Cxo of the week: Satish Mohan, Founder & CTO of Dhiway

Dhiway, is a company at the forefront of blockchain technology revolutionizing the digital landscape and empowering enterprises and governments with unwavering assurance.

Dhiway's mission is clear: to forge seamless blockchain solutions on a massive scale, eliminating obstacles and instilling absolute certainty in digital transactions. Its technology-driven approach profoundly impacts the digital realm, fostering trust, confidence, and security for businesses and individuals alike. Dhiway's comprehensive suite of blockchain solutions addresses the unique challenges businesses and governments face in the digital era. From streamlining identity management to enabling efficient supply chain operations, their technology-driven solutions deliver secure and transparent digital interactions, setting new standards in the industry.

Satish Mohan is the founder and CTO of Dhiway, a platform that facilitates people in embracing a digital landscape that encourages innovation and economic growth. With the ultimate objective of fostering collaborative ecosystems, Dhiway aims to have a constructive influence on society and the economy. With over 24 years of experience, Satish has successfully built and guided teams in envisioning, creating, and operating solutions that yield rapid growth and produce measurable, transformative outcomes. His core competencies lie in leading and collaborating with multifunctional global teams to align with strategic visions and capitalize on market opportunities.

Recently we have engaged in an interview with Satish Mohan, Founder & CTO, of Dhiway, to deep-dive into Dhiway's innovative solutions and how they are eliminating obstacles and creating technology-driven solutions that instill unwavering belief, confidence, and absolute certainty in the digital realm.

Introduction.

Dhiway is an industry leader in enterprise Web 3.0 technology. Our mission is to drive belief, confidence and absolute certainty throughout the digital world. We believe that digital interactions can be enhanced through the introduction of innovative approaches which address the trust deficit. At Dhiway we are working on ways to reduce this friction so that data transactions between parties can contribute to the growth story instead of being bogged down in complicated procedures. We do this by using established open standards-based approaches such as Verifiable Credentials. Our CORD blockchain enables new capabilities such as unique, persistent identifiers and data registries which help establish authoritative (trust) registries leading to better interactions The founding team of Dhiway brings a set of complementary capabilities. I have over three decades of experience leading high performing software development teams in distributed systems. At Dhiway I am wearing two hats: Founder & CTO. I am leading the integration of the CORD blockchain infrastructure in projects of population scale. And in this I have been engaged in forums where I provide inputs towards application and product development which can build on the capabilities of the blockchain and the credentialing platform.

Could you give us a summary of Dhiway's MARK Studio? How does Dhiway utilize blockchain technology to provide digital credentials for various businesses and industries?

#MARK Studio is a credential lifecycle management platform. It enables an organization to adopt digital credentialing for learning and education records, organization documents and workplace-related documents, among other possible use cases. #MARK Studio comes “batteries included” with a designer studio for certificate and credential design, custom digital trust marks and managing the credentials in bulk.

One of the known concerns with legacy credentialing systems is that it needs cumbersome methods to determine the integrity, authenticity, and current state of the credential. For instance, if a credential was issued in print-ready format and thereafter revoked, the printed credential can continue circulating, creating risk for the relying party.

Digitally verifiable credentials on the blockchain are a data representation method. This presentation allows anyone to verify the origin or source of the data, examine the changes if any, made to the data object and determine if the data object has been issued to the recipient. The simplicity of this model means that organizations which are seeking to undertake a digital transformation from legacy systems such as printed records to more modern approach can use credentials with a #MARK – a trust mark which enables instant verification. And if the organization has already made progress on the transformation and have adopted newer technology architecture – they can benefit from having credentials in a secure store such as a digital wallet.

This spectrum of possibilities comes with a set of capabilities around selective disclosure of data, management of notice and consent, as well as handling of authentication. In a digital wallet centric flow, the fullest set of capabilities is available since, in this approach, the holder of the credential has the agency to determine what parts of the information to disclose, for how long to share and of course, consent to the sharing of information upon a request.

What are the main difficulties that businesses encounter while managing and verifying traditional paper-based credentials for employees and clients?

There are three major concerns with legacy paper-based credentialing systems - the inability to quickly determine the current status of the credential, the durability of the credential itself and the absence of any easy means to evaluate the integrity of the credential. All these contribute to the risks which need to be evaluated and managed by the relying parties such as business and organizations. We read reports of forged certificates, counterfeit credentials and tampered documents so often that there is a deficit of trust in the exchange of credentials. Yet, the exchange and sharing of records is the way for access to services. Businesses often end up spending large amounts of money in order to get reasonably acceptable answers to all the concerns mentioned above. This means that access to services is delayed, the holder of the credentials is by default mistrusted and friction is introduced in the data exchange.

Could you explain the concept of blockchain technology and how it is utilized in creating and managing digital credentials?

Blockchain is an implementation of the distributed ledger technology (DLT). The advantages offered by blockchain over traditional data storage mechanisms are the ability to have immutable logs and the inability to tamper with recorded data. In case of credentialing systems which use blockchain technology, the underlying record store is used to provide the data integrity to the credential - so the relying parties can know about the origins of the record as well as the history of any changes made to it. Issued credentials can often be revoked - because an edit or modification was requested or, a status was changed. It is important for the verifying parties to be aware of this instead of just relying on the printed form of the record. Digitally verifiable credentials anchored on the blockchain reduce the risks originating from tampered records or forged credentials. This approach also allows the relying party to determine the issuing organization, the intended recipient and additional contextual information around the credential.

How does Dhiway prioritize the privacy of individuals and organizations that utilize your platform? Could you explain the specific measures in place?

Today, our credential lifecycle management platform #MARK Studio enables an organization to issue large volumes of verifiable credentials which can be delivered to the recipients over email or to their wallets. These credentials are anchored on the blockchain where the design ensures that no personally identifiable information (PII) is anchored to the chain. Dhiway’s measures to protect user data include a thoughtful combination of off-chain data storage, encryption with owner-specific keys, and key-based access controls. This approach offers a balanced solution that combines the flexibility and security of off-chain storage with the transparency and verifiability of on-chain proofs.

Our approach to protecting user data and fostering trust in digital interactions involves a combination of off-chain data storage, on-chain proofs, encryption, and key-based access control mechanisms.

Off-chain data storage

• Storage Flexibility: Off-chain data model allows organizations or individuals to store data in an infrastructure of their choice, whether it’s a private database or secure cloud storage.
• Enhanced Security: By keeping the actual data off the public blockchain, sensitive information remains private and protected from unauthorized access.
• Encryption: The off-chain data is encrypted using the data owner’s key, ensuring that only the owner or authorized parties can access and view the data.

On-Chain Proofs

• Verification and Authenticity: Proofs or cryptographic references to the data are stored on the CORD blockchain (on-chain). These can be used by receivers or third parties to verify the authenticity of the shared information.
• Transparency and Trust: The immutable nature of the blockchain ensures that the proofs cannot be altered, providing transparency, and building trust.
• Efficiency: Storing only proofs on-chain minimizes storage requirements on the blockchain, leading to more efficient operations.

Key-Based Access Control Mechanisms

• Delegations: Dhiway implements key-based access control to manage permissions and delegations, allowing organizations to create specific delegation capabilities and define who can access, manage, and control the data.
• Recovery: Mechanisms for recovery from key loss or key compromise add resilience to the system.
• The integration of off-chain data with on-chain proofs creates a seamless interaction where data can be securely stored and controlled by the owner, while still allowing for verifiable sharing and exchange.

Can you elaborate on the potential cost savings for businesses by adopting Dhiway's blockchain-based credential management system?

Any business adopting a shift from legacy to digital credentialing would need to factor in the operational costs associated with traditional credentialing systems. These include the cost of paper, the multiple data silos and the risk to reputation from tampered and forged documents. Over a period of time, we have worked with customers to demonstrate that a credential lifecycle management perspective on digital credentials helps establish the model to calculate cost savings which can be often up to 70% over the lifetime of the credentialing process.

Digital transformation has been able to reduce the cost of production of objects and in the case of credentialing it is similar as well. The value-adds are seen when reasonable volumes of credentials are issued, managed, and exchanged.

Are there specific industries that have established compliance standards for using blockchain in their credentialing processes? How does this affect cross-industry adoption?

Standardization is a necessary component of ensuring that there is better interoperability, data portability, and data governance postures. The lifecycle of a digital credential includes enrollment, issuance, management, and expiry. All the stages in the lifecycle are associated with specific levels of risk - so industry organizations have defined measures that clearly indicate the level of assurance, risk detection, and mitigation as well as standardization of data models. Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) such as ISO/TEC and W3C are engaged in collaborative discussions to build standards around biometrics, data formats, formats, and credentials among other topics. In India, the BIS is also engaged in developing standards along similar lines.

The availability of standards provides impetus for adoption. Especially, open standards which allow more innovative approaches to come about addressing some of the harder challenges in the topic of digital credentials.

Looking ahead, what are your future plans or roadmap for Dhiway? Are there any upcoming features or enhancements to look forward to?

We are on the cusp of enabling sectors with data assurance and authenticity at scale. The true value of data can be realised through the flow of data across ecosystem boundaries. As data exchanges become more automated through machine-to-machine interactions, it is necessary to enable systems with efficient means to determine provenance. Our authentic data platform is designed to deploy large-scale registries of data which can be referred to by the persistent digital identifiers.

Authenticated data flows are integral to digital trust ecosystems, and economies of scale are possible only when multiple such ecosystems participate in data exchanges. We are working with multiple government and private stakeholders to build lighthouse deployments that showcase the potential of changing the status quo and adopting the tenets that power a digital India. Some of the interesting projects we are currently involved in are in the domain of AI/ML. In these projects, the fidelity of the underlying data streams is extremely critical to the success of the outputs generated.

Our engagements span Digital Commerce, Digital Payments, Skills, Workplace, and Education. In these areas, we continue to interact with key industry players and established standards framework establishments to ensure that our market offering meets the requirements and lays the groundwork for robust platform capabilities. We are deploying a standards-based digital wallet – which will address a long-term integration requirement in this space. Dhiway fulfills a long-held desire of their customers to use the Blockchain and its technology as a productivity enhancer for their offerings to their customers.