ShoCard and SITA want to store your ID details on the blockchain to authenticate travelers

By Romain Dillet for Techcrunch.com

ShoCard and SITA, the IT company for the air transport industry, have been looking at ways to store your ID details on the blockchain to manage traveler identification.

More generally, ShoCard has been working on a seamless service that lets you store your identity onto the bitcoin blockchain. This way, anyone can retrieve and prove your identity whenever they need to. The startup was part of the Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

Working with SITA seems like a good fit as SITA is always looking at ways to make it easier to go through a border at airports. As airports get clogged up anything that can speed up passport check is a good thing.

Passengers would generate a Single Travel Token with all their travel documents using ShoCard. Behind the scene, you seal your scanned documents with a public and private key. Your documents are encrypted, hashed, and anyone can verify their authenticity using the public key. Passengers could share this public key by scanning a QR code for example.

This way, border protection staff could retrieve your passport, visa, biometrics details or ESTA application without having to manage traveler identifications. Maybe border protection staff will want to check the real copy the first time, but frequent travelers could rely on this sealed digital copy.

Moreover, it seems like authorities around the world all have their own way of storing traveler identifications. ShoCard and SITA could create a decentralized standard. This way, Chinese airports won’t have to trust American airports, as the authenticity proof is stored on the bitcoin blockchain — nobody controls the blockchain.

This is still early as SITA and ShoCard have only been working on a prototype to see if it would fit the needs of the various authorities. Given that SITA works with 90 percent of the airline industry, you need to be perfectly sure that it’s a viable solution before rolling it out to SITA’s customers.

First appeared at TC