Beyond Blockchain: How Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) Work
Beyond Blockchain: How Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) Work
It’s a common misconception that decentralized identifiers (DIDs) always rely on blockchain technology. While it’s true that DIDs are often grouped into the category of web3 technologies that can use blockchain, they don’t necessarily need to. In fact, there are several different types of DIDs that don’t use blockchain at all.
Three General Types of DIDs
Decentralized identifiers can be boiled down to three general types:
- Ephemeral
- Web-based
- Blockchain
Ephemeral DIDs
Ephemeral DIDs such as did:key and did:jwk are essentially public keys for private keys held by the DID controller. However, the keys cannot be rotated and are best suited for short-term use cases like IoT or debugging, rather than long-term identification.
Web-based DIDs
Web-based DIDs, like did:web, offer a more flexible option. They build on the existing root of trust provided by domain names, allowing the DID controller to easily prove their identity. DID:web also allows for the addition of multiple keys for rotation. However, it does not maintain a record of different states or have a good way of showing when an identifier has been deactivated.
Blockchain-based DIDs
Blockchain-based DIDs, like Sidetree, offer the ability to create, update, resolve, and deactivate identifiers through anchoring transactions on a ledger. This provides transparency, redundancy, and a record of all transactions available to anyone with access to the ledger. Sidetree can be implemented on both public and private blockchains, such as the did:ion and did:elem methods on public blockchains and the did:photon method on Amazon’s QLDB private ledger.
There are also decentralized identifier methods based on DNS, like did:dns.
In conclusion, while DIDs can certainly benefit from using blockchain technology, it’s not the only option. Other methods, such as web, DNS, or using the identifier directly, can also provide the necessary public key infrastructure for decentralized identification.
Benjamin Collins, Transmute’s Technical Product Owner, spent 10 years working with Linux and Open Source as the creator of DashGL.com, a site which provides tutorials for writing simple games for Linux in C using OpenGL and the GTK toolkit.
Connect with Ben on Twitter, and GitHub
About Transmute: Building on the security and freedom that Web3 promised, Transmute provides all the benefits of decentralization to enterprise teams seeking a cost effective, interoperable, planet-forward experience provided by experts in technology and industry.
Transmute was founded in 2017, graduated from TechStars Austin in 2018, and is based in sunny Austin, Texas. Learn more about us at: http://www.transmute.industries
