White Paper | eDATA Verifiable Credentials for Cross Border Trade

01 SEP 2022

This paper by UN/CEFACT, describes a highly scalable operating model for digitisation and trust of cross border trade basedon verifiable credentials, linked data, and decentralised identifiers. It provides national regulators with implementation guidance.

Read about TradeTrust in section 6.5 page 34 :

6.5 Open Attestation and Tradetrust

Singapore developed OpenAttestation (seehttps://www.openattestation.com/) to enable documents issued with this technology to be cryptographically trustworthy and able to be verified independently. OpenAttestation provides the technology underpinnings of TradeTrust (see https://www.tradetrust.io)whichis an open framework adapted for global trade practices to help the typically long chain of business partners achieve the ultimate objective of fully digitalising their business processes even across borders. Given thecomplexities of cross-border trade, success needs a multi-prong yet holistic approach. As such, withOpenAttestation providing the technology foundations, TradeTrust adds aspects such as acceptance by theglobal trade community and governments on the methods of document digitalisation as well as alignment onpolicy stances through G2G arrangements such as Digital Economy Agreements. These efforts have resultedin the following W3C verifiable credentials-related features being implemented:

  • The Decentralised document rendering protocol enables users to choose their own document schemaformat, and to customise the look and feel of the trade documents produced.

  • Selective Redaction provides a convenient method for intermediaries in the supply chain to hidesensitive data, which is critical for some use cases in the trade and traceability domains.

  • The Title Transfer feature supports electronic transferable records and is designed to be compliant tothe requirements laid out in UNCITRAL’s Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (2017).

  • The QR Code feature enables users to choose using paper or digital workflows, depending on theircircumstances thus allowing issuers to execute digitalisation with minimal dependency on verifiertechnical capabilities.

The UNCEFACT repository https://github.com/uncefact/spec-tradetrust provides additional guidance on the effective use of TradeTrust.

Download the full white paper on the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE's) official website.