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· 5 min read

Decentralized Identity in the Real World

The concept of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) was first proposed in 2015 by Drummond Reed and then became an official W3C standard in July of 2022.

Adoption has grown quite a bit in the last few years. Here are a few ways they are being used today.

· 6 min read

The Practicality of Decentralized Identifiers

You may know what a decentralized identifier (DID) is or even how to generate one, but you may be wondering: what’s the point of yet ANOTHER way to identify myself? To get a better sense of the why behind decentralized identifiers, we’ll discuss the real problems society faces today when it comes to identity, and why DIDs are an enormous practical solution to a pervasive set of problems.

· 3 min read

What Happens To My Content If TikTok Gets Banned?

The United States’ potential ban of TikTok is the latest and loudest warning sign of our increasing need for a decentralized internet. Consumers are quickly wondering where they’ll go for their short form video content if TikTok is taken away. Creators are faced with the reality that their income could immediately dry up if the most viral social media platform to date disappears. Lastly, businesses could potentially watch one of their most powerful distribution channels go up in flames overnight.

· 4 min read

Web Assembly

Web Assembly is a popular format for running binary applications in web browsers (with wide support).

This can have a few advantages but the interesting thing for us is that this can allow sharing of implementations of functionality: credential issuance, DID resolving, cryptographic functions, etc which you may not want to necessarily re-implement in JavaScript or TypeScript.

The SSI-SDK is an implementation of a lot of standards for self sovereign identity, so it is a great candidate to expose via WASM to web apps.

· 6 min read

Manually Issue a Verifiable Credential

This is a walk through of the VC issuance process from the perspective of the issuer. It is using a manual approach to issue verifiable credentials and is not intended to be used in production applications. We are providing this for educational purposes only.

Narrative

Alice starts a new job at Acme and she'd like a Verifiable Credential (VC) proving her current employment status.

· 2 min read

Announcing the Verifiable Credential Selector

Web 5 puts users in control of their own data. Right now your bank balance, credit card transaction history and the identity information on your utility bills are in dozens of databases owned by dozens of companies with dozens of terms of service you probably haven’t read.

The Verifiable Credential Selector (VCS) is an open source widget that makes it easy for you to gain possession of your data from Financial Technology (FinTech) apps. VCS uses Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials so once you have control of your data, you can selectively share only what’s required - instantly rather than waiting minutes.