Cosmos Cash: Public Permissionless approach towards SSI and Use Cases

In the digital world, digital identity is essential as it represents users in the same way that physical identity represents people in the physical world. Traditional identity management systems (IDM) manage digital identities with dis-tinctly personal and sensitive qualities associated with identity owners. In most traditional systems, identity subjects do not control their own identity nor do they control personal data. In contrast, a new self-sovereign identity (SSI) protocol approach gives people ownership and control over their data. Cosmos Cash is an emerging open-source public permissionless protocol designed to be regulatory compliant with respect to Know Your Customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) tracking, Financial Action Task Force (FATF) travel rule, and identity management. Cosmos Cash uses a novel SSI approach for identity management by leveraging World Wide Web Con-sortium (W3C) specifications for decentralized identifiers (DID) and verifiable credentials (VC). This paper presents the design and implementation of the Cosmos Cash protocol. First, the paper presents the modules implemented in the Cosmos Cash protocol. Second, it demon-strates the architecture and working of the Cosmos Cash identity management system and evaluates its operational services and efficiency. Finally, based on the architecture developed, the paper compares the Cosmos Cash protocol to existing protocols such as uPort and Sovrin.