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Centre – a consortium founded by Circle Internet Financial, LLC, and Coinbase to serve as a standard setting body for blockchain-based financial services – today announced Verite, a decentralized model for identity credential issuance, custody and verification.
Verite is designed to give people and organizations direct control over how, when and where their personal information is shared when doing business in the crypto economy.
Centre developed Verite as an open, shared set of protocols that can be easily integrated into the world’s leading blockchains, crypto wallets, web apps, mobile apps and smart contracts. Verite unites several identity standards to enable scalable, reliable, privacy-preserving ways to leverage identity and provide trust.
“The web’s early superpower was enabling everybody to connect and engage with content using standard protocols that everyone can use and no one can own. But we’ve lacked a similarly open, global, standard way to safely identify ourselves, control our own identity data, and establish trust between each other on the web,“ said Sean Neville, cofounder of Circle and architect of Verite, Centre and USD Coin (USDC). “Decentralized identity standards can help address this problem as we build new apps, like financial services on blockchains, in the next era of the internet.”
Verite credentials will empower people and institutions to cryptographically prove claims about their identity and carry those claims in the same crypto wallets where they store their digital assets. Since no personally identifiable information is stored or sent on-chain, users also gain certainty that only the minimal attributes necessary for identity verification are shared. Verite credential issuers can vouch for a user’s claims without repeatedly exposing sensitive personal data, like Social Security numbers or mailing addresses.
“With Verite, users can get a portable credential similar to a ‘verified status’ badge that they can take across chains and protocols to prove claims about their identity,” said Kim Hamilton Duffy, director of identity and standards at Centre. “DeFi protocol developers get the benefit of identity-verified participants, without having to collect or store sensitive user information.”
Centre, Circle and Block will collaborate on Verite to promote broader adoption of crypto payments and decentralized finance. Early feedback on Verite, and commitments to collaborate on shared decentralized identity standards going forward, includes major ecosystem leaders Algorand, Coinbase, Compound Labs, ConsenSys, Espresso Systems, Hedera Hashgraph, Ledger, MetaMask Institutional, Phantom Technologies, Solana Foundation, Spruce and Stellar Development Foundation.
“Centre is focused on maintaining the highest standards of integrity, compliance and trust in driving the global development of an internet of value,” said David Puth, CEO of Centre. “Verite marks the next step on our open-technology roadmap by defining and harmonizing decentralized identity standards to help bolster trust and protect customers’ privacy in the growing marketplace for crypto-native finance.”
Developers can start building with Verite today via Centre and help create the future of institutional DeFi, among other use cases.
Financial Services
