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After two months of research with the ZK-ID team, I felt like it was time to reflect on our learnings and draw some conclusions. Please, consider this a personal analysis. It won’t be entirely unbiased and objective, but I still hope it can stimulate further discussions and also help any new team member to get a sense of what we’ve done.

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1. Early stages

At first, Andy raised some questions in a document created in March 2024: ‣.

The goals at that time were:

• Identify identity projects in the Ethereum ecosystem.
• Create a framework to group and analyze them.
• Compare the pros/cons of each and create categories such as usability, trust assumptions etc.
• Find gaps in the ecosystem to build strategies on how PSE can help.

The focus from the beginning has always been not to compete (e.g., creating alternative solutions to existing ones), but to leverage the expertise in PSE to push the use of privacy-focused and zero-knowledge technologies, with a primary emphasis on how PSE projects that fall within the identity domain can be integrated and used in the SSI ecosystem.

It was also already clear that the digital identity ecosystem was extensive enough to make it very complex to capture all verticals, at least at an early stage of research. The hope was to scrape the surface just enough to catalyze discussions and inspire ideas.

2. ZK-ID’s journey

As we’ll see, we’ve made several advances since then, especially in recent months. Progress will be summarized in 3 main phases.

Phase 1 - General SSI research

Based on the document mentioned earlier, another document was created: PSE Identity Research. Zoey conducted deep and extensive research on SSI to find where PSE can have a positive impact in the identity space and what the ecosystem is missing.

This work has been crucial to better understanding the SSI principles, and some conceptual challenges, like the identity trilemma. SSI is not just a framework related to technology, it is a vision with clear core values and is part of a process of digitization of people’s identities that needs to take into consideration non-technological aspects, such as the impact on society, possible dystopias, and misuses. Generative Identity is an interesting working group with a more interdisciplinary perspective, which we should keep clearly in mind.

In addition to SSI principles, the taxonomy and key players in the ecosystem (such as holder, issuer, subject, verifier, credentials, and identities) were also explored. The various components of the ecosystem act on a stack in which there are many different technologies. After a review of crypto native and general audience applications, a list of the projects in the identity space was grouped according to certain categories: attestations, tooling, KYC/AML, agents and key management, reputation and credentials, standards, etc. Across the projects examined, the two main W3C standards were almost always central: credentials (VCs) and decentralized identities (DIDs).

Of the 83 projects found, 28 were manually filtered out, mainly removing those that were no longer active and not open-source. An analysis of Github statistics then identified those with the most traction: . Further filtering then allowed 6 of them to be analyzed in detail: PrivadoID, Veramo, Block Certs, BrightID, Gitcoin Passport, Sovrin. In addition, other notable projects not included in the analysis are listed here: ☝🏼 Notable Projects/ Orgs .

Overall, this phase allowed us to get a clearer picture of the SSI ecosystem and begin to theorize what the main gaps, needs, and areas of exploration might be: