Digital Bazaar intends to build upon the results of Phase I by creating a core commercial ledger product and additional technology to support three identity management use cases: Privacy-enhanced Credential Revocation, Privacy-aware Checkpoint Tracking, and Publishing Public Credentials for Status Checking. Digital Bazaar has successfully acquired and included letters of interest from multiple organizations that have demonstrated their commitment to running pilot programs in these areas for Phase II. The result of these pilot programs should be a commercial product with an initial set of customers.