BlockCypher and Shocard have partnered to provide the market’s first identity management solution that scales across public and permissioned Blockchains.
Identity management challenges have increased dramatically as rising attacks on centralized identity databases give hackers almost unfettered access to millions of user records. Multiple companies within the same industry duplicate expensive efforts to maintain identity information for operational purposes, audits, and regulatory compliance. These efforts cost banks, healthcare companies, and government organizations hundreds of millions of dollars a year in manual labor and redundant systems.
“Increasing security costs, the pervasive use of social security numbers as universal identifiers, and the fact that policy is often multiple steps behind criminals leads to an identity crisis that screams for a new way of protecting identity,” says Catheryne Nicholson, CEO of BlockCypher.
As a consequence, government agencies, financial institutions, healthcare providers, airlines, and travel companies are all investigating how Blockchain solutions can address identity management. Public Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum provide the benefits of immutability and transparency in an open and trustless environment. Permissioned Blockchains address access control and the scalability to support thousands of transactions per second.
ShoCard uses BlockCypher, the leading Blockchain Web Services™ (BWS) company, to provide identity solutions on a combination of public and permissioned Blockchains that can be integrated with existing company systems. ShoCard provides end users an application to manage and control the visibility of their data using both types of Blockchains. BlockCypher allows companies to switch from one chain to another seamlessly by providing the same APIs across Blockchains.
“It allows enterprises who are not yet ready to adopt a public Blockchain to first deploy a permissioned Blockchain-based identity management solution and then decide whether to move to a public Blockchain,” says Armin Ebrahimi, CEO of Shocard. “The flexibility that BlockCypher gives in connecting multiple Blockchains is critical in providing the transparency, access, and scalability our customers need.”
BlockCypher Identity™ accelerates the development of Blockchain-based identity management applications. BlockCypher Identity™ includes:
- Address API – generates addresses for identity transactions
- Data Endpoint – stores encrypted information
- Identity Wallet API – groups multiple identity addresses together
- Transaction API – enables publishing transactions to store an identity into a Blockchain
- Metadata API – adds informative descriptions.
To hear more about use cases for identity management on the Blockchain, please join BlockCypher and Shocard for a webcast on November 1, 2016. Please register here.
BlockCypher is the leading Blockchain Web Services™ company. Their web services enable Blockchain applications to be built easily. BlockCypher takes care of the complexity of building and running Blockchain infrastructure so companies can focus on their business applications. BlockCypher is Blockchain agnostic and runs multiple Blockchains – open and private – on the same infrastructure.
For more information about BlockCypher, visit http://www.blockcypher.com
