What is SEDI?
State-Endorsed Digital Identity (SEDI) is a constitutionally-based model meant to restore trust and protect liberty in the digital age.
The Challenge: Trust Has Collapsed Online
The internet has transformed how people live, work, and communicate. It connects billions of people across continents, supports global commerce, and powers innovation. Yet a trustworthy way for individuals to prove who they are does not exist.
In the physical world, trust is reinforced by an individual's image, voice, and official documents. In the digital world, those natural and institutional signals of trust vanish. In their absence, governments and corporations attempt to fill the void, building digital identity systems that control, surveil, profile, objectify, score and monetize our behaviors and personal data.
The absence of a secure, privacy-preserving identity layer has become more than an inconvenience; it has become a national vulnerability that puts at risk individual security, trust in democracy, and the free market economy.
Why SEDI is Needed
For more than a decade, technologies and standards have advanced the technical capabilities of digital identity worldwide. However, organizations who have adopted these technologies have not addressed some of the most essential questions concerning individual rights, comprehensive governance, and constitutional safeguards. SEDI fills that gap, ensuring that digital identity is designed to serve people.
A Constitutional Foundation for Digital Trust
SEDI begins with a foundational principle: identity belongs to the person, not the government. The government's role is not to create or control identity but to endorse and protect it as a matter of public trust.
This reflects the founding idea of the United States, that all just powers of government derive from the consent of the governed. SEDI recognizes it is the role of the state to act as a trusted endorser, verifying an individual's asserted identity and then issuing an endorsed credential mathematically bound to a digital identifier that the individual alone controls.
A hierarchy of values is used to establish priorities for SEDI requirements, the highest being to protect individual rights (including privacy), safeguard children and the vulnerable, and strengthen families and communities.