By XRPL Labs, the developers of the popular Xumm wallet, announced integration with the digital ID system called GlobaliD. GlobaliD is a digital identity provider that has already partnered with exchanges like Uphold and services like the National Student Clearinghouse.
According to their website, the National Student Clearinghouse provides education verification and transcript ordering services. They also enable the electronic delivery of academic credentials by high schools to colleges.
Students will be able to streamline college and employment application processes with seamless delivery of these types of data using the GlobaliD service. College applications are typically cumbersome. When I was applying to grad school at a foreign university, delivering my transcripts required me to log into the university website, have them notarized and physically mailed to the institution. Had GlobaliD been available when I was a student, the application process would have been much more straightforward.
With cryptocurrency wallet integration and PayString integration, individuals can also link their cryptocurrency wallets to their digital identities using their own private wallets found in non-Custodial apps like Xumm or exchanges like Uphold. GlobaliD is the very same service that joined the Open Payments Coalition along with Ripple-sponsored PayID before it was renamed to PayString.
If the service takes off, it could enable seamless payments to web freelancers using PayString to map wallet addresses across several distributed ledgers. If having all of this information floating around the internet seems like a privacy breach, the GlobaliD developers have taken steps to mitigate these concerns. Users can choose to hide any segment of their GlobaliD from public view. Profile information is also encrypted and messages are end-to-end encrypted.
The Xumm integration also gives users the ability (enabled by default) to hide their cryptocurrency wallets from public indexing. Freelancers can share a wallet address with a private contact while still leaving that information hidden from the rest of the world wide web.
Government ID attestation is handled by third parties, similar to registration for a cryptocurrency exchange:
There’s also a self-attestation option that stores pictures of your ID on the GlobaliD service.
I’m not sure how GlobaliD will work across services and apps, but there should be some granularity with who gets to see what on your GlobaliD profile. For example, a liquor store would need to see a user’s government ID attestation, but a popular gaming service would only need access to payment and billing information. Online services could also determine that a user is over 18 without knowing the user’s actual age, returning a simple yes or no answer attestation to that question using a registered government ID. In this case, a system like GlobaliD could actually preserve user privacy.
I wanted to play around with the Uphold integrations, but the GlobaliD app is a little buggy and doesn’t specify the permissions it’s asking for:
I’m not comfortable giving it carte blanche access to my uphold account, so I’m going to hold off on experimenting with this until they fix the permission dialog menu. But if we let our imagination run wild, we could have a situation where average users can send each other tokenized commodities and cryptocurrencies on the XRPL (Gold, BTC, Apple stock) using the Xumm wallet or even registering with the GlobaliD’s native integration of the Uphold exchange. If we see Sologenic integration at a later date, your GlobaliD could plug into the XRPL DEX, and it would enable decentralized KYC compliant trading, which is really exciting.
KYC demo available at GlobaliD
Digital IDs are also harder to misplace, so on the whole, it seems rather convenient. The potential for XRPL decentralized exchange integration makes this one of the most promising projects to watch if you’re at all excited about cryptocurrency integration into mainstream financial mechanisms.
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