Re: Announcement: Cryptographic Event Logs specification

This is awesome news, Manu, thank you for sharing it!

I imagine this is building further on did:tdw as well and adopting some of the thinking behind KERI key event logs<https://trustoverip.github.io/tswg-keri-specification/#labelling-key-events-in-a-kel> and transaction event logs<https://github.com/decentralized-identity/keripy/issues/133>? I am curious if this is the case, or if there are important distinctions and lines the teams are trying to draw?

Warm regards,
Kalin

From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 at 3:24 PM
To: W3C Credentials CG <public-credentials@w3.org>
Cc: Christine Webber <christine@spritely.institute>, Stephen Curran <swcurran@cloudcompass.ca>, Brian Richter <brian@aviary.tech>
Subject: Announcement: Cryptographic Event Logs specification
Hey folks, based on some discussions in the DID community, and some
crossover discussion with the Social Web community, we've identified a
potential specification for cryptographic event logs. Think of these
like "local blockchains", but without the network, consensus
protocols, or cryptocurrencies (all the controversial bits). It's just
a pure list of changes to a piece of data that's been digitally signed
when the data changed.

This work matters because we believe that we can create a truly
decentralized DID Method, that does not require a blockchain, with
this core primitive. The same core primitive could be used for fully
decentralized social web media posts.

We've been collaborating with Christine (of ActivityPub, OCaps, and
ZCAPs fame) and the Spritely Institute[1], the good folks working on
did:webvh[2], we've taken the BlueSky requirements[3] into account,
and (of course), not much of this is new -- these concepts have been
in floating around for 40+ years, and more recently blockchains,
did:peer, did:webvh, Gordian Envelopes, and a variety of other
cryptographic data structures that record change events to a file.

We're announcing the CEL spec today, which is a cryptographic protocol
for verifying a log of changes to data:

https://digitalbazaar.github.io/cel-spec/


We'll probably request adoption as a W3C CCG work item after the
holiday break. In the meantime, please take a look, provide any
concerns/issues as feedback to the mailing list, or ideally, an issue
on the github repo:

https://github.com/digitalbazaar/cel-spec/


With all that said, happy to answer any questions, concerns, or
explore possibilities with folks on this mailing list. :)

-- manu

[1]https://spritely.institute/

[2]https://github.com/digitalbazaar/cel-spec/issues/3

[3]https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-credentials/2024Dec/0043.html


--
Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/

Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
https://www.digitalbazaar.com/