Decentralized Identity: Passport to Web3

The internet is perhaps the most important invention of the century. Over the past twenty years, it has transformed the fundamental nature of information flows in society: media, politics, news, education, social interactions, etc. Yet even as economic activity increasingly moves from atoms to bytes, our online identities continue to lack true owne... See more

Although decentralized identity (DID) has been a largely overlooked topic compared to DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs, we view it as a critical technological primitive that enables native Web3 applications. If we create a shared, flexible, and resilient identity layer, we can drastically unlock the pace of innovation by creating a wider design space.

Credentials have to be managed, updated, and exchanged. This layer aims to address how DIDs can negotiate proof of control and authentication, as well as securely passing data between identity owners.BrightID is a notable project in this area. It is a social identity network with over 30,000 users that allows people to prove to applications that th... See more

More broadly, NFTs could serve as one anchor for decentralized identity. Already, several users identify their online presence not merely with a username but also with an NFT project. As an example, co-founder of Manifold @richerd explained that he turned down a $9.5 million offer for his cryptopunk NFT because he identifies his cryptopunk as his i... See more

Having a strong DID layer could allow for “on-chain” credit scores, providing users access to credit-based lending. Furthermore, because users directly control their credit score, they can better monitor and adjust their borrowing/lending behavior. Thus, DID offers the chance of further democratizing decentralized financial systems. 

On Ceramic, each piece of information is represented as an append-only log of commits called a stream. Each stream is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) stored in IPLD, with an immutable name called a StreamID, and a verifiable state called a StreamState. A stream is similar in concept to a Git tree, and each stream can be thought of as its own blockch... See more

Ceramic is a public, decentralized data network for managing dynamic and mutable information on the internet. It provides developers the ability to build applications without databases or servers by creating a flexible primitive called Ceramic streams.

In new technological paradigms, the solution that users interact with most frequently often have an outsized influence on the industry’s future development. Similar to how browsers were the battlegrounds for Web1 (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome) and apps for Web2 (Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify), wallets will likely be the battle... See more

Usernames and passwords continue to be the dominant paradigm, despite being repeatedly demonstrated to be an insecure model. The average person has to juggle between 70 to 80 passwords, resulting in a decidedly inferior user experience. Indeed, there are multi-million dollar businesses built just around helping businesses and individuals manage the... See more

A DID is an address on the internet that someone can own and control directly. It can be used to find connected DID documents, which contain information associated with the DID. DID documents contain relevant information to enable use cases, such as sign-in, data encryption, communication, etc. Cryptographic proofs, such as digital signatures, allo... See more