Senior Product Supervisor for Decentralized Identification at Microsoft, Daniel Buchner, has confirmed the discharge of ION. Deployed on the Bitcoin mainnet, this resolution is a permissionless public community for Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs).
Carried out on Bitcoin’s blockchain, it operates as a second-layer resolution to assist a DIDs/DPKI (Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure) at scale, based on its Github repository.
This undertaking started 4 years in the past, its function is to present people, organizations and others management over digital exchanges with DIDs. The ION makes use of a Sidetree protocol to anchor DID/DPKI transactions interacting on the community.
Every transaction is encoded with a hash that enables ION nodes to categorize, retailer, course of, and fetch the transactions related to a particular DID. Buchner acknowledged within the official launch:
We’re excited to share that v1 of ION is full and has been launched on Bitcoin mainnet. We’ve got deployed an ION node to our manufacturing infrastructure and are working along with different corporations and organizations to take action as properly. ION doesn’t depend on centralized entities, trusted validators, or particular protocol tokens – ION solutions to nobody however you, the neighborhood. As a result of ION is an open, permissionless system, anybody can run an ION node, in reality the extra nodes in operation, the stronger the community turns into.
Why did Microsoft resolve to make use of Bitcoin’s blockchain?
The ION community is related to Bitcoin with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and doesn’t require an extra consensus mechanism. Its nodes can course of “tens of hundreds of transactions per second.” customers can begin producing their DIDs with out having to make use of BTC or run an ION node on their very own.
Within the undertaking’s FAQ part, the ION staff charges Bitcoin as essentially the most safe blockchain on two metrics: manufacturing of a single, unbiased, immutable file with no option to reverse it; cheap price of attacking the system. Microsoft’s ION staff acknowledged:
Bitcoin is to this point past all different choices, it isn’t even shut – Bitcoin is essentially the most safe choice by an absurdly giant margin.
By way of price, Buchner mentioned the answer’s protocol “It’s skewed towards bandwidth and storage.” Thus, it could possibly assist 40 billion DIDs in 2 TB of reminiscence house with a light-weight configuration for the nodes. Buchner said the next through his Twitter deal with:
That is the fruits of 10 years of labor, starting in 2011 when a couple of of us at Mozilla put aside a few of our time to discover the core ideas of Decentralized Identification. Microsoft in the end supplied the chance to comprehend this dream, and for that I’m eternally grateful.
MicroStrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor welcomed the announcement and predicted that related second-layer options shall be launched extra regularly on Bitcoin. Their use instances shall be broad and utilized in folks’s day by day lives.
Layer 2 innovation atop #Bitcoin goes to speed up, offering us with a set of open, decentralized companies for id, belief, safety, license, commerce, et al. that we are able to construct into our units, combine with our software program, & ship on the pace of sunshine. https://t.co/M4nYwVKB49
— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) March 25, 2021
Bitcoin trades at $52,347 displaying a slight restoration within the 1-hour chart with 1.5% good points. On the 24-hour chart, losses are at 5.6% following an 11.1% correction on the 7-day chart.
