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