In our Quick reviews series we introduce interesting initial coin offering projects that might inspire you to do your own research and decide whether an idea and its development is worth your investment. It’s not an endorsement.
Today we are looking at Sovrin.
What problem(s) does it target?
Sovrin is a blockchain protocol dealing with self-sovereign identity (SSI) and decentralized trust. The project has been developed by the team behind tech company Evernym, and seeks to address a number of key issues surrounding online identity verification. These include the lack of a standardized format, or method when verifying the source and integrity of any digital credentials.
Sovrin is looking to take advantage of the World Wide Web Consortium which is standardizing the format of digitally-signed credentials, and the emergence of public blockchains that can provide the decentralized registration and discovery of the public keys needed to verify digital signatures. These two steps pave the way for the use of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and the establishment of a global public utility for self-sovereign identity, and The Sovrin Network has been designed exclusively for this purpose. The project implements Privacy by Design on a global scale, and includes pairwise pseudonymous identifiers, peer-to-peer private agents, and the selective disclosure of personal data using zero-knowledge proof cryptography.
Who the team members are?
The Sovrin team is close to containing 50 members all involved in various aspects of the project. The team has a vast amount of software engineers, and also employs numerous crypto engineers and product managers. The international group is packed full of high class performers from countries such as the USA, Russia, and India. They only appears to be lacking in the area of digital marketing.
At what stage the project is?
Awaiting token sale, and according to blog, adding new Stewards (those are operating validator nodes).
What the main future milestones in their roadmap are?
No roadmap available on their website. The one on their GitHub has last been updated almost two years ago, in October 2016, which is also a month after the project first launched. As the platform has already been developed, and the development team have already completed various key aspects of the project, Sovrin seems to feel that a development roadmap is unnecessary at this point, according to reports.
Fundraising status:
Token sale set from July to August according to data from ICOdrops, with no further details currently available.
Most important partnerships?
Crypto Valley Association: building an ecosystem for blockchain and other cryptographic technologies and businesses in Switzerland;
Digital Bazaar: a web solutions developer;
IBM: an American technology giant;
ARTiFACTS: allowing researchers to record an immutable chain of records, from the earliest stages of research for all research artifacts and record citations to these artifacts in real-time.
How large their community is?
Around 5,000 Twitter followers, more than 16,000 Telegram channel members, none of which are very active.
What other similar projects are?
Accord Project, uPort
