Kim Hamilton Duffy - From Learning Machine to DIF and the Evolution of Decentralized Identity

In this episode, I talk with Kim Hamilton Duffy, the Executive Director of the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF). Before her work at DIF, Kim served as the CTO at Learning Machine, an early pioneer in the self-sovereign identity space that was acquired in 2020.
We cover a range of topics, including:

• The early days at Learning Machine and how they acquired their first customers

• The messaging strategies that resonated and the unexpected moves that set them apart, like making it easy for customers to leave

• How adoption exceeded expectations at Learning Machine and how that compares to the current decentralized identity landscape

Kim offers deep insights from her extensive experience in the digital identity ecosystem, making this a conversation you won’t want to miss!
You can learn more about DIF on their website: identity.foundation.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more announcements related to the future of identity at trinsic.id/podcast

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to The Future of Identity, a show that surfaces hard-earned insights needed to succeed in the fast-evolving world of digital identity. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we are a reusable identity infrastructure company powering dozens of amazing identity products. Today, I spoke to Kim Hamilton Duffy, the Executive Director of the Decentralized Identity Foundation. But before getting into the standards space, Kim was the CTO of Learning Machine, which was an early pioneer in the self-sovereign identity realm, which was acquired in 2020. We dig into the early days at Learning Machine, how they acquired their first customers, the messaging that resonated at the time, and the unintuitive moves that helped them differentiate, such as making it really easy for their customers to leave them. And fortunately, sounds like none of them did. We also talk about adoption relative to expectations. At Learning Machine, Kim was really surprised by how well things were working.

Riley Hughes: And we also talk about how the adoption relative to expectation equation is different in the current decentralized identity landscape and what companies should do about that. So this was a really great conversation with one of the foremost leaders in the decentralized identity space, and I’m excited for you to hear it. Now, onto the episode. Welcome to the Future of Identity podcast, where we talk to the people building the ID tech products of tomorrow. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and I’m here with Kim Hamilton Duffy, Executive Director of the Decentralized Identity Foundation. Kim, welcome to the podcast.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Thank you, Riley. It’s great to be here.

Riley Hughes: So you’re one of the only people that I can think of. Let me know if there are others that I should be talking to, but you’re one of the only people I can think of in the decentralized identity space who has Been involved in a startup that’s driving adoption of this new age identity stuff. You’ve been leading governance groups in an ecosystem, building an ecosystem of parties around it. And you’ve also been leading a standards group where you’re at now at the Decentralized Identity Foundation, helping to define the standards that the other ones are using. And I feel like you have probably a lot of vantage points, maybe more vantage points than almost anybody, about different perspectives on the ecosystem. So I think this will be a really fun conversation. I’m excited to do it. Are there any vantage points you have that I’m missing here, or anything you would reframe about my characterization there?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: I think that’s very generous. Thank you so much. You know, I’ve been a huge fan of Trinsic and yours for a while. I think that you’ve done a great job of communicating it, knowing all the details, but also making what we do sort of catchier, describing it in ways that really resonate with people. So I learn a lot from you. I know we’ve talked many, many times about what to call all of this that we’re doing. I think we’ve all benefited greatly from your leadership and sort of how we drive adoption of what we’re doing here.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, thanks a lot. That’s really generous in return. And I think communicating this stuff can be a challenge. And so if I’ve maybe contributed a little bit to helping us communicate better, then that’s a really great compliment. So thanks a lot. I want to get into it. On this podcast, we try to keep focused on the more tactical elements of reusable identity adoption. I was hoping we could dig into Learning Machine, which, as I understand it, was your kind of foray into the decentralized ID space. So, is that right? And if it is, then maybe you could give us an intro of what you were doing there and the story.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Yeah, I’d love to. So yes, it was my first entry even into identities. My background, very focused on infrastructure in the sense of distributed infrastructure, solving new problems, ones where that were sort of new territory. You could solve things from first principles, things that pull heavily on broad range of computer science and math. I had been getting interested in blockchain from the sense of reading about it and even taking some Coursera courses. Then a high school friend of mine, Dan Hughes, reached out and he was leading a company, and he mentioned an opportunity, a collaboration with MIT Media Lab to anchor Open Badges, which is a credential schema to the Bitcoin blockchain. And he asked if, you know, he’s like, here’s this weird thing. I can’t, it’s hard to think of who would be a good fit for this. I think, you know, he thought of me. And I said, well, that’s a terrible idea, but I couldn’t resist learning about it. So I came to meet with Philip Schmidt at MIT with Dan and Chris Jagers, his co-founder.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: And so from that meeting with everyone at the Media Lab who was focused on it, I learned a lot more about the context, why they were wanting to anchor it to the Bitcoin blockchain. The big thing at the time was Open Badges. The dominant form of verification that happened was what’s called hosted verification, which meant it relies on the issuer hosting the file corresponding to that accomplishment. That was where the problems came in, right? If the issuer website wasn’t available, if they moved it, that was a really common problem, like sort of lack of URL permanence. Then you no longer had the ability to access it, prove that you really performed that accomplishment. So the problem that we were wanting to solve was using the Bitcoin blockchain for—we used it for a lot of things, and that’s sort of where the decentralized identity rat hole came in. We were using it for the sort of cryptographic key signing of the issuer.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: We were using it for timestamping, the ability to say, like, it happened within this range, and then also we can map it to, you know, cryptographic keys being valid in a certain range. So we were doing a whole lot of stuff there, right? And part of the idea was that we were saying identity a card. We don’t want to get into identity. And so, but as I was moving forward and trying to figure out things like cryptographic key rotation and everything, I realized that we had maybe made too many sort of simplifying assumptions. So did some Google searches, ran into Manu Sporny and all that community, found verifiable credentials and dids. And so I think that that was sort of the entry into sort of decentralized identity. We sort of backed into it, joined, became CTO. We had probably very soon after decided to release the open source Blockcerts, and then we also developed a commercial product based on it. That was a really sort of fun opportunity to do a lot of innovation on the open source side, but while building a commercial product to ensure that it’s something that people found useful.

Riley Hughes: Got it. Awesome. That’s really helpful. Sounds like Open Badges are something that at the time universities and other institutions were using, but there was a problem on the verification side, and that adding blockchain to the mix could help with some of those problems. So was your commercial offering mostly targeting institutions that were already using Open Badges and that had this problem, or was this at a point in the Open Badges adoption cycle where That customer list was not very long, you know what I mean? Was this earlier, and you were mostly selling into institutions that were used to PDFs, or what was the landscape of the customer marketplace at the time?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: I would say that we were not really targeting, you know, so at the time at least, Open Badges, partially because of some of the weaknesses that I mentioned at the time. People tended to use it for pretty low-stakes credentials, and so what we saw in sort of where the blockchain came in and the cryptographic elements was that there was a real need. There was a lot of fraud happening, and we really had focused heavily on education workforce credentials and, you know, a lot of the costs associated with fraud that would happen. And so we were not really looking to be a substitute to, say, Open Badges. We were focused more on, you know, these pain points of verifying credentials, you know, especially when it comes to cross borders, like people who are transferring into a university from a different country and then the, you know, procedures are completely different. So, yeah, we were looking basically at starting a little bit more of a new market.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: I wouldn’t say we were exactly going for DocuSign, because we deeply saw, you know, embraced the importance of building it on open standards, building it on a solution where people control these credentials. So we definitely saw it as something new and transformative.

Riley Hughes: I see. The main reason I started this podcast was because I was interested in decentralized identity adoption, and then walking through the stories and extracting the learnings from it. So in terms of adoption… Did it meet or exceed or underwhelm your relative to your expectations?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: It exceeded my expectations. And, you know, I think a big part of it was it was just the right people at the right time. So, and, you know, like not just being humble here, but the tech was just one part of it. So it was fantastic that we could partner with MIT Media Lab. We had access to people like Neha Narula at the Digital Credentials Initiative at MIT to help us really think through why are we using blockchain, and that helped us be really at the sort of edge of, you know, starting to minimize reduction on the blockchain where possible. So that reputation and weight of MIT definitely helped a lot. But I think, you know, and then there was the founders, so Dan and Chris and their vision for it. The two things that maybe people don’t think about a lot, we had a brilliant designer named Dimi, and he was laser focused on usability and the packaging, along with Chris. So we were just deeply a design kind of focused company and aware that we’re building something new and it has to be just blazingly simple.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: So a lot of things that we were doing in terms of design, I see people, you know, maybe I feel like we were really ahead of the curve on that. And then lastly, our head of business development, Natalie Smolenski, she’s just phenomenal at articulating the vision and speaking to the aspirations of our customers. So I think we just really had an amazing mix of people that were all really passionate about what we were doing. And I think it helped that we were really early and that we were just building something that felt entirely new. And so I think through that combination, we were really able to speak to not just educational institutions. So a lot of educational institutions, like the registrars, are really bought into this goal of, yes, your credentials, your diploma transcript, these should be yours. You should be able to control them. And so at least on the supply side, we had a really good match there. And we also had a good fit in terms of governments looking to represent certifications for their employees and some of the more organizational aspects that come into that.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: I would say that the government side, what really worked well was they weren’t really looking to replace something. They were in the position of saying, like, they had not really had digital records of any form, and so they were in the position of building something new. And so this vision really resonated with them. So we were, you know, I would say, in thanks to that broad mix of talent that we brought in, really able to speak to people and, you know, get customers.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. So if I’m an educational institution and people from Learning Machine are talking to me about the vision and trying to convince me to become a customer and start issuing credentials, right, is the primary sell mostly around the vision of people owning their credentials, or is it more about the nuts and bolts of the cost savings associated with not having to answer the phone and issue paper transcripts anymore and, like, all of the kind of business operational processes and things like that, right? Is it more the vision, or was it more the nuts and bolts of the cost savings?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Right. Certainly for, you know, for Learning Machine and what was really resonating with our target customers was the vision. And so that was, you know, really what Natalie would focus on is describing the goals of, you know, we’re calling it more self-sovereign identity than, but the idea of people being in control of their records. And so certainly, you know, with these, whether it’s registrars, educational institutions who were really compelled by that mission, governments who, you know, looked at it as a way to build, you know, the better architecture for, you know, for themselves going forward, that really spoke to them. And so if you can’t fire your vendor, it’s not self-sovereign. And we meant that very deeply. Before we even went live, I made sure to figure out exactly how a customer would offboard, and all of the credentials would still be verifiable. And I remember even at the time thinking, like, this is amazing that we’re building things sort of from the start to sort of plan for our obsolescence or, you know, like plan for people to leave.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: But I think that telling, you know, like letting people know how deeply this means, like you really can get rid of us. And so that was one of the key points that they found really compelling in our commitment to portability and true control, individuals’ ability to control their records.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I know that there’s, I use a note-taking app that makes it really easy to export all my stuff. And that note-taking app has been very frustrating in the past. And I’ve wanted to leave, but I’ve been like, ah, it’s a hassle to leave, and I can just leave anytime because I’m not locked in. So I’ll just leave later. And here I am years later still paying them and all of that. And it is funny how paradoxically, making it easy to leave can often help you keep customers and help you acquire them in the first place as well. So that’s an interesting insight. And it’s oftentimes I found maybe sometimes a little bit more, there’s a little bit of promise to it that isn’t always real, but it sounds like you really built it for real from the beginning, and that’s pretty cool.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Yeah, and we even had runbooks for how people would do it, and I don’t know, no one ever did it. But yeah, I agree with you. I think there is, from a business perspective, there really is an art to that. I know I have one subscription that I have probably not used in four years, but for similar reasons, how you navigate that, I think that in the absence of clear formats, data standards around what it really means to migrate things across, it is also kind of hard for people to figure out what to do. In our case, we knew the credential standard that we were exporting to. In a lot of other cases, like say with note-taking apps, what sort of convention are you using? So you just come up with something. I know what started with gpr, for example, and the ability to export your data. I don’t know if people have ever exported your data from like Spotify or whatever. You can see some amazing stuff in there. A colleague of mine found out that they had profiled him as a cat dad. So it’s interesting that you can see.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: All the stuff on you, but then also what you might get to do with it over time, and especially if individuals decide that they want to share it with other organizations, a lot of interesting questions around those will come up.

Riley Hughes: If we go back to the journey, the learning machine journey, your expectations are exceeded, things are working, there’s credentials out there. Obviously, there’s two sides of the coin in these ecosystems. There are the issuers and there are the verifiers or relying parties. Can you speak to the process of interacting with that other side of the ecosystem? Did you also build just as intentionally that side of the ecosystem, or was your effort mostly focused on getting the credentials out there, or how did that part go?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Yeah, I think at the time, because it was so new, that kept us really busy just getting credentials issued. And to a large extent, a lot of the— it was clear what we were, I wouldn’t say replacing, but it was clear what we were targeting, and at least conceptually the use cases were clear. So I think I mentioned earlier the idea that a big part of it was that, you know, working with, say, governments who are doing something entirely new. Gillaad Rosner has said the same thing, but decentralized doesn’t work, and, you know, I totally agree with that. So I think for us, we were in a good situation to be doing that thing that’s entirely new. And I think for— us, I think, you know, so I feel like to this day, actually, we still struggle. Everyone struggles on the relying party side of it. And so that’s really where, you know, the idea of laser focusing on use case and the exact value proposition is key.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: I will say in learning and workforce credentials, I’m still very heavily involved in those communities, very actively committed to it in ASU Trusted Learner Network, a lot of the groups working with HR standards groups, things like that. And so learning and workforce credentials and issuing those, I think the challenge is that the value of it seems like a no-brainer, right? Like, people, you know, companies need to hire people, and there’s a lot of fraud, and it’s hard to verify. You know, there’s all the general identity verification challenges, but then verifying skills is harder. What was so odd is that it was so hard to just break into the HR systems and really communicate that value proposition. Companies have their own methods of doing things, especially when it comes to large companies. And I think that, like, in terms of laser focusing, what I found over time is that the value proposition may ultimately be something very mundane, and that’s where we sort of come over time. Like, I feel like now you can’t speak to that.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Like, it was great when you could speak to the vision of it because that’s very motivating and inspiring. So I think now it does feel like the winning propositions might be a lot more mundane. Like, you can shave off some fraction of a cost or the identity checks that a company might do at the beginning. And so at scale, maybe it makes a big difference. But it really, especially with now that we’re no longer in zero interest rate times and budgets are tightening, the idea of really articulating that, and that is a challenge and an opportunity, of course. It means that you really have to go deep into the specific, you know, opportunity that you’re pursuing. So I think that we are seeing more of that over time. That is something, though, in general, a lot of companies working in decentralized identity sort of did not do early on. And that was, you know, sort of where we see a lot of the, you know, sort of delay in adoption.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s definitely something to that. When others Zig, it makes sense to Zag dynamic, right? You know, at the beginning of this space, the self-sovereignty pitch might have worked better because it was new, and that was the interesting new thing. But now that pitch doesn’t seem to be resonating as well with the market or buyers or whatever, at least that I see, because it’s more common. And more people say it. It’s more ethereal and less concrete. And maybe now it makes sense to go more concrete in articulating the value propositions, just like how a year ago or something, the AI customized emails must have been working for somebody because I started getting them. And now I doubt they’re working for anybody because there’s so many of them now that it’s just got to be completely that once everybody starts doing it or whatever, you lose the edge, right? It loses its advantage. But yeah, that’s an interesting insight.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Exactly. And it does feel like, you know, maybe the meaning of it has gotten confusing over time. How do you say, like, people maybe associate it with different stacks. I still hear people associate it with blockchain, and so I think, you know, and you and I have talked about this a lot, like need for rebranding, revisiting what we’re doing here, what the goals are. I do feel like there is a huge opportunity for re-energizing and refocusing what we’re doing here, especially because we are starting to see some strong adoption of decentralized identity principles in forms of these with guidance, regulations, and aspects of verifiable credentials and related standards, and principles of the form of the desire to prevent correlation, the desire to minimize phone home, meaning contacting the issuer when something is verified. So we’re seeing huge success in a lot of forms. I think, though, there’s a lot of the sort of broader challenges that we were talking about in the earlier days that are worth coming back to, but we’ll get into that later.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. So the relying party market sounds a bit harder. Do you think that that was primarily because of coverage, or because of a chicken and egg is another way of saying it? For example, if there are a million credentials issued, that is, it sounds like a lot and seems like a big success story from, if you’re talking about your traction on the issuance side. But if you’re talking to an HR system that onboards, that operates in the United States where there are over 300 million people with jobs or whatever, and probably over 100 million onboarding each year or something, it’s just you’re talking about less than 1% of people are really covered under this. And it, you know, so is it more of a coverage and adoption challenge, do you think, to get the relying parties involved? Or do you just think maybe the pain point wasn’t acute enough and that the old way of doing things worked well enough that it didn’t— justify an update? Or do you have any kind of diagnostics on that?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Yeah, I mean, certainly for—I feel like at least in the educational credential space, there was so much interest and so much traction that, I mean, to some extent it felt like we will get to a point when there is some critical mass of these things, right? Of course, that’s a big proposition to make. I do think it was definitely a chicken-and-egg problem, and another aspect of it was it is certainly getting better over time. Certainly with Trinsic’s offerings, for example, and many other companies are making it easier to integrate. For a while, it was probably a very heavy lift for a lot of relying parties to try to integrate into it. It was maybe a whole new system, and maybe even if blockchain was brought in, it was just something that was kind of a non-starter. But the ability for customers to just easily integrate it with some sort of plug-in model or something like that. So I think it was a combination. Probably the chicken-and-egg problem is more important. And then that’s where, though, you know, we really benefit from government-backed efforts, frankly.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: You know, like in the educational workforce space, Gates Foundation, Walmart Foundation, groups like that are really behind a lot of these pilots where we’re focusing on things like credentials for frontline workers and things like that. I think over time the pilots also have gotten a lot smarter of saying, like, look, we really need to— Line up the people who are going to use these and make sure that we’ve addressed, you know, carved out something. This is an exact need, you know, verifying a worker has a certain skill for mobility. To a large extent, efforts like DHS, SBIP have addressed that in terms of finding situations where people will have to have some kind of credential. And so it still is just very much about laser focusing on the ecosystem. It’s a challenge for a single company to do it. And I think in terms of just getting that right set of partners to really make sure you can pull that off is key.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. The Learning Machine was eventually acquired. You must have been doing something right to get Highland interested. I wonder if there are founders out there listening that are making a run at it, what would you— what were some either lessons that you can extract from your time there or things that you think Learning Machine really did right that would be helpful for other people who maybe want to have a successful outcome like that as well?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Yeah, I think the laser focus on design, messaging, products that was really resonating with people. I think that that was— we did that very well. Being focused on the open source ecosystem from the start, that was also really key. And I think at the time, even though we weren’t entirely positioning ourselves as alternative to companies that were in the open badges space, it was clear that a lot of what we were doing, frankly, was education and addressing people’s concerns around use of the technologies that we were introducing, how we’re insulating against them. So I would say we spent a lot of time on education. People, like buyers, were starting to understand that, and they would start to ask. Companies that were selling open badge-based products, they would start to ask them, Well, do you support this? And maybe they didn’t know exactly what to ask for. Maybe they would say, Well, do you support blockchain? And, you know, really it was sort of teasing apart all of that.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: But I think understanding the importance of messaging, working with the community to understand what works and what resonates. So in our case, Highland really saw the value of the approach, the community and ecosystem that was associated with it. I think that was a key part, that we had open source all the critical libraries, basically everything that was not kind of the more mundane account management or whatever sort of stuff. Like we made it open, making it really easy for people to just get started. Also, to your point about the confidence that people have that it’s truly, you know, you can truly leave the platform by having everything out there, even if people are choosing to use the commercial product for its convenience. But that was a huge hook for a lot of people compared to maybe other platforms where they felt a bit more like, Well, my credentials are sort of locked into there. How do I get them out?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: So I think navigating that, it was definitely really challenging because we were—I think that the reason that I ended up doing some standards leadership was like I felt everyone was moving too slowly. And now over time I see the lens of it, but it’s like it’s a very lonely position doing something that’s so new. But I think making a stab at it, putting it out there, trying to engage with the community, I think that in the end the open standards community ends up being really receptive to the fact that you’re trying something, getting feedback. And I think in our case, by trying to find that right balance of all the components while not spending too much time waiting for standards to be ready really allowed us to demonstrate success.

Riley Hughes: Great, great answer. I want to ask, and to transition out of the kind of Learning Machine story and zoom to the rest of the space in your career. since then. You mentioned that Adoption exceeded your expectations there. Since then, you’ve done a couple of other things, including at Centre and now at the Decentralized Identity Foundation. Has adoption exceeded your expectations in these places as well? And if not, maybe what do you think is different? Or, yeah, I think that’s maybe a fine question.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: I would say if I were to go back in that time, we’re in many ways way more successful than I ever thought in terms of who’s even talking about these framework standards and everything. But we’re successful in ways that I kind of didn’t expect. So a lot of the conversations early on were very focused on new forms of trust and reputation beyond government identity. And so it’s interesting that governments are the ones, especially like eIDAS regulation and the basis for national identities, European wallets, things like that. It’s really coming from that. I think that the efforts that I’ve done over time, when I think about the focus and the problems of getting relying parties and things like that, that part, for things other than these government-backed identity efforts, those have really been a challenge. So, for example. When I was at Center, it was a great opportunity to really focus on the ecosystem and getting everything lined up.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: There was a huge philosophical alignment in the idea of, you know, control, portability, and, you know, there’s approaches to identity in the DeFi Web3 space that could really benefit from decentralized identity principles. So, you know, getting participants to align on that, I think the big challenges that maybe I underestimated was just how hard it is, or was at least at the time, for decentralized identity open source tools to really compete with the ease and ability to just make an NFT that represent, or soulbound token or whatever. Getting into wallets, getting these credentials to really make sense. In that community, the developer ease of use really came up. But then also reusable KYC credentials seems like a no-brainer. Getting that done is a whole other challenge. And what was great about that was the opportunity to work with people at Circle and Block and TBD, like their compliance teams, to really sort of laser focus on what does it mean to have reusable portable KYC, but then also the liability constraints that sort of get in your way.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: So then, you know, figuring out, like, what is that credential? What is that sort of killer use case credential that people find valuable? So I think, you know, yet again, it comes to, like, no matter how much you’ve thought about, like, the relying party and what it means to really build an ecosystem, like, think about it a lot more, really spell it out, make sure that it’s something that is technically feasible, but then also provides that value such that companies can rely on it.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, the developer ease of use point is an interesting one. At Trinsic, we spent a lot of time trying to alleviate that problem, but it can’t be the only thing, right? It’s not the only thing. There are the ecosystem challenges, and there are some of the other, just some of the other things you mentioned as well. I remember when I interviewed for a job at the Sovrin Foundation in 2017, I remember hearing about how the credit unions were going to issue a million credentials within the year or something, and the adoption would be—the adoption expectations were lofty at the time and, to this day, I think are still not quite where we thought they would be seven years ago or something. It seems like there are really two schools of thought. The first is that by getting a lot of the best minds in an area together and aligning on some common things, right, collectively, two plus two can equal five, and the output is greater than the sum of the parts. And I think we’ve seen that in certain ecosystems.

Riley Hughes: And then there’s another school of thought, and you heard me mention this before in a previous conversation, but I spoke to a founder of a company that is basically building something that looks and smells a lot like decentralized identity, but is totally proprietary. And his insight in the market was like, wow, these decentralized identity people are onto something. There’s a lot of value here, but they’re all too busy sitting in working groups and figuring out standards and trying to Build open source code that solves every edge case. And so they’re moving slow. So I’m just going to go take the concept and run at the market and get a bunch of customers with it and ignore all that stuff. And so there’s really these two schools of thought, right? Is the one may be a little slower on the uptake, but once it takes off, you have a whole ecosystem of parties that are aligned on something which will propel it seemingly faster than something else. And then you have another school of thought, which is just take the— just run ahead at something and ignore what everybody else is doing.

Riley Hughes: And it’s interesting to, if you were talking to somebody who were evaluating these two paths, right? Obviously, as the executive director of DIF, I can imagine where you would land on that. But I guess, how would you help them think through? what they should do and how they should balance maybe the two extremes to land on a happy medium that’s right for them?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Yeah, I mean, I ended up a little more on the standard side of things, and it was something that I do think it’s important for people to be very mindful of it, seeing how much demands it can be on someone’s time. I mentioned the idea earlier: you just cannot wait on people to do— like if you’re trying to build a product and you just end up way ahead on what people are trying to solve. Like the examples that I come up with are, you know, we were making sure revocation worked, and everyone else was like, no, we’re not going to think about revocation until 2022. And I don’t know, I think people are finally thinking about revocation, but it’s just, there’s so many, like, critical technical aspects that you just have to make a stab and go forward, document it, stay tuned and everything. I think in terms of the proprietary alternative, it’s like the real risk, of course, is that you’re sort of out on a limb doing something that just becomes obsolete. You’re really not sort of in tune with where the direction is going.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: And maybe if you have really strong lobbyists, you’re making sure to get in the room with the regulators or things like that. But it’s kind of a lot more work than just being engaged with this community, but then also, again, being very selfish about it, knowing what you want to get out of it. I think the thing is, like— There, it can be, I guess the identity community is probably some inherent reason. Like, it can be a feistier community than most, but I feel like it’s important for the leadership to support realistic expectations for companies involved, make sure that it’s easy for them to get access to the information that they need, not expect them to change their whole roadmap waiting for a standard or something like that, and supporting them and their ability to share their lessons learned or report back. I think that there’s a way to navigate it such that you’re not being just sucked in to all of these working group meetings. I mean, it is wonderful, and I’m always surprised when I see some people who spend so much time in these meetings.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: But then you think about, from a company perspective, unless that is your company’s job to sit in there and move these forward, or you’re getting contracts around it, like you just have to be very selfish and intentional about how you’re doing that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s a good nuanced view. I appreciate that. This has been an awesome conversation. I’m really glad we got to do this, and appreciate your generosity in sharing your perspectives here. Do you have anything to actually— so we like to ask everybody who comes on the show, tell me what the future of identity looks like to you.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Right. So I mentioned a few times the unevenness of success in decentralized identity and identity credentials, the idea that— Government identity is having a lot of progress. I think what still remains my north star, what excites me and motivates me, let’s come back to this. So I’m really motivated by the lifelong learning, accomplishment, and skills credentials and the ability for people to carry that with them. You know, so identity credentials, including national identity, if that’s relevant, or mDL, whatever, that’s a critical part. What I find really motivating is the possible transformation that comes from the ability to establish trust in a broad range of claims. These are the sort of conversations that I’d like to get us back to to ensure that we’re continuing to build towards. So things like proof of reliable payment history to open up access to credit, helping people find better career paths and opportunities by the ability to establish trust in this broad possible range of credentials, and then also enabling business models that don’t necessitate data silos.

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Like the step one of the business doesn’t have to be go get all the data, become the winning platform, so that then you can learn and make recommendations. There’s a lot of new opportunities that are possible if we can will this into existence. And I think in terms of the possible transformation to people’s lives, that’s really the vision that keeps me going. And we want to be practical and make sure, like, what’s achievable right now, not get stuck on the chicken and egg problem, but charting a path to this kind of future is really exciting to me.

Riley Hughes: Great. That’s a motivating vision for the future for sure. Kim, do you have anything to plug? If people want to learn more, get in touch with you, or get involved at the Decentralized Identity Foundation, where would you point them?

Kim Hamilton Duffy: Yeah, so come to our site. It’s identity.foundation. If you want to just sort of casually check out what we do, what we talk about, Lamari, who’s our amazing community lead, she leads DIF coffee breaks every Thursday on X, formerly Twitter. And so those are quick 30-minute conversations. You can just listen to some of the people who are building in the space. And last week, for example, she had some really compelling people who are focusing on building government-backed credential based on decentralized identity. And so I think that there’s a lot of ranging from different levels of adoption, people who are leaders in the space like Edmund McMullen from DISCO, and we want to get you there someday. So it’s a really good way to see what we’re up to and hear from the leaders in identity.

Riley Hughes: Okay, great. Thanks for listening. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out on Twitter at Trinsic underscore ID and visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the ID tech products of the future.