W3C Workshop Submission - Ryan Shea of Blockstack Labs

Hello fellow workshop participants,

I'm submitting my full W3C Workshop Submission for you to review. In
addition to this one, I am co-authored on the submission by Christopher
Allen.

Looking forward to the next planning call.

Thank you,
Ryan

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*About the Author*

Ryan Shea is Co-founder of Blockstack Labs & co-creator of Blockstack, an
application stack for decentralized, server-less apps secured by the
blockchain.

Onename, a consumer identity app built on top of Blockstack, was one of the
earliest non-financial blockchain applications and remains the largest by
transaction volume.

*Areas of Interest*

Blockstack Labs has produced and has been iterating on a variety of
protocols in the areas of cryptography, identity, and blockchain
technology, and has been collaborating with other individuals and
organizations (including Consensys and Microsoft
<https://blog.blockstack.org/blockstack-labs-partners-with-microsoft-3ffccebf3f4f#.o9wn4g17i>)
in order to move them closer to becoming widely accepted standards.

We are interested in collaborating with others on developing standards and
have published protocols in the following areas:

- Identity profiles
- Identity claims and attestations
- Elliptic curve keychains
- DNS resolution (including methods for resolution to immutable data)
- Authentication (including methods without identity providers)

To date we've worked with the following standards, either by (a)
incorporating them in their original form, (b) extending them or (c) by
using them as inspiration for our own protocols:

- schema dot org
- JSON web tokens
- JSON-LD
- DNS zone files
- BIP44 hierarchical deterministic keychains

We are also interested in the following areas:

- An HTTP API standard for a transaction broadcasting endpoint
- An HTTP API standard for HTTP 402 - Payment Required using
cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin

*Workshop Goals*

Our goals for the workshop are to:

- Learn about and explore the areas of interest of the other participants
- Learn about the standards and protocols that participants are already
working with
- Find common ground on our areas of interest
- Determine the areas where more experimentation is required and the areas
that are ripe for the development of standards
- Work towards the development of standards in key areas of interest

*Resources*

- Blockstack Paper <https://blockstack.org/blockstack.pdf>
- Blockstack GitHub <https://github.com/blockstack>
- A video by Blockstack Labs on self-sovereign identity and the blockchain
<https://blog.blockstack.org/snapstorm-what-is-identity-ad34e681b62f#.ad4ejexxu>

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*Ryan Shea*  Co-founder, *Blockstack Labs <http://blockstack.com/>*

*Cell: 650-564-7432 <650-564-7432>** | Skype: ryaneshea*