China's BSN to Launch Decentralized Identity (DID) Project, Becoming the Largest-Scale Identity Verification Experiment

According to the press release from BSN, the Blockchain-based Service Network platform officially supported by the Chinese government, announced its decentralized identity (DID) project yesterday, aiming to spark innovation within the existing verification system in Chinese society.

Background Information

What is BSN

The Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) is a blockchain infrastructure planned by the China National Information Center, serving as an early test for China's national team in the crypto industry.

BSN aims to unify the current fragmented Web3 facilities by providing a unified infrastructure across services, enterprises, and underlying architectures through government resources. It aims to reduce the cost of industry service construction, promote current regulatory amendments, research and develop applications, lay a solid foundation for future industrial development, and ultimately become an important foundation for China's blockchain infrastructure.

What is DID

Decentralized Identity (DID) is a new type of digital certificate that allows users to control their own identity data. DID can address the issues of fragmented and centralized certificate authorities, reduce verification friction costs, and mitigate cybersecurity risks.

DID has broad potential applications in the native Web3 environment, including DAO citizen verification, fair minting of NFTs, online reputation, decentralized social networking, and more, making it a crucial aspect of Web3 development.

In addition to its online applications, DID can also serve as a new component in real-world industries, enhancing the security and uniformity of existing products or services in the identity management field. The DID project promoted by the Chinese government is an example of this.

China's Government Promotes DID Project

According to a BSN press release, the Chinese government is attempting to put the original digital identity certificate—Citizen Identity Network Trust Certificate (CTID)—on the chain, providing DID identities to the entire population of 1.4 billion people, and is expected to use the CTID digital identity chain as the underlying architecture.

CTID is already an essential element in various aspects of Chinese people's lives, such as transportation, shopping, and healthcare services, where CTID can be used to verify user identities. Combining CTID with blockchain is expected to generate new applications such as:

• Using various encrypted services on BSN and completing verification procedures faster while maintaining privacy.
• Customizable business DIDs, providing individual users with business DIDs, allowing users to have both personal and business identities simultaneously, thus providing flexibility.
• Providing decentralized verification capabilities for personal identity certificates, allowing users to prove their identity and conduct business in different scenarios by presenting the certificate.

BSN DID services can provide the infrastructure for DID authentication for any existing system, meeting the needs of various business scenarios for identity verification, transaction verification, and managing digital assets and personal information security.

BSN DID services are completely open source and free to use to attract more businesses and institutions to adopt them.

Opportunities in the Chinese Blockchain Market

The BSN DID project will allow Chinese people to use DID for anonymous registration and login to most domestic services, enhancing the privacy of individuals and businesses in that market and accelerating the verification process.

In such a unique social system and market environment, the BSN DID project can be considered one of the largest Web3 social experiments.