UAE to integrate Avalanche into its national digital identity platform

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is shifting the blockchain infrastructure that supports its national digital identity platform onto Avalanche, according to statements from the blockchain company and the country’s federal telecom regulator. The identity platform called UAEPASS is used by about 12.5 million people in the country to access government and private sector services.

TDRA, the UAE’s Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, the federal body that oversees UAEPASS made the decision for a change to the AVAX blockchain. The UAEPASS platform is how residents, citizens and visitors log in, sign documents and access online services. The Digital Vault is a feature within the identity platform, that stores verified documents and lets a person hold a credential that can be handed to institutions for checks.

12.5 million UAEPASS users on Avalanche

Avalanche’s figures state that UAEPASS serves about 12.5 million users, with over 15,000 services accessible through the identity platform, and over 350 government and private-sector entities dependent on it. A document being used across that many institutions needs to attain a level of trust about its issuer without the need for individual investigations by each institution. Having this on a reliable blockchain makes verification a routine lookup instead of a totally fresh check each time.

Saeed Belhoul, Dgov Operations Director, said in the announcement that the UAEPASS Digital Vault had become a major part of life for the people in the UAE, and the govenment aims to continue to protect the trust the people place in it. He also added that the upgrade will move the vault onto infrastructure capable of handling its growing demands and supporting the platform for years to come.

Why a dedicated chain for real world performance?

The Digital Vault within UAEPASS will now operate on an Avalanche L1, which would be a dedicated blockchain controlled by the operator instead of one that shares capacity with activity unrelated to the platform’s use-case. Avalanche said in the statement that this setup ensures traffic elsewhere on the network does not compete for capacity. The setup also gives TDRA control over network membership, permissions and configuration.

“Digital identity is one of the clearest examples of technology that has to work reliably at real-world scale,” said John Nahas, chief business officer at Ava Labs. He described the system as high-performance infrastructure that operated behind the scenes to keep digital services secure and seamless.

UAE not the first government to intergrate Avalanche

The California DMV has also moved 42 million vehicle titles onto a DMV-run Avalanche L1, which has led to title transfers that used to take around two weeks taking only minutes to be complated.

Avalanche claims the projects are similar in terms of serving tens of millions of people, with one handling identity and the other property records. The blockchain company also implied that public-record systems tend to prefer this type of design.

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