Lissi’s Journey in the Metaverse: Building Trust with ID-Wallets and Verifiable Credential
Welcome to Lissi’s Journey in the metaverse! Today, we are investigating the essential role of trust infrastructure in the metaverse. Identity is the very foundation of every social interaction, regardless of where it happens. While the real world gives us humans countless glues to verify the authenticity of people or organisations we interact with, virtual worlds can be constructed, modified and faked with the press of a button. Hence, the ability to verify the authenticity of people, organisations and content is paramount to the success of the metaverse.
Over the past four years we collaborated with governments, universities and private organisations alike within IDunion to build a common trust infrastructure, which we now want to leverage to create trust in the metaverse. Our primary focus is the integration of user-friendly applications of ID-Wallets and verifiable credentials. The Neosfer Lounge in Decentraland features a dedicated use case track for Lissi, serving as a showcase to underline the practicality and effectiveness of these tools. Finally, we will wrap-up with reflections on the expedition and look into the future steps towards their widespread adoption.
ID-Wallet use cases in the Lissi Lounge — by Neosfer
The Neosfer Lounge was published at the beginning of 2023 with the objective to showcase relevant projects and investments of the company as well as host the live streaming of the expert talk Between the Towers. You can find the lounge here. We now expanded the lounge to include a dedicated track for identity use cases. Join Lissi as our protagonist, demonstrating the practical usage of ID-Wallets with the following use cases.
End-user use cases: ID-Wallets are one of the key tools to build trust in the metaverse. These wallets store digital identity credentials of users, such as customer and membership cards or tickets. They can also be used to identify the real world identity of citizens to comply with know your customer (KYC) requirements, given this is required by law e.g. for opening a bank account or receiving consulting services. But the use cases are not limited to end-users.
Demonstration Case Customer Cards: A seamless onboarding process enables the user to swiftly sign up and begin exploring the Lissi Lounge — by Neosfer using an ID-Wallet app. The simple, secure onboarding process saves time and ensures one can easily authenticate the next time interacting with the company.
Organisational Use cases: How can you ensure a virtual building you enter is actually representing your favourite retailer brand? How can the company ensure that only their own employees can declare themself as company representatives to prevent fraud and phishing? The answer lies in identities for organisations “ORG-IDs” and digital employee passes. We work together with commercial registers and eIDAS qualified trust service providers to issue organisational identities as verifiable credentials to companies.
The institutional trust we bring to the metaverse serves as corner-stone to enable business driven use cases and trusted interactions. By facilitating reliable identity verification, we move a crucial step towards a trusted and secure metaverse. Using ID-Wallets in the metaverse gives users the required confidence to explore, interact, and transact in the virtual world. The wallets can also help users maintain control over their relationships as well as transparency of their interaction history.
Demonstration Case Employee Pass: Within the Lissi Lounge you might be lucky and encounter a real person behind the service desk. Given it’s a real employee of Neosfer there will be the name and the role of the person illustrated on top of the person.
There is also an additional use case within the lounge. However, you will need to take a look yourself to find out more about it ;). Would you like to implement your own metaverse use case? We would love to hear from you via our contact form.
Outlook & Next steps
Currently the integration is a mere showcase and lacks the real world benefits of a pilot use case. Hence, the next steps for us is to integrate the credential workflow with real data for the customer cards and build a holistic story for the customer service representatives together with interested partners. While we focused on the technical integration, we now have to pay attention on use case benefits and UX in the second step. This will also include the task to beautify our lounge ;)
