Key Points
- Michael Saylor announces that MicroStrategy is building a “Decentralized ID” on Bitcoin.
- The Orange protocol for decentralized identification will anchor digital IDs in the Bitcoin blockchain.
MicroStrategy’s co-founder Michael Saylor announced the open-source MicroStrategy Orange Decentralized Identity protocol during a recent conference in Las Vegas.
The firm’s executive vice president of engineering Cezary Raczko, said that Saylor presented a compelling case for the reasons why there’s a need for decentralized identity.
He also said that Saylor made an even more compelling case for which it makes sense to anchor digital ID into the Bitcoin blockchain, protected by the Bitcoin network’s strength and security.
MicroStrategy also published an unofficial draft of the MicroStrategy Orange specification on Github.
A while ago, Saylor hinted at the fact that his company has been working in the ID and authentication space. Back in 2013, he said that MicroStrategy was aware of Ordinals after the protocol launched in January. He was also interested in exploring how it could inspire software innovations.
Saylor said that the idea of burning a piece of data on the blockchain opens the door to the possibility of burning a digital signature, a registration, or a hash of a document. He also highlighted that enterprises have weak security compared to Bitcoin.
He believes that Bitcoin innovations can introduce a new level of security.
Raczko said that at the heart of all this, there is a hosted service cloud that allows the issuance of identifiers to organization users. This allows the deployment of prepackaged out-of-the-box applications that run on the MicroStrategy Orange platform.
This will make it easier for coders to take such capabilities and integrate them into their applications and systems. Also, Bitcoin-based public and private keys generated via MicroStrategy Orange protocol would be inscribed using the Ordinals protocol.
Decentralized ID protocol uses a modified approach to inscriptions as Ordinals
According to the official documentation, the decentralized ID (DID) protocol uses a modified approach to inscriptions as Ordinals.
It stores only data related to DID, which means that documents can be created and updated with few restrictions on size and content. All this happens while taking advantage of the SegWit feature of Bitcoin.
Raczko said that the opportunity will allow the integration of a digital ID based on Bitcoin via this verifiable credential ecosystem, which can open up a large number of interesting new use cases.
The decentralized identifier could also be used to check users on social media applications or authenticate a text message, college degree and medical records.
All these result in verification in a decentralized way with the ultimate identity living and being anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain. The protocol could make it possible to display an orange check for verified users on platforms.
MicroStrategy shared a post on X, addressing this “orange check” as a global standard and the approach of this idea of DID with Bitcoin.
"Wouldn't it be great if instead of a blue check, green check, etc., there was an orange check that was a global standard? With MicroStrategy, maybe we could approach this idea of decentralized identity, with Bitcoin."
–@saylor, Executive Chairman, MicroStrategy… pic.twitter.com/KFaQH7CaZm— MicroStrategy (@MicroStrategy) May 1, 2024
The new protocol could lead to a way of anchoring digital IDs in the Bitcoin blockchain.
