Jack Dorsey’s bitcoin-focused TBD business unit, a subsidiary of Block Inc., announced on Friday that it is building a new decentralized web: Web5.
Web5 is based on the assumption that Web3, the idea of building a decentralized web using blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, has the right intentions but uses the wrong tools.
Web5 leverages Bitcoin, the decentralized currency network, and a wealth of solid computing technologies to create a new ecosystem of decentralized identities, data storage and applications where users are in control of their personal information.
Fairly decentralized developments on the internet over the past few decades, such as BitTorrent and Tor, have shown that blockchain technology is not a necessary component for decentralization. Rather, it has been shown that blockchain is only needed for one very specific purpose – alleviating the double-spending problem in order to successfully bring peer-to-peer money with Bitcoin into the digital realm.
TBD’s Web5 consists of software components and services such as Distributed Identifiers (DIDs), Distributed Web Nodes (DWNs), Self-Sovereign Identity Service (SSIS), and a Self-Sovereign Identity Software Development Kit (ssi-sdk). These components allow developers to focus on building user experiences while more easily enabling decentralized identity and data storage in applications.
Decentralized identifiers
Web5’s DID component leverages ION, an open, public, and permissionless second-level DID network running on the Bitcoin blockchain. It is based on the deterministic sidetree protocol, which does not require special tokens, trusted validators, or additional consensus mechanisms to work.
A DID is essentially a globally unique persistent identifier that does not require a centralized registry and is often cryptographically generated and registered. It consists of a unique Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) string that serves as an ID with additional PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) metadata describing the cryptographic keys and other basic PKI values associated with a unique, user-controlled, self-determined identifier are linked in a target system like the bitcoin blockchain.
ION only allows DIDs to be disabled by their owners, so it’s censorship-resistant and includes registration features to support decentralized package managers and app stores. The decentralized network can theoretically process thousands of DID operations per second.
Decentralized web node
The DWN used by Web5 is a reference implementation of the Decentralized Identity Foundation’s DWN draft specification. Two people from Block contributed to the specification: Moe Jangda as a contributor and Daniel Buchner as editor.
According to the specification, a DWN is a data storage and messaging mechanism that participants can use to locate public or private data associated with a particular DID. It allows interaction between different entities that need to verify each other’s identities in order to transfer information to each other.
“Decentralized web nodes are a web-like data storage architecture that allows an entity to operate multiple nodes that synchronize each other to the same state, allowing the owning entity to secure, manage, and share its data with others without having to rely on location or vendor -specific infrastructure, interfaces or routing mechanisms”, according to the specification.
Topology of decentralized web nodes. Source: DIF.
TBD’s goal is to produce a first version of the current draft specification along with a reference implementation by July 1, 2022.
Contributions from the development community are welcome. Interested developers can submit suggestions as pull requests to the GitHub repository. Likewise, issues can also be submitted in the same GitHub repository.
Self Sovereign Identity Service
Web5’s SSIS is a web service that wraps the ssi-sdk.
The SSIS interacts with the standards around verifiable credentials, credential locking, credential request, credential exchange, data schemas for credentials and other verifiable data, messaging with DWN, and use of DIDs.
The SSIS facilitates everything related to DIDs and verifiable credentials. Source: TBD.
“Using these core standards, the SSIS enables robust functionality to facilitate all verifiable interactions such as creating, signing, issuing, curating, requesting, revoking, exchanging, validating and verifying credentials at varying levels of complexity,” it says on its website.
Self Sovereign Identity SDK
The ssi-sdk encapsulates standards related to self-sovereign identity.
A preliminary overview of the vision of the SDK. The included standards are under active development and may therefore be added or removed. Source: TBD.
“The ssi-sdk intends to provide flexible functionality based on a set of standards-based primitives for building decentralized identity applications in a modular way: with limited dependencies between components,” it says on its website.
