Buenos Aires to Create Digital Identity Platform

Buenos Aires, Argentina, has begun work on a blockchain-based digital identity platform with the aim of giving the city's residents control over their personal data.

The city on Tuesday published a whitepaper with the proposal for the platform, which will be operational between the last quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of next year, Diego Fernández, secretary of innovation and digital transformation of Buenos Aires, told CoinDesk.

The platform will be decentralized, public and non-permissioned, said Fernandez, adding that it will be available for use by any organization, government administration or company wishing to mint verifiable identities, without needing the approval of the city.

“[The motivation is] to give rise to a new paradigm in which secure transactions are agile; where verification of necessary documentation is fast, reliable and private … that people are in control of their identity, and they decide where their information is stored and who can access it," the whitepaper stated.

In the next 90 days, the city will define the architecture of the platform and decide what blockchain it will be built on. After that, Fernández said, it will take about six months to develop the platform.

"There are a lot of very relevant architectural decisions to be made in the face of preserving privacy and allowing it to be a non-permissioned public network,” he said, adding that the platform should be able to connect with different blockchains in the future.

Among those involved in the project so far are Santiago Siri, a contributor to the Proof of Humanity project and developer of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) ERC-20 token; Leo Elduayen, CEO and co-founder of Koibanx, a Latin American asset tokenization and blockchain financial infrastructure company; and Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, founder and CEO of RSK Labs, which operates a smart contract blockchain secured by the Bitcoin network.

Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, has a population of almost 3 million.