Sovereign Identity and “The Wallet of Wallets”

by Dane Keller Rutledge, Esq.

Managing your personal identity securely and productively is of prime importance. If you don’t manage your own personal identity, others will manage it for you. Commercial enterprises mine your personal identity, personal interests, and personal buying patterns in order to refine their business models and increase their revenues. But who you are, in all aspects, is your personal property and you ought to be able to manage and protect it.

These long-established principles of identity and property rights are recently being referred to as “self-sovereign identity” (SSI). Though no consensus exists on an exact definition, SSI is generally described as the notion that every human or organised business or other legally-existing entity ought to own its own personal identity information. SSI doctrine also holds that every individual ought to be able to decide how, where, when, and with whom which portion of the individual’s personal identity information is to be shared. Implicitly, personal identity information is to be stored in custody by the individual, not by third-party entities. Of course, these boundaries are not perfectly inviolable, as there will always be personal identity information recorded and maintained by governments and their associated agencies.

It must also be recognised that any individual’s capacity to protect personal identity information is, as a practical matter, delimited by the efficacy and security of the technology available to the individual.

Particularly in this new world in which humans acquire digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EOS, the effective and secure management of personal identity information is fundamental to each individual’s ability to protect personal property. Many so-called digital “wallets” are subject to viruses and hacking, resulting in devastating losses. And if an individual’s digital assets are instead held in custody by centralised trading exchanges, then the short history of the digital assets marketplace demonstrates how vulnerable those exchanges are to external hacking and insider corruption.

To buy and sell digital assets, one must have a device to support such transactions. Ideally, such a device should be reliable, secure, and convenient and easy to use. I called for just such a device in my writings on the fundamental components of a comprehensive Digital Assets Ecosystem (DAE).

The Volentix DAE developed its native digital wallet application VERTO for the purpose of delivering to each individual user the tools necessary to curate his or her digital assets without the need otherwise to trust custody of those assets to one or more all-too-vulnerable centralized exchanges. VERTO also provides the prospect of decoupling precious personal identity information from centralized servers, so that those personal data are kept away from prying eyes (and fingers). VERTO’s utility features can be accessed by using Volentix’s utility-based native digital currency VTX. Volentix’s development team refers to VERTO as “the wallet of wallets.”

Dane Keller Rutledge, Esq., is an attorney, a scientist, and the creator of the Digital Assets Ecosystem Base Code (DAEBC)

CAUTION/DISCLAIMER: Please do not take any of what is written in this article as legal advice (or, for that matter, as advice of any kind). One should always seek advice of one’s own legal counsel and/or other relevant professionals.

Copyright 2019
Dane Keller Rutledge
All rights reserved