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Enhanced Ecosystems

What are Enhanced Ecosystems?

Service providers are large enterprises or government organisations that create digital trust networks to exchange value among participants. Large digital trust networks can include numerous issuers, holders and verifiers interacting in multiple ways and exchanging various verifiable credentials. This makes it hard to know what information and entities can be trusted, unless each network member maintains their own list of trusted sources.

Enhanced Ecosystems are part of the MATTR VII platform. They enable service providers to define policies regarding valid issuers, credential types and verifiers. In an enhanced ecosystem issuers, verifiers, and holders only need to trust a single service provider, and delegate managing the trust network to them.

Service providers who implement Enhanced Ecosystems augment their ecosystem by applying two layers of trust:

  • Cryptographic trust: Based on the ability to use cryptographic tools to verify credentials issuers, signatures, status and validity periods.

  • Ecosystem trust: Based on the ability to trust entities who are included in well defined and maintained lists of valid issuers, credential types and verifiers.

Creating an Enhanced Ecosystem

Creating an Enhanced Ecosystem comprises the following steps:

  1. Create an ecosystem: Create an ecosystem to act as the overarching entity that would include all the other components.

  2. Create valid participants: Once an ecosystem is in place, you can create valid participants that can be trusted within it. Participants can be issuers and/or verifiers.

  3. Configure valid credential types: Configure what credential types are valid in the ecosystem.

  4. Create a policy: Create policies that define what participants are allowed to issue/verify what credentials in the ecosystem.

Operating within an Enhanced Ecosystem

Once an Enhanced Ecosystem is established, the following capabilities are available:

  • Retrieve a policy: Retrieve the ecosystem policies and use the information within them to apply your own business logic.