Microsoft has announced that they are launching a decentralized identity tool on Bitcoin. The open sourced project will be called ION.
Microsoft ION:
As announced by Microsoft on the 13th of May, The open sourced project called ION operates on how networks actually communicate with one another in the handling of decentralized identifiers.
This will give you the ability to prove that you own the keys to your identity data. For example, anytime that you go and use Facebook to login into another website, there is an underlying protocol which allows for that to happen. So, what Microsoft is building is a new protocol to enable this to happen in a decentralized way built on top of bitcoin.
The individual ION nodes on the secondary network shall be held responsible to keep the tracks of the DIDs or digital decentralized IDs and to timestamp these onto the bitcoin mainnet.
For creating a digital decentralized ID, the user will wrap a public key into the Digital Decentralized ID creation document on the ION network, sign the input using their private keys and then send it over to the node on the network. Each time that the user is going to update his Digital Decentralized ID by creating a sub ID or by updating the metadata, the corresponding node will update the changes in the Digital Decentralized ID document.
If Microsoft implements this into any of their software products then people will be using bitcoin to verify their identities. Currently, some companies have already moved forward to showcase their interest in running the ION nodes which includes the Bitcoin security and hardware company Casa, internet security firm Cloudflare and Equinix.
The project will move from the bitcoin testnet to the bitcoin mainnet later this year. What are your thoughts on the ION project by Microsoft? Tell us in the comments section below.
