Services marketplace (November - December)

Initially the focus was on how to solve the issues behind current service marketplaces (servnetwork.org/whitepaper). Solving these problems meant giving back control to professionals helping them own their identity and reputation, easily chose who they want to work with and also be able to govern how the network they use is run and improved.

In the current market the cost of starting a marketplace is too high due to the chicken and egg problem. Even if the professional side of the marketplace could be bootstrapped to a high enough number of providers there would still be the issue of generating traffic. Currently this would be mostly limited to using expensive paid search ads. Couple the cost factor with the amount of resources to get the marketplace started and it became clear that a marketplace was not a good starting point.

Professional profiles (December - January)

Further thought and feedback led to investigation on focussing just on identity. If the professional profile could be useful on its own in enough contexts then this would make for a better starting point both in terms of lowering development requirements and also removing the high cost to make a product that's useful immediately.

There were a number of services and protocols that could benefit from the data from a professional profile, some of which are mentioned on the website - servnetwork.org. This list is not exhaustive of all the potential benefits there might be!

Self sovereign identity (SSI) research (January - February)

With professional profiles making a good place to start the next focus was on investigating how this would integrate into the self sovereign identity space. What would be need to be standardised or created?

The DID standard provides people, organisations and even connected devices a way to create decentralized identifiers that can be used anywhere online to represent their identity. These identifiers can be resolved to be stored on a number of different distributed ledgers (both permissioned like Sovrin and permissionless like on Ethereum). DID identifiers resolve to a unique DID document which can also have verifiable credentials linked to the identity holder.

The more research done on the SSI space the more it became clear of the importance that any standardised schema of a professional profile should also interoperable across distributed ledgers. No vendor or implementation should lock a professional into a single approach.