Abstract

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) works with innovation communities across the nation and around the world to harness the commercial R&D ecosystem for technologies with government applications and to coinvest in and accelerate technology transition-to-market [11].
Within SVIP, the Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) portfolio is supporting technology developers whose innovative technologies have many uses and applications, including digitally issuing currently paper-based credentials, creating immutable records and audit logs of data, supply chain traceability, and privacy respecting essential work and task licenses for workers and individuals. The effort is, in some cases, utilizing blockchain and DLT solutions with emphasis on architecture, standards, and interoperability. In all cases, the intent is to overlay any solution, whether it is using blockchain, DLTs, or non-ledger-based technologies, with global, openly developed, standardsbased data models and application programming interfaces (APIs). This will prevent the development of closed technology platforms and ensure the availability of a competitive marketplace of diverse, interoperable solutions for government and industry to draw upon to deliver cost effective and innovative solutions that are in the public interest [11]. To this end, the solutions being developed under SVIP are based, in part, on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Verifiable Credentials Data Model (VCDM)[90] and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) standards [89].

Date

October 15, 2021

Authors

Nick Genise, Balenson David