Spark New Zealand announced it has become a Founding Steward of the Sovrin Network, which is enabling the development of self-sovereign identity (SSI) on the internet.
The Sovrin commitment is the first initiative arising from last week’s announcement that Spark is forming a new subsidiary business entity, led by Dr Claire Barber, to focus on long-term, large-scale new business opportunities arising from a range of emerging technologies.
Spark is the first organisation in New Zealand or Australia, and one of only three telecommunications-based companies globally, to become a Sovrin Steward. More than 50 organisations worldwide, covering a wide range of industry sectors, have joined as Stewards to date.
Organisations developing applications that run on the Sovrin Network aim to transform the current approach to online identity – with a range of potential benefits including lowering transaction costs, facilitating privacy by enabling individuals to have greater control their own personal information, limiting opportunity for cybercrime, and simplifying identity challenges in fields as varied as healthcare, banking, IoT and voter fraud.
In its formative stages as a global public utility, the Sovrin Network (sovrin.org) will use the power of a distributed ledger. The Sovrin ledger is operated by Stewards, trusted organisations within the ecosystem who have agreed to abide by the requirements in the Sovrin Trust Framework and are responsible for operating the “nodes” (computer network servers) that maintain the ledger. Stewards also, as a group, accept or reject any changes to the ledger-specific portions of the Sovrin open source code. The Trust Framework is administered by the Sovrin Foundation, a nonprofit organisation based in Utah, United States.
As part of its commitment as a Sovrin Steward, Spark has built its own distributed ledger node that will be switched on later this week and connected live to the Sovrin Network.
