At Northern Block, we are thrilled to announce our participation as a founding member in the newly established Global Acceptance Network (GAN). This initiative is a crucial step towards solving one of the biggest challenges we face in the digital world: the lack of trust in digital interactions.
Think about how seamlessly payments work in the physical world. When you see a Visa logo at a merchant’s point of sale, you immediately know that your Visa card will be accepted. You don’t hesitate to tap your card on the terminal. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have the same level of confidence when it comes to online interactions.
Today’s digital interactions, especially those involving sensitive information like login credentials or payment details, are often fraught with spam, abuse, and fraud. We frequently find ourselves unsure if the transactions we’re engaging in are legitimate. Whether it’s receiving out-of-band communications through SMS or email from organisations claiming to need something urgent from us—often playing on our emotions to compromise our security—we face constant uncertainty. On the other hand, organisations are striving to put their customers at the centre by creating more personalised and seamless experiences, and there’s no better way to achieve this than by obtaining data directly from the source: their customers. However, they need to trust that the data provided has integrity. Without this trust, businesses are forced to implement duplicate verification processes for all their customers, adding friction to the experience and undermining digital transformation efforts.
At Northern Block, we recognized this trust gap early on, which is why we became a founding member of the Trust over IP Foundation in 2020. Our goal wasn’t just to build better technologies but to apply the governance frameworks necessary to solve human trust problems in the digital world. While we’ve made great strides in achieving cryptographic trust—this only solves part of the problem.
Over the past few years, the Trust over IP Foundation has produced significant thought leadership and numerous deliverables, contributing greatly to the evolution of digital trust. Among these achievements, two major innovations stand out as particularly relevant to the Global Acceptance Network:
- The Trust Registry Query Protocol: This allows any entity to interact with a trust registry by asking a simple question: “Does Entity X have Authorization Y, in the context of Ecosystem Governance Framework Z?”
- The Governance Framework Metamodel and toolkit: These tools help capture and implement governance for ecosystems, which have already been successfully deployed in initiatives such as Bhutan’s National Digital Identity Ecosystem and the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF).
The Global Acceptance Network builds on the progress made by the Trust over IP Foundation by putting its frameworks into action. While numerous ecosystems today leverage various forms of credentialing and could benefit from sharing data or credentials with others, the real challenge lies in establishing governance standards that ensure these exchanges are trustworthy. This is where GAN comes in.
Much like Visa connects banks, merchants, and consumers within a trusted payment network, GAN’s purpose is to connect digital ecosystems. However, unlike Visa, GAN is not a centralised network and cannot operate as one. Instead, its strength lies in developing relationships with ecosystems and making specific claims about these ecosystems—claims that GAN is uniquely positioned to verify. These claims won’t be about the internal governance or authorities within an ecosystem, but rather about the ecosystem itself and its conformance to GAN’s trust criteria. Over time, as ecosystems are recognised by GAN or linked to the GAN network, the hope is that people and organisations will view these ecosystems as trusted entities, similar to how we implicitly trust the Visa network when we see its logo.
GAN’s ultimate goal is to solve human trust and governance problems by reducing the risks involved in accepting digital credentials or data from outside an organisation’s own ecosystem. This vision is closely aligned with the one we had when the Trust over IP Foundation was formed: a future with thousands of interconnected ecosystems, each with their own governance frameworks. GAN will act as a connector, ensuring that these ecosystems can interact and exchange trusted data, enabling secure, frictionless interactions—just like when we confidently tap our Visa cards at the checkout.
At Northern Block, we provide digital trust solutions that enable ecosystems to produce and manage valuable credentials. As demand for these credentials grows across ecosystems—something the Global Acceptance Network (GAN) can facilitate—the value for our customers increases. Additionally, as a provider of trust registry solutions, which support data models linked to ecosystem authorities and for registry of registries, we aim to ensure that these registries can establish relationships with the GAN trust registry. This further enhances the value and interoperability of the ecosystems we support, driving greater trust and value.
