The media keeps referring to cryptocurrencies, even when talking of non-currency tokens, while reducing the underlying blockchain networks to objects of speculation, instead of focusing on the fact that they provide - first and foremost - a promising governance infrastructure that could resolve many problems of the Internet we use today, such as:... See more

Authentication is the process with which a person, institution, or object can prove that they are who they claim they are. A person can authenticate themselves by proving ownership of an object (ID card, hardware wallet, software wallet), knowledge (password or PIN), or by a personal property (biometric data, signature). Often, a combination of... See more

Thirty years into mass adoption of the Internet, our data architectures are still based on the concept of the stand-alone computer, where data is centrally stored and managed on a server, and sent or retrieved by a client. Every time we interact over the Internet, copies of our data get sent to the server of a service provider, and every time that... See more

A Decentralized Identifier (DID) is a public and pseudo-anonymous unique digital identifier for a person, company, or object that grants personal control over one’s digital identity without the need for centralized institutions managing those identifiers. To guarantee independence of centralized registries, DIDs need to have certain properties.... See more

While most blockchain literature makes a binary distinction between permissioned and permissionless ledgers, I would like to argue that there is no such thing as “100 percent permissionless.” Every consensus mechanism requires a minimum threshold of investment that one needs to make in order to be able to validate transactions or write to the... See more

If you can’t hold state in the Internet, you cannot transfer value without centralized institutions acting as clearing entities.

Instead of a single trusted third party validating transactions through their servers with authority (single vote), a P2P network of computers running the blockchain protocol validates transactions by consensus (majority vote).