Riley Hughes is the Co-founder and CEO of Trinsic, a reusable identity infrastructure provider. Riley educates and trains businesses on the benefits of using Trinsic to improve the identity verification processes within their products, improving privacy and the user experience.

As a pioneer in the decentralized identity community, Riley has spearheaded privacy-preserving technologies, such as identity wallets and verifiable credentials eligible to the masses. Before Trinsic, he honed his skills in the decentralized identity space as the second employee at the Sovrin Foundation — an international nonprofit that was established to administer the Governance Framework at the Sovrin Network.

It is a common experience to verify one's identity online only to have the website fail to accept the provided identification. Additionally, many people are uncomfortable sharing their driver's license and other forms of ID, as it contains personal information. With so many technological advances, why is proving one’s identity such an antiquated process?

These are the burning questions Riley Hughes had while working for the Sovrin Foundation, a Governance Framework administrator, so he was inspired to develop decentralized identity products such as digital wallets and verifiable credentials. Digital wallets are convenient and secure methods to store payment information on mobile devices, including bank information and debit and credit cards. Like digital wallets, verifiable credentials digitally store information found on physical documents such as driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, employee IDs, and educational certificates and can be cryptographically verified. These self-sovereign methods give individuals complete autonomy over their data and allow them to control how it’s shared.

Join Jodi and Justin Daniels in today’s episode of the She Said Privacy/He Said Security Podcast, as they welcome Riley Hughes, Co-founder and CEO of Trinsic, to discuss decentralized identity. Riley expounds on self-sovereign identity, how decentralized identity enhances privacy, and how AI impacts the reusable identity infrastructure.