A New Approach to Building Trust in Decentralized Systems by Christopher Allen Musings of a Trust Architect is a series of articles by Life with Alacrity author and Blockchain Commons founder Christopher Allen that lays out some of the foundational ideas and philosophies behind the technology of Blockchain Commons. ABSTRACT: Progressive trust is the concept of gradually building trust over time. It differs from classical models of trust, which rely on authentication mechanisms and centralizat...| Blockchain Commons
I have been struggling for a while to communicate my framing of definitions for Data Minimization and Selective Disclosure, which are privacy-focused data-protection techniques that Blockchain Commons is now incorporating into Gordian Envelope. A few years ago, I supported an RWOT paper on the topic, but it ultimately didn’t match my vision, in part due to a traditional focus on government credentials that we’re (unfortunately) unlikely to be able to influence. This year I gave it a new t...| Blockchain Commons
ABSTRACT: Digital infrastructure is built on sand due to its control by centralized entities, most of which are focused on profit over service. We need Exodus Protocol services that build infrastructure without centralization, ensuring its continuation into the far future. Bitcoin offers our prime example to date. Five design patterns suggest how to create similar services for coordination, collaboraiton, and identity. It’s 2025. Digital infrastructure has become the heart of not just our e...| Blockchain Commons
It has been both an innovative and busy quarter at Blockchain Commons. Here’s some of the main things that we worked on this summer: Join the Club: Introducing the Gordian Club The Club Made Reality Next Step: Hubert New Dev Pages: Provenance Marks Gordian Clubs Hubert Again! Other Recent Work Presentations: Swiss e-ID TABConf 7 FROST Updates: FROST & Bitcoin FROST Demos FROST Verify ZeWIF Updates: Error Handling Back to the Stack Work in Progress: The Architecture of Autonomy Learning FROS...| Blockchain Commons
This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024. My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the United Nations in New York, I wrote “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, the article that described the ten precepts of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and provided the name that defined our ecosystem. Eight and a half years later, I ask the SSI community to reflect on a difficult question, one that challenges the very foundation of SSI. Has...| Blockchain Commons
Musings of a Trust Architect contains Christopher Allen’s foundational ideas and philosophies behind the technology of Blockchain Commons.| Blockchain Commons
On September 28, 2025, Switzerland adopted the use of “electronic proof of identity,” or e-IDs, to be issued and administered by the Swiss government. Use of the e-ID is meant to be voluntary and free of charge. However, there’s still real concern about the use of e-ID in Switzerland. The vote passed with just 50.4% of the voters in agreement. A previous vote on the same subject failed in 2021. And, I think there’s real cause for concern. Fortunately, I was able to talk directly about...| Blockchain Commons
Imagine: A reporter maintains a list of sources and the information they provided for an article critical of the federal government. This is a requirement for fact-checking any serious news story or for later defending it in a court of law. But the federal government illegally seizes the list and jails the sources. Imagine: A protest group uses a supposedly secure messaging app to coordinate, but the government threatens the app store, who substitutes a version that records all of the informa...| 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
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
