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KABN Network, a Canadian fintech company that prides itself on creating the proper infrastructure for verifying, managing, and monetizing online identity, has unveiled the formation of a consortium of industry leaders to develop a new system for verifying digital healthcare credentials in order for businesses to securely verify COVID-19 immunization records of customers. According to the press release shared with Coinspeaker, the healthcare credential verification capabilities are expected to launch during the first quarter of 2021, with the expectation that a COVID-19 vaccination program will be put in place by then.
Online identity is constantly evolving and the need for secure, reliable, and easy verification of one’s identity has grown exponentially during the global pandemic. While social distancing, mask mandates, and other measures are still needed to help curb the spread of the virus, the implementation of an easy-to-access and widely-distributed vaccine will likely be the final solution to ending the pandemic and getting back to normal life. However, this will require that at least 70% of a population receiving the vaccine to reach herd immunity. Tracking and verifying COVID-19 immunization records will prove to be difficult with traditional methods of paper that are hard to verify, leaving room for false documents to be used. That is where the leveraging of a digital identity network like KABN can prove to be necessary to verify COVID-19 immunization records in real-time.
Here’s how it works: The KABN will utilize its Liquid Avatar platform, a cloud-based digital identity management platform, to allow users’ identities to be verified through its biometrically-secure application. With this new ecosystem, qualified Healthcare professionals will be able to issue a verifiable credential to users who’ve received their COVID-19 vaccine. When a request is made by a participating verifier, users will have the choice to share this private credential. This enables venues and other facilities to verify both the issued credential and the known user in real-time to grant entry or access to services.
Since the KABN Network Self-sovereignty platform is designed to give people ownership of their data and identity, users will have complete control over their digital assets and can share their COVID-19 vaccine credential while keeping the rest of their data and credentials private. This program will not only be able to verify identity credentials for the COVID-19 vaccine, but will also be able to support a wide range of immunizations and healthcare records. With the formation of this health verification management ecosystem, KABN Network and its partners will grant access to its verification system for healthcare issuers and customers at no cost. Verifiers who want access to the system will be charged a nominal subscription and a micro-payment for each verification.
“We want to empower users to return to public life and the things they once did freely, pre-COVID-19, with ease and continued safety, with this and future credentials,” said David Lucatch, CEO of KABN. “Our goal is to help get everyone back to life as efficiently and effectively as possible, so a sense of “normality” can be reestablished
The digital verifiable credential is one of the many KABN Network initiatives to promote the use of digital verification and management systems. KABN has now joined the likes of IBM (NYSE: IBM) in pioneering breakthroughs within the digital identity space. Upon verification of any identity using the KABN network’s provision, only the owner of the credential can grant access to verifiers to view the credentials, at no cost to the user.
Delivery via Consortium
The KABN Network will be joined by other industry-leading partners who will leverage their core services to contribute to the initiative, including Lumedic Exchange to power the healthcare credential ecosystem; Loop Insights, a leader in automatic contact tracing; The Campus Agency, to support on campus programs at over 2,000 US Colleges and Universities; and TripXpertz, an organization that works with over 1,000 travel and tourism boards, airlines, wholesalers and resorts. This partnership is built on a Trust over IP (TOIP) open standards framework and the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) specifications for decentralized identifiers for credential management.
The KABN Network Digital Identity Ideology
The KABN Network specializes in verification, management, and monetization of self-sovereign identity, defined as “a lifetime portable identity for any person, organization, or thing that does not depend on a centralized authority and can never be taken away.” KABN’s core ideology is that “ownership of identity is a basic human right and individuals should be the primary beneficiary of any use of their identity.” To strengthen and validate this notion, the KABN Network consists of 4 key products, including KABN ID, Liquid Avatar, KABN Card, and KABN Kash.
KABN Network outlined on its platform, “as the digital universe continues to expand, there is an ever-increasing need to verify online identity. Additionally, Individual users also need to manage their public and private data and benefit from its use. This is applicable, for e-commerce, education, health, financial services, government programs, or other instances where a user needs to share personal or public information and where the business needs to validate that user.” And that is exactly what this consortium is championing.
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