Today marks the Decentralized Identity Foundation’s first anniversary. Over the past year, DIF has grown from a handful of founding organizations to 56 members. Together, we’re working to shape the future of decentralized identity technology and standards.
Technology Under Development
DIF members are working together to build a variety of technologies. Much of this work is being done in collaboration with the larger open source community through the W3C and events such as Rebooting Web of Trust and the Internet Identity Workshop.
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier for verifiable, “self-sovereign” digital identity. DIDs are fully under the control of their owner, independent from any centralized registry, identity provider, or certificate authority.
Universal Resolver
The Universal Resolver is similar to Bind in the DNS system. However, instead of working with domain names, it works with self-sovereign identifiers that can be created and registered directly by their owners. This project was organized by DIF members with funding from British Columbia.
Chainpoint
Chainpoint is an open standard for anchoring data to a blockchain and creating a timestamp proof.
Hubs
Hubs are datastores containing semantic data objects at well-known locations. Each object in a Hub is signed by an identity and accessible via a globally recognized API format that explicitly maps to semantic data objects. Hubs are addressable via unique identifiers maintained in a global namespace. Several members within DIF have announced work on hub implementations, including Microsoft and Sovrin.
New Web Site!
We have launch DIF’s new website: identity.foundation. You can also follow DIF on Twitter to keep up with news and announcements.
DIF Steering Committee Members
We’d like to thank the following Steering Committee members for providing leadership and helping DIF grow over the past year.
Sam Curren — Engineer, Sovrin Foundation
Rouven Heck — Co-Founder & Project Lead, uPort
Jude Nelson — Co-founder, Blockstack
Kim Duffy — Chief Technology Officer, Learning Machine
Daniel Buchner — Technical Product, Decentralized Identity at Microsoft
Dan Gisolfi — CTO Trusted Identity|Distinguished Engineer, IBM
Steering Committee Alumni: Tierion, GEM
Join Us
Please join DIF if you’re interested in shaping the future of identity. We have over 600 members in our community Slack.
