Microsoft Is Building an ID Verification Platform on Bitcoin

Microsoft is leveraging blockchain technology to create a trustless digital identity scheme, but its not launching a token or building a private blockchain to do so. Its building on Bitcoin instead.Announced on May 13, 2019, Project ION is an open-source, Layer 2 network built out of the public key infrastructure protocol Sidetree. In practice, “it is akin to Lightning, in that there is no secondary consensus among ION nodes,” a source close to the network’s development told Bitcoin Magazine.“This is just like Bitcoin, but for IDs,” the source said.The idea here is to make user names obsolete. Instead of logging into Facebook, email or any other application with a username, users can use a digital decentralized ID (DID) instead. This DID, like a private key when signing a transaction to the Bitcoin network, proves ownership. Individual ION nodes on the secondary network will be responsible for keeping track of these DIDs and timestamping them onto the Bitcoin blockchain for reference and attestation.To create an ID, a user would wrap a public key into a DID creation document on the ION network, signing this input with their private key and sending it to a node on the network. This ION node then archives the metadata (without accessing the data itself) as a DID document for other nodes to reference. To set ownership of the DID in stone, the node batches reference hashes for all of the DIDs it has received into an OP_RETURN tr...