• Gataca selected as one of the 5 best-in-class teams of the Business Oriented Call within eSSIF-Lab with additional 41K€ in equity-free funding, adding up to a total of 106K€.
• Gataca is chosen within the Infrastructure Oriented Call within eSSIF-Lab to develop standards for the self-sovereign identity (SSI) Community with 155K€ equity-free funding.

How are eSSIF-Lab, NGI, and the European Commission related? And where does Gataca fit in?

eEssif-Lab, also known as the European Self-Sovereign Identity Lab, is a project funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative.

The goal of eSSIF-Lab is to promote and advance the development and adoption of Self Sovereign Identities (SSI) to enable more secure electronic transactions.

The eSSIF-Lab program plans to distribute up to 5.6€ M among 62 projects across 3 open calls. The projects and open calls will be divided as follows:

• One infrastructure-oriented open call targeting 20 technical enhancements and extensions of the SSI framework
• Two business-oriented open calls targeting 42 SSI business and social innovations and applications (https://essif-lab.eu/)

The business-oriented call, or BOC, has 3 competitive phases for which only the best projects will be chosen to move onto the next phase (meaning after each phase, the number of participants decreases).

Where is Gataca in the process?

Gataca has surpassed phases 1 & 2 and, due to its exceptional contributions, has been selected as one of the 5 best-in-class teams of the business-oriented call securing an additional 41K€ in equity-free funding and adding up to a total of 106K€.

What has been Gataca’s involvement in the eSSIF-Lab business-oriented call (BOC)?

Gataca’s proposal for the eSSIF-Lab BOC was to open the APIs of GATACA Connect, our Verifier’s component, in an effort to enable any technology provider to integrate their stack with our Connect and exploit its credential verification features for their own use cases.

Let us provide a bit of background. Currently, there is a lack of standardization in protocols between the ID Wallets and Verifier components, and as a result, each provider is building their own protocol. If this continues, Verifiers may suffer vendor lock-in situations, and ID Wallet holders may need to hold multiple wallets, a situation we wish to avoid.

Thus, the ultimate goal of our initial proposal was to prevent vendor lock-in situations starting with our Verifier’s component GATACA Connect.

So far, Gataca’s achievements include a Connect OpenAPIs Sandbox, which consists of a web application that presents our APIs and offers an interactive, visual and simple step-by-step process to integrate and test these APIs. The sandbox platform is publicly available at https://openapis.demo.gataca.io.

Planning for Phase 3 includes business case validation with organizations engaged during Phase 2.

Our previous project’s success has us eager to contribute more. We want to go one step further with our interoperability commitment by making GATACA Connect wallet-agnostic and vendor-agnostic. How, may you ask? Keep on reading.

Hint: We´ve been selected for the eSSIF-Lab infrastructure-oriented call.

What about the eSSIF-Lab infrastructure-oriented call (IOC)?

That’s right! GATACA has also been chosen within the infrastructure-oriented call to develop standards for the SSI Community with 155K€ equity-free funding. In the past couple of months, we began developing a brief outline of achieving the aforementioned global interoperability.

Up until now, we have opened our own APIs. We want to achieve consensus within the SSI community and standardize those APIs.

We have already analyzed existing interoperability efforts and detected some improvement areas. We’ve concluded that certain business requirements were not fully considered in some relevant standardization efforts, and additionally discovered relevant standardization gaps and found interesting evolved approaches.

From there, we decided to go the extra mile and document an enhanced version of our APIs, a draft proposal that combined the most exciting perspectives from existing standardization & interoperability efforts and our own APIs.

This unofficial draft can be found here: https://gataca-io.github.io/verifier-apis/

The draft then became the groundwork and inspiration to launch the Verifier Universal Interface (VUI) interoperability initiative, an interoperability working group aiming to build a complete set of standard APIs for a Verifier component.