Decentralized Identity: Passport to Web3

As we move to a crypto-native world, we get to rethink the internet as it stands today. In creating web3, we work towards a vision of the internet as originally intended — an open web owned + operated by its users. With this vision comes the ability to have more portable online identities and community affiliations — something made possible with de... See more

To manage data, we need a protocol that makes it easy to store, discover, and route information about an identifier. For Web3 to live up to its promise, that routing table should (a) be unified rather than siloed by application or any other boundary, and (b) be sovereign, give control of data directly to each identifier.This suggests a simple desig... See more

A shared database seems like a great place to put a unified user table, and get rid of the archaic need for every application to create their own identity system.This is the promise of decentralized identity and a core pillar of the Web3 vision: every user and builder is in control of their own data, value, relationships, and information. In this v... See more

Web3 identity solutions center around user-centric ownership models. They also prioritize portability, with solutions promising a foundational identity layer that enables inherent information transferability, rather than retroactively fitted portability solutions as in web2.

Services like BrightID and ENS let us prove we’re human + add digital identities on top of our wallets, letting us “put our mouth where our money is,” but it’s DIDs that bring the disparate parts of our online identities into one.

But in order to mainstream decentralized identity, we must first establish systems that map people’s relevant off-chain experiences and affiliations on-chain. Then we must build mechanisms to standardize, process, and prioritize the influx of data that will be added on-chain. On the way, we’ll need to solve endemic challenges to decentralized ident... See more