Blockchain Strategy
- What role does Dhiway play in the growing trend of blockchain interoperability, and how do you ensure seamless integration across different blockchain platforms?
In a dynamic data economy, blockchain provides the foundational trust infrastructure. This ensures that nation-scale projects (DPIs) that adopt a public blockchain can provide features and capabilities that transform applications and services that anchor records on the chain. Today, the two essential challenges to overcome are the “cold start problem” with credentialing and the availability of public blockchains aligned with the National Blockchain Strategy.
Dhiway is developing middleware strategies to enable blockchain interoperability, including connectors for multi-chain interactions.
ONDC has adopted and implemented the CORD blockchain framework from Dhiway as Confidex, establishing the first instance of a nation-scale public blockchain. The MARK Studio verifiable document platform helps organizations design, issue, and manage W3C Verifiable Credentials, which are secure, tamper-resistant, and instantaneously verifiable. These two directions help create open-standards-based data formats and open-source blockchain framework projects, enabling greater adoption and more rapid digital transformation.
Though there is no debate on the value that a blockchain brings for many use cases to build trust in the digital eco-system, the main challenge with widespread adoption is mainly about bringing the different eco-system players to work together and about building a public infrastructure that everyone trusts, one initiative towards this is the ‘Confidex’ network started by ONDC that aims to make it Nation’s blockchain, to which many providers and ride on.
Regulatory Topics
- With increasing regulatory scrutiny on blockchain and cryptocurrencies, how does Dhiway navigate and comply with these regulations?
Blockchain is often classified as an emerging technology, so greater regulatory interest exists. The CORD blockchain framework is an open-source effort to enable the implementation of many tokenless blockchains worldwide. This ensures that the CORD-based implementations are used as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that aligns with the goals of delivering citizen services.
Today, regulatory frameworks worldwide focus on the data principal’s fine-grained ability to govern and exchange their information, undertake selective sharing of data for purpose-defined and time-restricted uses, and their consent being asked for along with information requests. The CORD blockchain enables IT designs to meet such demands. Dhiway is engaged in consultations and feedback conversations with industry associations and standards development organizations (SDOs) regarding the management and governance of personal data and sharing such information.
The recent spate of adverse incidents related to cryptocurrency and crypto exchanges has exacerbated the negative perception. However, Dhiway has no stake in this business domain and is unaffected by specific regulatory actions related to cryptocurrencies.
Privacy, Security Topics
- With the rise in cyber threats, how does Dhiway ensure the security and privacy of its blockchain solutions?
Businesses are dealing with a rise in cybersecurity attacks, data breaches and the regulatory compliance framework around infrastructure security. Of these, data breaches have the most severe business impact. Dhiway’s approach to helping organizations deal with data governance issues is designed around adopting VCs to secure exchange and verify data. This reduces the available surface area for data breaches. VCs being cryptographically signed also prevents the unintended leaks of data or breaches into data silos.
It is essential to note that no data is recorded on the blockchain itself. This means that while the blockchain can draw upon the security best practices put in place by the public cloud provider or even the vendors of on-premises implementations, it has no personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive data recorded that can be accessed.
Blockchains are complex infrastructure components; hence, the challenge for any organization is building capacity and knowledge in the Ops teams to manage blockchain deployments. Infrastructure and network security audits are another set of challenges that come up. Dhiway has designed the CORD blockchain framework to be quickly operationalised using a set of routines and containerization. This is aimed at reducing the system’s footprint as well as enabling better business continuity plans.
Business Strategy/Partnerships
- How does Dhiway stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving blockchain industry, and what is your vision for the company’s future?
Digital trust ecosystems with blockchain as the foundational infrastructure begin to demonstrate value when there are large use cases involving high credential liquidity and data registries. Data registries, often also called trust registries, form authoritative information sources around use cases. Some examples could be data registries of all qualified healthcare service providers or registries of all graduate students. Registries like these enable applications and services across various ecosystems to interconnect and meet the business needs of trustworthy information.
Credentialing is a way to enable the adoption of blockchain technology for various applications, and we are seeing the growth of Learning and Education Records, Skilling and Knowledge Records, Workplace Records and other miscellaneous credentials used in various sectors such as travel and hospitality, education and learning, skilling and capacity building,
We have announced technology engagements and partnerships with ONDC, Cultyvate, Client Fabric and others in order to advance the use cases in the business domains where these organizations are leading with technology innovation. Dhiway’s mission is to reshape the digital future, and we are doing that by transforming the present. Today, the status quo of digital interaction is a “trust deficit” and our products are designed to address this deficit and make authentic data exchanges possible.
R&D, Innovation Topics
- What upcoming innovations or developments can we expect from Dhiway in the near future?
The decentralized and distributed nature of blockchain implementation means that consensus mechanisms play a crucial role in addressing some of the challenges posed by “the blockchain trilemma” (security, scalability, and decentralization). A few of the approaches adopted by Dhiway for the CORD blockchain have originated from feedback and consultation with technology partners focused on specific use case needs. This has resulted in improvements to block finalization techniques and other additional aspects that improve the transaction characteristics of CORD (3s finality, 50K transactions per block, etc.).
DIDs are designed based on the concept that the holder of the DID has a greater ability to manage and govern the DID without requiring a third party to rely on it. In terms of implementation details, this could translate into the holder of a DID being able to use a purpose-specific virtual ID (VID) and demonstrate cryptographic proof for specific data elements.
Technology innovations in this space emerge from current and future use cases. As we see the adoption curve trend in the right direction, we will also see concepts such as digital wallets emerge. It is essential to highlight that strong sponsorship of such architecture in the EU has already resulted in the widespread adoption of VCs, digital wallets, and applications and services that promise citizens a much richer experience around control of their data.