Sovrin

The main competitors of Sovrin are KYC platforms, such as Coinfirm, KYC Legal, Civic.

The Core product was developed by Evernym, not by Sovrin. Evernym - the company predecessor of Sovrin - started working on a blockchain solution for self-sovereign identity in 2015. Evernym has existed for several years and is already working with clients like The US Department of Homeland Security, R3, the country of Finland (through the MyData initiative), and a number of leading global financial institutions including the entire U.S. credit union industry. It has a fully up and running business development function staffed by senior professionals in both North America and Europe. 

Sovrin will form a marketplace where any source of trust—from a government to a family—can be exchanged for value. And those who have earned that trust—the identity owners—can now benefit from the ability to transfer that trust to other relationships. Verifiers, for their part, can now take advantage of a vastly expanded marketplace for trust information—a marketplace in which issuers are constantly competing to fill any “trust gaps.”

The token metrics have not been yet disclosed and will be available by the public sale announcement. Most of the team members had corporate careers and do not have previous startup experience. The core team members do not have blockchain experience.

Size of Potential Market
While there appears to be a high number of projects trying to address the area of decentralized identity management, there is still a sizeable market for the Sovrin team to target, and they may not face as much direct competition as might first be expected from smaller projects such as Remme and Verime. The high number of operators in the digital management sector illustrates that it is one of the more viable use cases for blockchain technology and any project that provides a secure platform that gains a significant amount of adoption can be expected to appreciate considerably in value.
In addition, the team state that a worldwide standard format for digital credentials should have a far-ranging impact, and to be truly universal, a blockchain for SSI must operate as a global public utility. Therefore the scope of the project is huge as the team attempt to influence the tech world in the same way as standardized network packets enabled the Internet, and standardized hypertext pages enabled the Web. Sovrin envisions a world where standardized digital credentials enable a global ecosystem of credential issuers, owners, and verifiers.
Furthermore, the team quote the World Bank’s 2017 ID4D (Identity for Development) “Counting the Uncounted” census, and declare that one seventh of the world’s population has no legal identity today. As a result, Sovrin is attempting to build a self sovereign identity solution that will be implemented all over the world.

Transparency
The Sovrin whitepaper focuses on the reasons behind the project and the technological solutions, and commercial opportunities that surround the project. With regards to transparency, the whitepaper is lacking in certain areas, as there is no information on token metrics or any team members. However, these issues are addressed in other documents or made public online.

Technology
The whitepaper covers a number of key technological aspects including how the Sovrin system is built around a purpose-built blockchain and incorporates DIDs, verifiable credentials, and zero knowledge proofs.

Vision
The team seem to be entirely focussed on achieving results in real time, and by drawing attention to the Alliance and Foundation; they appear to be working toward their goal of adding to their collection of early adopters and stewards.

Market Competitive environment:
Project aims to work on several markets with strong teams, well funded companies and polished infrastructure:
Identity and Access Management - $8 billion (Orbis Research);
Cybersecurity - $86 billion (Gartner);
RegTech - $70 billion (Let’s Talk Payments);
Data Integration - $6 billion (Markets and Markets).
Direct competitors in the blockchain sector:
Civic - raised - $33M, capitalization – $64,1M, ROI USD - 1,83x;
Ontology – raised amount is not disclosed, capitalization – $595M, ROI USD – 19,69x;
TheKey – raised $22M, capitalization – $42,8M, ROI USD 0,26x;
SelfKey – raised $21,7M, capitalization – $34,9M, ROI USD 1,01x.
But Sovrin has strong plans for how to reach goals on each market. And with the current team the possibility to achieve goals is high.

The project advantages:
Well developed technology;
Strong team;
On the blockchain will be stored only DIDs (not private data like passport, driver ID, etc.);
Step forward for the global digitalization;
Parties, who will manage credentials (HRs, users themselves, etc.) will be rewarded for their work with Sovrin token;

SOCIAL ACTIVITY
The project popularity in the social networks and discussion forums
The project is detected on the radar of influencer Ian Balina.
Twitter: 5,1k followers, average number of likes per post is 10, average number of retweets per post is 4, average number of comments under the post is 1, user activity is low.
Medium: 499 followers, the average number of likes per post is 70 without any discussion in the comment section, user activity is low.
Telegram (chat): 14,7k members, admins on the Telegram-channel are responding slowly, user activity is medium and looks natural.
Telegram (announcement channel): 3,9k followers, there are only 2 posts, that was made this year, the last post was in March

Strength and Opportunities:
Blockchain technology is very well suited for this use case, because it helps to avoid data breaches. Sensitive data is no longer stored in a centralized database at the supplier of a service or at a large software company such as Facebook and Google. People and economies can be better protected from the effects of cybercrime. Sovrin wants to provide a digital identity for those who do not yet have any type of identity. Sovrin’s mission is to provide a cheap and accessible identity for everyone. This enables Sovrin to deliver a solution targeted especially for people in developing countries.
Weaknesses and Threats:
Building blockchain based digital identities is one of the trending topics in cryptocurrency. Hence there is a lot of competition in the field. uPort and Endpass are solutions build for Ethereum. TheKey is an identity verification solution for the Neo platform. On top there are other independent platforms such as selfkey.org. The examples mentioned are just a few and not a complete list. There is a lot of competition in this space. Obviously there is a need for an identity management solution on the blockchain, but it will be difficult to dominate this market. A part of the executive team seems to be either very recent in this position or has substantial other responsibilities. This may negatively impact the execution of the project.
Verdict:
Sovrin is already at an advanced staged compared to most other projects at the ICO stage. It is clearly visible that there is a necessity for the service that Sovrin is providing. However, investors in the Sovrin ICO need to consider the strong competition in the field. In 2018 it is not yet possible to foresee which blockchain based identity management solution will be the dominant one in the future.