Welcome to Blockchain Commons
Blockchain Commons supports the creation of open & interoperable, secure & compassionate digital infrastructure.| Blockchain Commons
Blockchain Commons supports the creation of open & interoperable, secure & compassionate digital infrastructure.| Blockchain Commons
Not only did Blockchain Commons close out its major Zcash project in Q2 and start work on a big, new FROST push, but we also did continued work on many other initiatives: Working with Partners Zcash Zingo Labs FROST Ethereum Articles & Presentations Interoperability Provenance Marks Post-Quantum URs Permits in Gordian Envelope Thinking about Identity HackerNoon No Phone Home XID Core Concepts Fair Witness Bitcoin Policy Summit Web Updates Updated Projects Page New Envelope Seeds Page CLI Upda...| Blockchain Commons
Reflections on recent conversations about digital identity, sovereignty, and the erosion of foundational principles Echoes from Geneva I wasn’t present at the Global Digital Collaboration conference (GDC25), but the observations shared by colleagues who attended have crystallized some issues I’ve been wrestling with for years. I should note there’s a selection bias here: I’m the author of the 10 principles of self-sovereign identity, so my community tends to have strong opinions about...| Blockchain Commons
Blockchain Commons was pleased to receive another grant this year from Human Rights Foundation (HRF) and their Bitcoin Development Fund grant to support our work with developers and implementers to expand the usage of FROST. To quote HRF’s press release: “For nonprofits operating under authoritarian rule, securing Bitcoin is critical for survival. If private keys (which control access to bitcoin) are compromised, funds can be seized and movements dismantled. Blockchain Commons is a [not-f...| Blockchain Commons
At Blockchain Commons, we design open infrastructure that prioritizes privacy, autonomy, and human dignity. That’s why I support and personally signed the No Phone Home Initiative. It is not just a position, it’s a call to preserve a foundational principle of decentralized identity: Credentials must be verifiable without enabling surveillance! Why “No Phone Home” Matters The problem is simple: when verifying a digital credential such as a mobile driver’s license or a diploma, many s...| Blockchain Commons
ABSTRACT: “Fair Witnessing” is a new approach for asserting and interpreting digital claims in a way that mirrors real-world human trust: through personal observation, contextual disclosure, and progressive validation. It can be implemented with the decentralized architecture of Gordian Envelopes to allow individuals to make verifiable statements while balancing privacy, accountability, and interpretability. At its core, fair witnessing is not about declaring truth, it’s about showing y...| Blockchain Commons
“Cypherpunks wouldn’t just critique the surveillance state—they’d also call out us technologists for enabling it. We were supposed to resist, not retrofit.” Christopher Allen recently talked with Tereza Bízková in an interview that was published to the front page of Hackernoon. It was headlined “The Co-Writer of TLS Says We’ve Lost the Privacy Plot”. In it, Christopher talks about what privacy means to him, what he thinks about recent privacy efforts, how centralization has ...| Blockchain Commons
In early 2025, Blockchain Commons architected and engineered a major project for the Zcash blockchain: the ZeWIF specification that allows all of its wallets to interoperate. Interoperability is something that I consider vitally important for a technological ecosystem, so I was thrilled that Blockchain Commons could improve interoperability for Zcash. Here’s a bit more on why, what Blockchain Commons did for Zcash, and what I’d like to do for other technological communities. The Limits of...| Blockchain Commons
Blockchain Commons focused on the ZeWIF project for the Zcash blockchain during the first quarter of 2025, but that didn’t stopped us from also advancing a few other priorities, including the initial release of our long-incubating Open Integrity project. Here’s what all we’ve been working on. ZeWIF Specification: Why It’s Important The ZeWIF Meetings What We’ve Released So Far What’s Still to Come Post-Quantum Commons: Why It’s Important PQC Meeting QuantumLink What We’ve Rele...| Blockchain Commons
When can you trust a software release? How do you know that a software repo is safe, that it represents the intent of its creators? On the 20th anniversary of Git, these questions are more important than ever. Obviously, Git lays the foundation for trust in software releases with its ability to sign commits, but the trust of the system is unfortunately shallow. Untrusted content can be merged into a trusted repo, commit histories can be rewritten, and trust can’t be reliably extended into t...| Blockchain Commons
On January 31, Christopher Allen spoke with Mathieu Glaude at the SSI Orbit Podcast on the controversial topic “Has Our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?”. Following the video link, below, are Christopher’s Musings on the topic, overviewing some of the material from the video. The legitimacy of the modern self-sovereign identity (SSI) industry is a vital question to ask, because in the last year I’ve become to wonder if DIDs and VCs could actually lose. In my opinion, the main th...| Blockchain Commons
This summer, we’ve been iterating through an article intended to talk about the success that Blockchain Commons has had working with the Wyoming legislature to help to define a first-in-the-country legal definition of digital identity. The Digital Identity Working Group for the Wyoming Select Committee on Blockchain meets again next week, on September 21-22, 2021. I will be providing testimony there at 2pm MST. As a result, we’ve decided to release the current draft of this article on dig...| Blockchain Commons
ABSTRACT: The idea of Self-Sovereign Identity emerged in 2016, but it has inspirations dating back centuries. This article explores the historic evolution of sovereignty and demonstrates how it can be modeled using approaches from other disciplines, including Living Systems Theory and Ostrom’s Principles. It then dovetails that with the topic of human rights to demonstrate many of the goals of the original advocacy for Self-Sovereign Identity. These are goals that we must reconsider today, ...| Blockchain Commons
