The popularity of self-sovereign identity (SSI) solutions has surged over the recent years powered by the unforeseen urgencies of the pandemic, increasing decentralisation and transition towards Web 3.0, to name a few. In addition to earlier SSI applications by the United Kingdom’s (UK) Financial Conduct Authority’s know your customers (KYC) trial, the technology has been used to implement the UK’s National Healthcare Service Staff Passport and the IATA Travel Pass. Both governments and companies are looking to integrate them – Twitter, Salesforce, Avast are just a few to mention. SSI has become one of the future-proof go tos.
Whether public or private, centralised or decentralised, there is a common denominator for all – a need for digital trust. However, current identity models are inefficient and built around organisations. In the United States alone, identity theft losses cost $502.5 billion in 2019 and increased to $712.4 billion in 2020. In the UK, annual UK-issued debit and credit cards identity thefts reached a value of £29.7 million in 2020. Digital trust is currently predicated on constant check-ups. In order to prove an attribute or claim, a third party is needed to certify or verify that claim.
Unlike the existing system, self-sovereign identity is a user-centric and user-controlled approach to exchange information much safer.
The disrupting technology could be used everywhere from banking to metaverse, travel to healthcare. SSI has no limits in its application across sectors.
How does one quantify the impact of a paradigm, which will completely transform how we interact with identity and, more broadly, authentic or trusted data?
While there have been a few attempts to understand the value of the digital identity space, there is a significant gap in qualifying the total addressable market (TAM) for SSI. Therefore, this whitepaper aims to establish a baseline TAM for self-sovereign identity specifically, which can then be iterated upon by the community.
Our estimates suggest that the potential of the SSI market totals ~$0.55Tr; this figure is solely based on the areas of opportunity we have focused on in this whitepaper. There are certain to be more areas of opportunity as the scale of SSI impacts is yet to be understood and determined.
If you’re interested in contributing to this research or have access to relevant data, please get in touch ([email protected]). We’d love to collaborate with you. It is an important subject that is going to impact our economy across many levels, and understanding its impacts most certainly deserves further research.
