Buenos Aires, Argentina, is working on a blockchain-based digital identity platform to help users get more control over their personal data, Coindesk wrote Thursday (March 31).
The city published a whitepaper this week to propose the platform. It should be operational between the last quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023, according to Diego Fernández, secretary of innovation and digital transformation of Buenos Aires.
“[The motivation is] to give rise to a new paradigm in which secure transactions are agile; where verification of necessary documentation is fast, reliable and private … that people are in control of their identity, and they decide where their information is stored and who can access it,” the whitepaper stated.
The platform will be “decentralized, public and non-permissioned,” according to Fernández. And it will be available for use by any organization, government administration or company minting verifiable identities, without city approval.
The city plans in the next 90 days to define the architecture of the platform, deciding what blockchain it would be built on — and after that, it will take around six months to develop it all.
There are several people involved — Santiago Siri, a contributor to the Proof of Humanity project and developer of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) ERC-20 token, and Leo Elduayen, CEO and co-founder of Koibanx, a Latin American asset tokenization and blockchain financial infrastructure company.
In addition, there’s Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, the founder and CEO of RSK Labs. RSK Labs operates a smart contract blockchain secured by the Bitcoin network.
The question of identity and privacy has been grappled with by businesses as of late, with a PYMNTS report noting that 67% of U.S. businesses aren’t in compliance with the European Union’s digital identity protection laws.
Related: Study: 67% of US Websites Violate EU Data Protection Law
The violations are varied, with 43% not offering users a way to opt out of selling data, 55% not notifying users of cookies and 32% containing ad trackers.
