DID ratification announcement

_posts/2022-07-21-DIDs.md

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+---
+title: "Seven Years Later: DIDs Have Been Ratified!"
+excerpt_separator: "<!--more-->"
+categories:
+  - News
+tags:
+  - DID
+  - W3C
+---
+
+Congratulations to W3C on the ratification of [DID v1.0](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/) as a W3C standard!
+
+![](/assets/images/posts/did-image-1.svg)
+
+The July 19th ratification of DIDs as an international standard demonstrates the ability of a cooperative commons to incubate ideas that will eventually be adopted as standards to be used widely by governments, corporations, and individuals. In doing so, it demonstrates the strength and purpose of the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+The story of DIDs has many origins. Christopher Allen began experiments with decentralized identifiers in late 2014 when he suggested  a [hack to TLS](https://github.com/ChristopherA/revocable-self-signed-tls-certificates-hack) that associated X.509 certificates with Bitcoin addresses and then allowed revocation of those certs by spending the Bitcoin. It was a decentralized solution to the centralized problem of certificate authorities. Around the same time, Dave Longley and Manu Sporny were exploring similar ideas around identifiers and decentralization in the [W3C Web Payments Community Group](https://web-payments.org/minutes/2014-05-07/). Then, in 2015, Drummond Reed and Respect Network joined together with Christopher Allen and others as part of the XDI Registry Working Group, whose goal was to explore possibilities for a decentralized and rootless registry of identifiers; a strawman was presented at [IIW 21](https://iiw.idcommons.net/A_Registry_Directory_~_based_on_BLOCKCHAIN_that_is_ROOTless_%26_NOT_Centralized).
+
+That presentation led to interest from Anil John of the Science and Technical Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, who was looking for alternative identifiers to the US Social Security Number that also provided clear differentiation between identifier and authenticator functions. A coordinated community effort then led both Drummond Reed at Respect Network and Manu Sporny at Digital Bazaar to submit proposals to the Department of Homeland Security's Identity Management and Data Privacy R&D Program. The goal was to show wide community interest in decentralized identity. Not only did both companies receive a grant, but they also both received additional funds through round two of the program.
+
+Much of the community's support for DIDs has occurred through our own [Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshop](https://www.weboftrust.info/), which were founded by Christopher in November 2015 to mark the upcoming 25th anniversary of PGP. One of the five papers that were published following that first workshop was the massive [Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure paper](https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot1-sf/blob/master/final-documents/dpki.pdf), which included as one of its design principles that "each principal must be in complete control of their current identifier/public-key binding", but had not yet settled on questions such as whether decentralized identifiers should be usernames or UUIDs.
+
+DIDs themselves saw their first major workshopping at RWOT 2, which was run in conjunction with the [ID2020 conference](https://medium.com/id2020/id2020-holds-inaugural-summit-at-the-united-nations-7112014add5e) at the United Nations in May 2016. Drummond Reed and Les Chasen of Respect Network produced the initial paper on the [Requirements for DIDs](https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot2-id2020/blob/master/final-documents/requirements-for-dids.pdf), supported by that US Department of Homeland Security grant. That was also the workshop that brought in Manu Sporny's work on [Verifiable Credentials](https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/), which required an identifier to work with, and so was quickly dovetailed into the project.
+
+RWOT has been constantly involved with the iterations of the DID specification that followed, beginning with the [DID Data Model and Generic Syntax Implementer's Draft 01](https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot3-sf/blob/master/final-documents/did-implementer-draft-10.pdf) that was written at RWOT 3 in San Francisco, where Christopher, Drummond, and Les were joined by Ryan Grant. More designs followed across the subsequent Rebooting the Web of Trust events, including a massive DID breakout room at RWOT 5 in Boston, which spent the length of the conference refining the growing spec. Many, many more people contributed to the evolution of the design, among them: Daniel Buchner, who spearheaded Microsoft's support of DIDs and with Microsoft's backing created the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF); and Joe Andrieu, who led the work on the [DID Method Rubric](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-rubric/), a way to evaluate DID methods, as well as foundational use cases and engagement models for decentralized identity such as [Joram](https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot3-sf/blob/master/final-documents/joram-engagement-model.pdf) and [Amira](https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot5-boston/blob/master/final-documents/amira.pdf) and the [Use Cases and Requirements for Decentralized Identifiers document](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/).
+
+The W3C Credentials Community Group, which was co-chaired by Christopher Allen, Joe Andrieu, and Kim Hamilton Duffy led to the final architecture of the DID spec to be presented to the W3C. The DID Working Group then took up that specification beginning in September 2019. On July 19, 2022, that Working Group's work became a "W3C Recommendation" and thus an official international standard. Our congratulations to DID Working Group chairs Daniel Burnett and Brent Zundel, to DID editors Manu Sporny, Amy Guy, Markus Sabadello, and Drummond Reed, and to everyone who has spent the last seven years working on turning the ideas incubated in New York, San Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere into a real specification that can change the world by giving people control over their digital identifiers.
+
+![](/assets/images/posts/did-image-2.svg)
+
+The goal of Rebooting the Web of Trust has always been to incubate ideas that can then be developed by companies and standards organizations. We hope to inspire and influence the future of digital identity, to ensure that it is truly a decentralized web of trust. We have been thrilled to support projects such as [Verifiable Credentials](https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/) in the past, and we are even happier to see a specification that grew so totally out of our collaborative process become an international standard. We look forward to more successes of this sort in the future!
+
+_Illustrations drawn from [DID v1.0 spec](https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/)._

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