COVID-19 has changed the way we are currently living our lives and interact with others around us. The world is not going to be the same again, even when we recover from this pandemic. Today, each of us faces life-or-death questions whenever we interact with people, places, or things. These trust issues have become even more critical as the government announces lockdowns to be lifted, and life gradually starts to return to normal.

The airports and airline industry will need to know who has been cleared to travel domestic or international. Hospitals will need a way of knowing which medical professionals and visitors are safe to let in. Companies will need to prevent further spread of virus once employees start returning to the office.

Informal trust is essential as a society. But it takes more than just goodwill, common sense, and manners when a life-threatening pandemic surrounds us. Governed, digitally provable trust is required, as both China and South Korea have demonstrated in their countries. Moreover, Bill Gates also observed that: we will need “digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”

TrustNet Pakistan Foundation has started an open-source COVID-19 Initiative so we can use blockchain-based digital trust to solve some key problems that we are already facing in Pakistan and are likely to occur in the post-COVID world. TrustNet PK is already part of a global initiative called ‘COVID Credentials Initiative’ which is focused on fighting COVID-19 challenges using blockchain-based digital credentials solutions. This initiative is joined by more than 60+ organizations all over the globe with more than 200+ people involved.

It is pretty obvious that there will be a pre and post COVID world. The question is how we are going to remember it. Will we remember it as locked at home and doing nothing about it or using our skills and experties for something bigger than ourselves and contributing back to society.

Using a blockchain-based digital identity trust framework, we can enable healthcare facilities, and COVID-19 testing services all across Pakistan small clinics or big hospitals / labs, to start issuing digitally-signed credentials to a patient about their COVID-19 status directly to their smartphones.

With a quick touchless scan of a QR code, that person can prove that he or she is virus-free or has been vaccinated (once that is available). This special digital certificate can maintain the privacy and confidentiality of people by having no personal information and still providing strong cryptographic proof that the credential belongs to that person.

Such a digital credential would be massively harder to fake or spoof than any paper or plastic credential. And it can be issued in seconds—and revoked in seconds if that individual’s COVID-19 status changes. Moreover, its trust interoperability would be international, meaning a digital credential issued in Pakistan can be verified and trusted anywhere in the world.

It is extremely challenging for the digital infrastructure of our society to having integrations with every commercial service in the eco-system and have national and international interoperability. We at TrustNet PK have a solution for that using the most emerging technology.

The international organizations across the globe have proven the technology and the standards we are using. Verifiable digital credential technology is already powering several vital projects, spanning government (verifiable public directories), financial services (banks, credit unions, FinTechs), healthcare (doctor onboarding), humanitarian services (portable identity for refugees, privacy-preserving HIV testing), and many other sectors.

We hope you join us to build for humanity and Pakistan. The very least you can expect from this initiative is blockchain learnings, working with a community of exceptional people, your personal open-source contribution and perhaps your effort could save someone's life.