SSI Guide 1 — Understanding Self-Sovereign Identity
This guide provides a foundational understanding of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) as a model for digital trust infrastructure. It reframes digital identity away from platform-centric products and toward long-lived infrastructure that must remain verifiable, governable, and defensible over time.
Rather than focusing on specific technologies or implementations, the guide explains why identity systems fail structurally when governance, auditability, and long-term responsibility are implicit. It introduces SSI as an approach that enables institutions, individuals, and organizations to participate in shared trust frameworks without centralizing control over identity data.
The guide is intended for decision-makers and professionals who need to understand why identity must be treated as infrastructure, not as an application feature. It establishes the conceptual baseline for the subsequent guides, emphasizing restraint, explicit governance, and institutional alignment as prerequisites for credible deployment.
SSI Guide 2 — SSI as a Governed System in Operation
This guide builds on the foundational concepts of SSI and examines how they function in real institutional environments. Its focus is not on architecture in isolation, but on governance as an operational system: how trust rules are defined, how authority is constrained, how change is managed, and how risk is contained over time.
The guide addresses questions that arise once SSI moves beyond experimentation: Who governs schemas and issuers? How is auditability achieved without surveillance? How are failures handled without breaking trust? It treats SSI as an institutional commitment rather than a technical deployment.
This guide is intended for organizations that are already familiar with SSI concepts and now need to assess whether they can operate it responsibly. It provides criteria for evaluating governance readiness, operational burden, and long-term viability.
SSI Guide 3 — SSI Use Cases
This guide translates SSI principles and governance models into concrete sectoral contexts. It examines where SSI provides clear institutional value and where its application requires caution or restraint.
Rather than promoting adoption, the guide evaluates fitness and conditions across public services, education, workforce identity, healthcare, finance, enterprise ecosystems, and cross-border cooperation. Each use case is framed around governance capacity, regulatory reality, and long-term sustainability.
The guide makes explicit that SSI is not a universal solution. In some contexts, centralized systems remain appropriate. In others, SSI introduces complexity that is justified only when portability, multi-issuer trust, and long-lived credentials are essential.
SSI Guide 4 — SSI Anti-Patterns & Readiness Framework
This guide provides a diagnostic framework for evaluating SSI initiatives before irreversible commitments are made. It analyzes recurring anti-patterns that cause SSI projects to fail, stall, or lose institutional legitimacy, and translates them into practical readiness and maturity signals.
The guide treats failure as a source of insight. It identifies conceptual, architectural, governance, privacy, deployment, and incentive-related patterns that predict systemic risk. It is intentionally conservative and designed to support clear go / no-go decisions.
This guide is not about promoting SSI adoption. It is about protecting institutions, regulators, and stakeholders from premature or misaligned deployments. It legitimizes restraint and termination as responsible outcomes.