Today, there are more and more initiatives working on decentralized identity infrastructures, or Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). However, there is a big paradox underlying all those initiatives: Even though they often use the same technical specifications , e.g. W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), they are in practice usually…

In 2018, all European member states, together with Norway and Lichtenstein, signed a declaration stating the joint ambition to take advantage of blockchain technology. These 29 countries founded the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP), and within this partnership, they decided to build the so-called European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). EBSI was…

A DIF-hosted resource for community development — Introduction It has been almost three years since DIF began working on the Universal Resolver (GitHub: Universal Resolver) — a foundational piece of infrastructure for the Decentralized Identity ecosystem (see the original announcement). Since then, our vision of being interoperable across ledgers and DID methods has seen a lot of support…

One of the most important challenges that remain in decentralized identity architecture is the key management. The whole point of a Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (which is the underlying paradigm that has led to the development of Decentralized Identifiers and many other related technologies) is that individuals, organizations, and things…

Some time last summer, our community around Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and DIDs made a fascinating discovery: PIDapalooza, a conference whose tag line is “open identifiers deserve their own festival”. We were immediately puzzled and intrigued at the same time — how was it possible that there was an entire community…

We recently published a report on “DID Auth” (PDF, MD), which summarizes ideas and possible architectures that allow you to prove that you control a certain Decentralized Identifier (DID). This report originated at the sixth Rebooting-the-Web-of-Trust workshop and is the result of a collaborative effort by several authors and contributors…

On any blockchain or other decentralized system — DIF is introducing a community preview of the Universal Resolver — a core building block of a decentralized identity system. This is a first step in fulfilling DIF’s mission to help individuals and organizations to control their digital identity, without being dependent on any intermediary party. This tool fulfills a…