Digital Identity · 2026-06-27

Strategic Identity Asymmetry: Why Digital Infrastructure Governance Fails Where Technology Succeeds in Brazil, Nigeria, and the Philippines

SSRN

Cross-border digital identity interoperability fails when states can issue credentials but cannot export trust. The paper's central contribution is to relocate the binding constraint from protocols and enrollment infrastructure to assurance grammar, accreditation authority, trusted lists, and institutional capacity.

Standards, Protocols & Interoperability · 2026-06-26

Control Is the Operative Fact: A Three-Layer Model for Digital Identity, Transferable Records, and Platform-Independent Authority

OWG Connect — Open Trade Infrastructure Series (Discussion Paper v1.0)

The paper's most consequential governance claim is that proprietary electronic bill of lading platforms have not solved the control problem but merely relocated it: authority over a trade document now depends on a commercial operator's continued existence, goodwill, and terms rather than on any independently verifiable cryptographic state. OpenETR's Three-Layer Model is architecturally correct in separating correctness, control, and recognition as distinct concerns, but the paper has not yet specified who governs the governance layer itself, how the attestation and trust-registry infrastructure will be built and held to account, or what enforcement and redress mechanisms will operate when cryptographic control and legal recognition conflict.

Digital Identity · 2026-05-05

Self-Sovereign Identity and the Future of Digital Trust: From India to the World

Data Security Council of India / Digi Yatra Foundation / National Centre of Excellence

The paper frames self-sovereign identity as a strategic shift from institutional data accumulation to holder-mediated verification, but its governance model still depends on future trust registries, legal recognition, sectoral mandates, revocation controls, and redress institutions that are not yet operationalized.

Digital Identity · 2026-04-06

A Cryptographic Framework for Proof of Personhood

Reference page for IACR ePrint paper

The paper usefully formalizes privacy-preserving proof of personhood as a cryptographic problem, but its real governance challenge lies upstream of the proofs: who is allowed to issue personhood, what social relationships count, and how those judgments are revoked, contested, and made legible across institutions.