How Dock Solves Many of Today’s Digital Credentialing Challenges

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Although most aspects of our everyday lives have become more digitized, several industries struggle to catch up. This includes credentials, which continue to be primarily physically issued.

While technology has allowed for the emergence of digital credentials, they present numerous challenges including the verification of their authenticity. Blockchain-based company Dock aims to solve these issues and provide a more reliable alternative.

Physical and Digital Credentials: The Issues

Whether it’s passports, ID cards, driver’s licenses, or college diplomas, credentials have been physically issued for centuries. An issue with credentials in a hard copy format is that as people are required to carry credentials with them on a daily basis the risk of them being lost or damaged is increased. This can lead to time-consuming and bureaucratic processes in order to obtain replacements.

To avoid these issues, recent developments have led to the emergence of digital credentials. Essentially, they contain the same information as the physical copies but can be stored on smartphones and can be distributed online. However, they also present a few challenges; primarily, they are prone to counterfeit and require manual verification processes.

The Solution That Dock Offers

Launched in 2018, Dock’s mission has been to remove central intermediaries from the issuance and management of credentials. Because of a few initial hurdles with already existing networks that lacked sufficient scalability, interoperability, and security, the company decided to develop its own decentralized network enabling organizations to create verifiable credentials.

The main differences and benefits of creating credentials on Dock’s Network are that they are cryptographically verifiable. This solves the most significant issue with existing digital credentials, as it ensures they can be trusted through the use of cryptography, removing the need for manual verification.

Dock has built its own custom blockchain specifically for verifiable credentials offering higher performance at lower costs than some congested public blockchains. Dock also utilize W3C standards throughout their solution providing interoperability with other networks using the same standards while additionally providing users the ability to control their own data.

The company recently announced the formation of the Dock Association, a Swiss non-profit organization whose responsibilities include establishing and providing ongoing governance, overseeing the promotion of the network, and driving network adoption.

Companies wishing to employ the Dock network have a simplified process ahead of them. Dock offers a Software Developer Kit (SDK) which provides support for:

• The creation of Decentralized Identities (DID) in compliance with W3C standards.
• The issuance and presentation of verifiable credentials.
• Credential schema using the JSON standard.
• Revocation registries to facilitate credential revocation.

For information on Dock’s mainnet launch, head to https://www.dock.io/mainnet

Any organizations looking to find out more about issueing on the Dock network can get in touch at marketing AT dock.io

Developers looking to start building can head over to the company’s developer docs at https://docs.dock.io/build

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