Creating identities

If you have freshly installed the iov42 Identity Manager browser extension, it will not have any identities in it. Therefore, you have two options:

1. Creating your first identitiy;

2. Importing existing identities;

We will cover identity import in a later section:

Exporting and importing identities

Creating an identity

In order to create your first identity, simply click on "Create your first identity". This will lead you to the identity creation window:

Here you have to enter a name for your identity. It can be any name you choose (e.g. your own name, if you are creating a personal identity, or your organisation name, if you are creating an identity for your organisation, etc.).

You also have to provide a network URL. The network URL defines on which iov42 core platform network the identity will be created.

The iov42 Identity Manager can determine the network URL automatically if the Create your identity window is opened on a particular website. For example, opening the Create your identity window while on Timber Chain (timber-chain.com) will automatically set the correct network URL that is used by Timber Chain.

You can read more about Timber Chain here.

If you wish to create an iov42 identity in the iov42 Identity Manager for development purposes, you can receive the test network platform URL by siging up to our sandbox: https://signup.iov42.com/signup/browser.

Switching the Create only keypair toggle will simply generate a keypair (instead of creating an identity on the core platform), which can be used later on for creating an identity.

Once you have entered all of the required information, you can click "Save" to create the identity.

From here, you have a choice to either immidiately activate the recently created identity or to go back to overview.

What does activating an identity mean?

By activating an identity, the user of the iov42 Identity Manager states that they want to use this particular identity to interact with the iov42 core platform (i.e. use the kaypair of this identity to sign actions on the "blockchain").

Since the iov42 Identity Manager can store multiple identities, it is important to be able to choose which identity you wish to use for a particular interaction (e.g. personal identity for an interaction with a banking app or organisation identity for managing organisation operations).

You can activate an identity by clicking on it in the list of identities:

In the next section, we will explore how to export and import identities.