Preview
Microsoft Microsoft
Microsoft home
  • Documentation
  • Code Samples
Show / Hide Table of Contents

Sidetree & ION

Created: May 27, 2020


Overview

Sidetree and the Identity Overlay Network (ION) work together to provide a means to locate a decentralized identifier (DID), find the public key to validate a holder controls the DID (private key) and provide a destination to find additional information about that DID.

A brief explanation of Sidetree and ION are below.

Sidetree

Sidetree is a blockchain-agnostic layer 2 protocol that was designed to support a globally scalable, immutable append-only log with no central provider or authorities to be censorship and tamper resistant. This is accomplished by leveraging decentralized ledger technology to support a distributed public key infrastructure (dPKI). This dPKI is used to anchor public keys to validate ownership of a DID.

There are three major components to a Sidetree network: a decentralized ledger system, Sidetree nodes and the Content Addressable Store (CAS).

The Sidetree nodes observe the decentralized ledger for Sidetree transactions and/or write transactions to it. These nodes also fetch and replcate data to the Content Addressable Store (CAS).

You find much more architectural information about the Sidetree protocol in the specification and DIF GitHub respository

Identity Overlay Network (ION)

ION Logo

The Identity Overlay Network, or ION, is a public, permissionless, decentralized DID overlay network that runs on top of Bitcoin, and leverages the Sidetree protocol.

More simply, ION is a DID method that uses Bitcoin at layer 1 and Sidetree at layer 2. The use of the Bitcoin network as the decentralized ledger enables for massive scale, cost efficiency and deployment flexibility.

Anyone can run an ION node! Get started with ION

Additional Resources

Sidetree specification (DIF)

Sidetree repo (GitHub)

ION repo (GitHub)

The Sidetree Protocol: Scalable DPKI for Decentralized Identity (Blog)




See something missing? We'd love your feedback and input on the Verifiable Credentials preview. Please contact us. When you use Microsoft DID Services, you agree to the DID Preview Agreement and the Microsoft Privacy Statement.

In This Article
  • Contact us
  • Terms of use
  • Privacy statement
  • © Microsoft 2018