Hardware-Rooted Identity for Permissioned Blockchain Networks

By Numan Maloney, EVP at SLC Digital

The Age of Distrust

The greatest commodity in the modern world is not oil, gold, or data. It is trust.

Every global economy, every payment rail, every blockchain ledger is merely an abstraction of our collective willingness to believe that someone, somewhere, will do what they say they will do. Trust is the invisible infrastructure behind civilization itself.

And yet, as our lives migrate into the digital domain, trust has eroded.

The systems of passwords, one-time codes, push notifications that were supposed to keep us safe have turned into liabilities. Attackers no longer need to break in; they just wait for us to make a single mistake. SMS verification, once the symbol of “modern” security, has become the most exploited vulnerability in financial services, with SIM swaps, phishing kits, and man-in-the-middle attacks costing billions annually.

The tragedy is that we built our digital economy on signals that were never designed to bear the weight of identity. A phone number is not a person. A password is not a credential. A push notification is not proof of intent. Modern ID verification providers run the risk of enabling the greatest villain of all by providing inadequate proofs: false trust. This can lead people to trust the untrustworthy, with devastating consequences.

The world needs a new foundation of trust that is both human and hardware.

That foundation is beginning to emerge across permissioned blockchain networks, such as the Canton Network, and could be strengthened by hardware-rooted identity layers like SLC’s eSIM-based verification technology.

The Canton Network: A Trust Superhighway

At its core, the Canton Network represents a revolution in financial interoperability. It is a permissioned blockchain-of-blockchains connecting the private ledgers of the world’s largest financial institutions.

It’s not just a network of nodes; it’s a federation of trust zones, each owned by an institution that can transact and reconcile with others without ceding control.

The promise?

24/7 global settlement, cross-border transactions without intermediaries, and atomic synchronization across markets.

But there’s a broader paradox facing permissioned blockchain networks today: while platforms like Canton provide institutional trust (as each node is authenticated and permissioned), they do not yet provide individual-level trust—proof that the entity triggering a transaction is who they claim to be. Today’s financial ecosystem still depends on outdated software credentials sitting far above the hardware layer.

This is where hardware-rooted identity layers, such as SLC’s eSIM verification, become relevant.

From Network Trust to Human Trust

SLC’s technology reimagines the eSIM as the hardware root of trust for the digital economy.

Each SLC-enabled eSIM acts as a secure enclave, cryptographically bound to an individual, capable of producing signed attestations that verify:

• Who – The verified identity tied to a specific eSIM ID

• What – The transaction or smart contract being executed

• Where – Out-of-band network location data confirming physical presence

• When – A cryptographically timestamped event call from the eSIM itself

In essence, every transaction can be fingerprinted to a human identity, a time, a place, and a device. The result is a verifiable bridge between real-world intent and on-chain action. This is an element often missing from permissioned blockchain architectures today.

These proofs could then be ledgered and notarized on permissioned networks, including platforms such as Canton, enabling multi-layer attestation flows:

1. Hardware → Individual

2. Individual → Institution

3. Institution → Network

This expands the trust perimeter of permissioned networks like Canton from “institutional validity” to end-to-end, human-level validity. This represents a paradigm shift for digital asset transfers, cross-border settlements, and enterprise workflows.

Turning a Vulnerability Into a Trust Engine

The irony is poetic.

The same telecom infrastructure once exploited by SIM-swappers can now become the most secure layer of identity verification ever deployed.

By anchoring identity in the eSIM’s tamper-resistant hardware, SLC provides cryptographic guarantees invisible to malware, immune to phishing, and independent of any phone number or app layer.

This means no spoofable signals, no man-in-the-middle opportunity, and no dependency on user behavior. The result?

Transactions validated by presence, not by password.

Financial institutions can go beyond MFA (multi-factor authentication) and into HFA: Hardware-Fused Attestation.

Every transaction, message, or asset transfer can be authorized only if signed by a live, verified eSIM credential that is impossible to clone, spoof, or replay.

Escalation, Messaging, and Multi-Use Capability

SLC’s eSIM layer also introduces secure escalation for high-value transactions.

If a transaction exceeds a risk threshold, applications built on permissioned networks could trigger an encrypted SLC Secure Messenger session directly to the verified user’s eSIM, creating a private, cryptographically authenticated communication channel between the institution and individual.

The eSIM can further:

• Serve as a hardware key vault, storing cryptographic keys safely within the SIM.

• Manage institution-level eSIM deployments, providing device-level attestation for enterprise fleets.

• Support multi-use APIs, allowing developers to plug into SLC’s “identity pipes” without needing to rebuild their authentication stack.

The result is a modular trust infrastructure that any participant in a permissioned network ecosystem, from a central bank to a fintech startup, can leverage for verifiable digital identity.

Self-Sovereignty and Alignment with Web3

In the broader Web3 narrative, self-sovereign identity (SSI) represents a vision where users own and control their digital presence. SLC’s eSIM layer embodies this ethos in physical form, which is a self-sovereign SIM that binds human, hardware, and network identity into one tamper-proof credential.

This aligns perfectly with Canton’s mission: interoperability without centralization, privacy without opacity, trust without intermediaries.

By incorporating hardware-level identity verification layers such as SLC’s, permissioned networks like Canton could achieve hardware-level assurance across their ecosystems.

A Vision for the Trusted Digital Economy

Imagine a world where:

• A cross-border payment between banks in Zurich and Singapore is verified by both institutions and the individual trader’s eSIM.

• A tokenized bond settlement is cryptographically time-stamped at the hardware level.

• A fintech app onboarding a user doesn’t ask for a selfie, but for hardware-bound eSIM proof.

• Regulators and auditors can see zero-knowledge attestations that confirm compliance without compromising privacy. While zero-knowledge proofs preserve privacy, many current implementations force institutions to accept outputs without sufficient visibility into the quality or provenance of the underlying inputs.

This isn’t hypothetical. The technology exists.

What’s missing is the integration of hardware trust into digital networks of value.

Conclusion: Trust Starts at the Chip

In a world where trust is the currency, building it into the hardware is no longer optional, but inevitable.

Canton Network has built the superhighway for global finance.

SLC’s eSIM identity layer can serve as the guardrail and traffic signal system that ensures every vehicle is verified, every lane is secure, and no bad actor can swerve off course.

When paired with hardware-rooted identity layers, permissioned blockchain networks can enable a digital economy that is not only fast, interoperable, and programmable, but trustworthy.

Trust can’t be bolted on anymore. It must be built in.

And with SLC’s eSIM verification, it starts at the chip.

References to the Canton Network are illustrative and intended to represent a broader class of permissioned blockchain architectures rather than a specific partnership or integration.

—Numan Maloney, EVP at SLC Digital