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Using ledger technology to manage your digital identity

Blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the currencies associated with them have been on a wild rollercoaster over the last three years. The technology is still very immature, but this quiet time is the best situation. All the buzz and excitement is gone so developers and innovators have the time and peace to work.

Paul Loeffler
12 Apr 2019
Using ledger technology to manage your digital identity

Using ledger technology to manage your digital identity

At Digital Transformation World in Nice this May, Paul Loeffler, Managing Partner, Institute 4 Entrepreneurship will be part of a panel discussing how to realize the value of blockchain and the token economy. Hear some of his insights below before the big event.

Blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the currencies associated with them have been on a wild rollercoaster over the last three years. The technology is still very immature, but this quiet time is the best situation. All the buzz and excitement is gone so developers and innovators have the time and peace to work. Crypto technologies and currencies are not going away, they need the time to develop, to mature.

Let’s review the key features of DLT – blockchain being just one type.

  • Ledger - a series of events or list of transactions. Each event is described as a block and each block is linked to the next one.

  • Distributed – the ledger exists on multiple machines, each with its own copy of the list, so changing or manipulating the history is extremely hard since there is no single source ledger.

  • Consensus – a set of rules for establishing and confirming that an event or transaction has occurred and should then be shared with the other machines and their lists.

  • Secure – each block or transaction is cryptographically locked, so no changes can occur without leaving a clear trace.

  • Immutable – ledgers can only add blocks to the chain, so the history is permanent.


A DLT for managing and solving critical issues of digital identity and data privacy management is powerful and the focus here. The value of such a system to the telecom industry has been discussed in a Catalyst project presented last year in Nice. Learn more here.

The EU has led the way to addressing these issues with GDPR. Other parts of the world are following closely with PDPA in Singapore, for example. Even the US government has taken up the issue, going so far as to reconsider decades old monopoly legislation.

In the blockchain world, the issue of identity, has been under discussion and a focus of work for a many companies and governments, for example:

  1. Estonia – e-Identity and e-Residency programs have taken all the government identification and functions online. All based on blockchain technology.

  2. Switzerland – eID for the Kanton of Schaffhausen was developed with the technology and business partner, Procivis.

  3. US – a startup in San Francisco has developed a secure identity platform for consumers as they interact with vendors, i.e. wherever they need share their private information.


These projects intend to harness the power of personal computing to enable citizens and consumers to manage their digital identity and personal data. To do this, we need to understand computing power and tokenization.

Since “The supercomputer in your pocket” was published about four years ago, the power of mobile phone chips has increased even further. Consumers have today more computing power than many desktop PCs. With the smartphone, we can generate cryptographic keys to secure consumer data right on the smart phone.

With this platform we can share personal, sensitive data by converting that data into a seemingly meaningless set of characters. This is tokenization, which by the way has been around on the internet when Netscape developed its server in the 90’s. This is how credit card transactions are safe on the web. The same idea offers the opportunity for much more personal control and security of data sharing.

By allowing customers to manage and share tokenized versions of their digital identity and personal data, telcos can offer a very high value service which could strengthen the industry and provide richer consumer experiences by simplifying payment processing and partnerships with third party services, to name just two.

This must be the new level of customer centricity in the age of digital transformation.