Most self-sovereign identity systems consist of strictly objective claims, cryptographically signed by trusted third party attestors. Lacking protocols in place to account for subjectivity, these systems do not form new sources of legitimacy that can address the central question concerning identity authentication: "Who verifies the verifier?". Instead, the legitimacy of claims is derived from traditional centralized institutions such as national ID issuers and KYC providers. This architecture has been employed, in part, to safeguard protocols from a vulnerability previously thought to be impossible to address in peer-to-peer systems: the Sybil attack, which refers to the abuse of an online system by creating many illegitimate virtual personas. Inspired by the progress in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, there has recently been a surge in networked protocols that make use of subjective inputs such as voting, vouching, and interpreting, to arrive at a decentralized and sybil-resistant consensus for identity. In this review, we will outline the approaches of these new and natively digital sources of authentication -their attributes, methodologies strengths, and weaknesses -and sketch out possible directions for future developments.

Purpose This paper aims to explain the architecture and design choices of the exchange. Lykke is a FinTech company based in Zurich that has launched the global marketplace for all asset classes and instruments digitized on the blockchain. The authors discuss how the exchange will evolve over time. They explore the macroeconomic benefits of the new blockchain technology. The Lykke exchange is compatible with any type of public blockchain. Design/methodology/approach The authors present the architecture of an exchange for colored coins. By colored coins, they mean issuer-backed securities on the Bitcoin blockchain. Orders are collected and matched by a semi-trusted exchange. Matched orders are settled on the Bitcoin blockchain, where each successful trade between parties appears as a set atomic-colored coins swap transactions. Unfilled and expired orders are discarded. The exchange does not take possession of the traded coins, but needs to be trusted to match trades correctly. Findings Lykke has launched the exchange initially for the main currencies, cryptocurrencies and Lykke coin (entitlement to the shares of Lykke company). Perspective asset classes include futures and options on digital assets, crowd-funded loans for retail and private equity financing for small and medium-sized enterprises, contracts for difference, zero coupon bonds and other fixed income and natural capital bonds. Originality/value Lykke exchange and all its tools and services are open source; the transparency of technology is ideal for research. The paper provides a high-level overview of the exchange and concludes with a research agenda.

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