Overview

Gateway is a full-suite credential management protocol. Our goal is to create a collaborative credential infrastructure enabling brands, individuals, and firms to easily issue credentials natively, manage their lifecycle, and consume their claims, while keeping important tenets such as user privacy, developer ease, and sharing paradigms in mind.

Simply put, we digitize, standardize, and unify credentials across the internet

What are Credentials?

Credentials are the building blocks of our identity. The truth is we are completely surrounded by credentials everywhere. From the moment we are born (birth certificate) to the biggest things in our life (marriage certificate, job recommendations, degrees, credit scores), we are reliant on these building blocks to navigate successfully both in real life and digitally.

Credentials are social data primitives that build up our digital identity.

The Problem

There were a couple of problems we realized that became the motivation of how we built Gateway. Here are some that stick out.

1. Fragmented Identity: From the digital sphere to the physical world, we have so many different identities that are associated with us. This includes email(s), social security number, social media accounts, usernames, etc.
2. No Standards: There are no clear standards on what constitutes a "credential". For example, a college degree from Harvard does have the same predictable properties as say a FINRA license.
3. Lack of Trust: The person trying to reading a credential (for example, a potential employer) may not trust that the person received the credential without verifying it on their own (calling the issuer).
4. Lack of digitization: Many important credentials are still in physical format and do not have digital counterparts. The most common ones include degrees, driver's licenses, certifications etc.

Due to these limitations, we are with a world with the following issues:

1. Data is centralized and kept in custody of large corporations and institutions.
2. There is a high barrier of usage of credentials - there is too much coordination required in order to verify credentials.
3. Lack of visibility of highly valuable credentials - no standards = limited curation.
4. The user has no control, leading to privacy violations - aforementioned corporations and institutions can sell your data at will to other companies who may not have the best intentions.
5. There is high barriers to entry for new organizations - since large corporations own the data, newer applications and organizations looking to get started often face cold start problems.

Our Mission

At Gateway, we believe in a more interconnected web. In the road to achieving this, we hope to fundamentally change the ways people think about identity and data. For us as Gateway, we work everyday to make the following things possible:

• Your data, your choice: We want users of the platforms to ultimately dictate what information about them can and cannot be used.
• Robust Identity: We want your data to be reflective of all different types of things you do on the internet - not just siloed to a handful of applications.
• Issuer-Incentive Alignment: While open sourcing data is great, there is often little appeal for an application to open up its data for everyone else to use. We are creating an economy where data contributors are compensated fairly.
• Easy-to-Use: Built by developers for developers. We value your time and make implementation super simple.

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Gateway Protocol's Mission is to build a user-controlled, digital credential repository.

How Do I Get Started?

To continue learning about how the protocol functions, click here!

For Issuers

If you are interested in becoming a credential issuer, start here. Issuers are the data contributors to the system. More information on the participants involved can be found here!

For Recipients

If you are an everyday user, you are most likely a recipient. Navigate to Gateway to create a profile and connect different auth methods to see what credentials you hold. The more you connect, the more ways you can earn credentials.

For Verifiers

If you are interested in leveraging the credentials, check out here!