The WID3+ Consortium is a group of leading Web3 and digital identity experts in Germany and Malta, who joined forces to solve some of the most pressing issues in Web3 contracting. As a business-to-business (B2B) suite WID3+ maintains the digital identity bridge wid3.app, as well as conducts research and development for creating AUTHBOND as bid bond platform. The WID3+ Consortium is lead by ACURRAENT UG and previously included the University of Malta. In 2023, WID3+ participated in NGI TRUSTCHAIN #OC1 and has now become part of NGI TRUSTCHAIN OC3.

At the time of writing, the consortium consists of the following representatives:

• Matthew Scerri, DLT Consultant, Malta
• Nicole Marie Cassar, Business Strategy Expert, Malta
• Victoria Kozlova, Managing Partner, ACURRAENT UG, Germany
• Ben Biedermann, WID3+ Consortium Lead, ACURRAENT UG, Germany

• Joshua Ellul, Associate Professor and Director, Centre for Distributed Ledger Technology, University of Malta, Malta

Our product portfolio currently consists of the WIDE solution and AUTHBOND, which is currently under development. WIDE is the identity engine of our solution suite, whereas AUTHBOND provides extended mediation and smart contract funtionalities.

Contracting in Web3 has an accountability problem because the pseudonymity of contributors diminishes their eagerness to focus on delivery. To address this shortcoming, AUTHBOND combines smart contract-based bid bonds with digital identity. AUTHBOND incorporates learnings from conventional public and private sector contracting and applies it to Web3. The platform is designed to provide transparency to digital trade and democratise on-chain economies.

Bid bonds can effectively mitigate risks associated with project defaults, particularly in grant programs that currently rely on milestone-based payments by requiring contractors to deposit a security. AUTHBOND proposes to replace traditional centralised third parties with a combination of Web3 credentials and staking contracts. This innovative solution not only streamlines the process but also introduces more efficient contracting methods in Web3 and beyond. These privacy-preserving yet metadata-rich bonds can induce legitimacy for digital identities that are part of the TrustChain Large Scale Pilot (LSP) and provide utility for the WIDE solution by bolstering industry adoption, as well as increasing transparency for users contracting in Web3. Through the use case of awarding contracts for running nodes of a decentralised remote procedure call (RPC) network and together with the RPC gateway provider PORTERS, we want to bring the next generation of services procurement to users of Web3 and the TrustChain platform.

WIDE is short for Web3 Identity for DAOs and Education. The project was incepted in response to the 2023 #OC1 by the NGI TRUSTCHAIN consortium. WIDE operates at the intersection of edge and cloud wallets to tackle the remaining and more challenging innovations within the decentralised identity paradigm. WIDE takes the opportunity to not only build decentralised identity bridges, but also connect governmental identity spheres with the emergent Web3 landscape.

WIDE is a direct response to the high market fragmentation and low interoperability, which originates from the identification of discrepancies between the state of the art in decentralised identity and the ARF. Thus, WIDE does not formally have a background that consists of artefacts or software code. In essence, WIDE fills the interoperability gap between eIDAS 2.0 and Web3 by developing a bridging service.

Holders, i.e. end-users, currently have to manage a number of different authentication mechanisms used by Verifiers to allow for their credentials to be verified. WIDE proposes a solution to the fragmentation of Holder claims being spread across multiple sources and multiple standards by bridging the gap between the different models. It provides the Holder with the ability to capture and store claims securely from different identity providers remotely, while linking such claims to their Web3 wallet. Furthermore, WIDE aims to provide Verifiers with the option to interact with the Holder via either OAuth or Web3 to ensure future-proofing.

WIDE addresses the challenges of market fragmentation and low interoperability for decentralised identity management. WIDE seeks uses decentralised ledger technology (DLT) for secure claim verification and encryption to integrate decentralised identity functionalities with decentralised autonomous organizations (DAOs), along with introducing authorization interfaces that may be more familiar to users of legacy systems. The architecture of WIDE is modular, designed to interact within distinct operational contexts: Issuers, Holders, and Verifiers. WIDE is being developed as an open-source project under the EUPL-1.2 License, emphasising our commitment to transparency and collaborative development.

This research and development project is part of the NGI TRUSTCHAIN FRAMEWORK. All software code is provided as is and without warranty under permissible EUPL 1.2 licencing. This project is funded by a cascade funding partner through a Horizon Europe Grant under the TrustChain grant with grant agreement number: 101093274.