- As part of the Global Legal Hackathon, the IOTA Foundation and the law firm Dentons have presented a digital health passport that is supposed to enable people to return to everyday life despite COVID-19.
- In order to continue financing the development, the IOTA Foundation is currently trying to obtain a grant of 500,000 euros.
Dentons and the IOTA Foundation have joined forces in a COVID-19 hackathon to develop “Selv”, a digital health passport. Selv is based on IOTA‘s Distributed Ledger technology and was designed by the IOTA Foundation, with Dentons multinational law firm contributing its legal expertise.
The digital health passport is intended enable people to return to work or move across borders despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The app is free of charge, accessible to everyone worldwide, compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and secure. In addition, the application is open source and provides a decentralized system for the global management of health data.
Personal data will be stored in encrypted form on the user’s device. In addition, the app is scalable and interoperable as it follows the W3C specifications on decentralized identities (DIDs). On the website of the “Global Legal Hackathon” the project team has publicized the following goals:
Lockdowns have slowed the spread of COVID-19 but have had massive economic impacts. […] A solution is needed for governments to verify individuals’ health status on a mass scale. Selv will help governments restart their economies.
Throughout the course of history, humanity has always used the latest technology at its disposal when confronted with global health challenges. […] and now Distributed Ledger Technology. IOTA is the next stage in the technological evolution, guaranteeing the authenticity of digital health data.
The Global Legal Hackathon brought the IOTA Foundation together with Dentons, and led to several advances:
Together, during the hackathon, the Team have progressed the app development, prepared a GDPR compliance analysis, promotional materials, FAQs and an adoption plan.
The current Selv Demo consists of a mobile app (Android and iOS) and a website, where individuals can store their health data during the test and securely share their status with government agencies, employers or colleagues. The demo also offers the possibility of downloading a health certificate, which (theoretically) can be passed on to one’s own employer or a border authority.
Selv was originally developed by IOTA to provide a more general health passport and a digital wallet with identity. Individual components of the application have been in development since 2019, and the IOTA Foundation has been working on a ready-to-use version of the underlying protocol and libraries since then. The current progress of the project is as follows:
The IOTA Foundation are in discussions to obtain a grant (circa €500k) to continue development and support of Selv. The funding is necessary as the solution will be free at the point of use as a quasi public good. Further work to be done on the Selv suite includes app improvements, an issuer app, and issuer backend integration.
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