[MINUTES] CCG Weekly 2025-09-09

CCG Weekly Meeting Summary - 2025/09/09

*Topics Covered:*

   -

   *Metal Label Platform Presentation:* Yancey Strickler and Brandon Valisk
   presented Metal Label, a platform for creative collectives to release work
   and manage shared economics. The platform uses a custom DID method for user
   and group identification, CID for content addressing, and Stripe for
   financial transactions. They discussed their journey from an initial
   on-chain Ethereum-based platform to their current centralized issuance
   approach while retaining many decentralized identifier principles. They
   emphasized data portability and the "right to exit" as core values. Future
   considerations include support for verifiable credentials and potentially
   other DID methods. The platform facilitates profit sharing and has
   processed over $600,000 in payments. The presentation also touched upon
   their related legal project, Artist Corporations (ACorp), aiming to create
   a new legal structure for creative work.
   -

   *IETF CFRG Updates:* Greg Bernstein announced updates to IETF drafts
   related to privacy-preserving signatures (blind BBS and BBS pseudonyms),
   crucial for the cryptographic suite used in credential systems. These
   updates will be incorporated into the data integrity crypto suite draft.
   -

   *BCG Recharting Questionnaire:* A reminder was given to fill out a
   questionnaire regarding the rechartering of the VC working group at the
   upcoming TAC meeting this fall.

*Key Points:*

   - Metal Label successfully transitioned from a blockchain-based system
   to one leveraging DIDs and CIDs while maintaining key decentralized
   principles, prioritizing user control and data portability over on-chain
   features.
   - The platform prioritizes ease of use for creators, minimizing the
   technical complexity associated with decentralized technologies.
   - The use of DIDs and CIDs ensures data integrity and offline
   verifiability.
   - The platform's architecture enables offline verification and
   authenticity of content.
   - Future development might include open-sourcing core components,
   expanding DID method support, and integrating verifiable credentials.
   - The Artist Corporation (ACorp) legal project aims to provide a novel
   legal structure for creative collectives.
   - Updates to IETF drafts for privacy-preserving signatures are underway
   and will impact credential systems.
   - Input is needed on the rechartering of the VC working group via a
   questionnaire.

Text: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-weekly-2025-09-09.md

Video: https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-weekly-2025-09-09.mp4
*CCG Weekly - 2025/09/09 11:50 EDT - Transcript* *Attendees*

Benjamin Young, Chandima Cumaranatunge, Erica Connell, Fireflies.ai
Notetaker Ivan, Geun-Hyung Kim, Greg Bernstein, Harrison Tang, Hiroyuki
Sano, Ivan Dzheferov, JeffO - HumanOS, Jonathan Bryce, Kayode Ezike, Leo
Sorokin, Phillip Long, Rob Padula, Ted Thibodeau Jr, Vanessa Xu, Will
Abramson, Yancey Strickler
*Transcript*

Will Abramson: Hey join us.

Will Abramson: How you doing?

Yancey Strickler: Hey, Will.

Yancey Strickler: Doing great. Hello, this is Brandon.

Will Abramson: I play what?

Yancey Strickler: I'm Yansy.

Will Abramson: Hey Yeah, This is Harrison the coach. How you doing Harrison?

Harrison Tang: Hey Will. Hey

Yancey Strickler: Good morning.

Will Abramson: All right,…

Will Abramson: you're together. Where are you calling in from?

Yancey Strickler: We're in Austin, Texas. We're never in the same place.

Will Abramson: Okay, cool.

Yancey Strickler: It just happened to work out that the same day this was
happening, we were together. So, perfect timing. Yeah. Yeah.

Will Abramson: So, we probably get started about 5 people it will trickle
in and then we do some admin. and I'll hand it over to you guys. Yeah. Yeah.

Yancey Strickler: Sounds good. We'll go.

Yancey Strickler: We'll mute and go camera off. We have a presentation to
share. Yeah, we'll come back on.

Will Abramson: Yeah. Cool.

Yancey Strickler: right, cool.

Will Abramson: We' get started in just a moment. I'll get started with some
of the administrative stuff.

Will Abramson: So yeah, welcome to today's credential community group call.
Today we have Yampsy and Brandon joining us to kind of talk to us about
metal label. So it's going to be a pretty cool talk I think. before we get
into that, let me just run through the administrative stuff. So code of
ethics and professional conduct reminder think we're a pretty friendly
community here, but let's remember to treat everyone with respect and
continue to do so. I think we've been great. So just a friendly remind So
anybody's welcome to participate in these calls. However, substantiative
contributions to CCG work items must be members of CCG with full IPR
agreement signed. if you have any questions about that just reach out to
any of the chairs and we can help you with that. third yes.

Will Abramson: this call is recorded using Google Meet and the recording
and the transcript is available and will be sent out to the mailing list
after this call, usually tomorrow, I think. okay. And then remind
reintroductions. Anybody new to the community today wants to say hello or
anybody want to reintroduce themselves or people to say Okay, not seeing
anybody jump on the queue. let's move on. So, announcements and Does
anybody have any announcements or reminders for the community today?

Will Abramson: Greg, go for it.

Greg Bernstein: Yeah. Hi everyone.

Greg Bernstein: On the privacy preserving signature front, we have updated
two important drafts that go along with the core BBS draft and that's blind
BBS and BBS pseudonyms. These are both used in the crypto suite. So they
are updated. blind BBS is very stable. We use that in anonymous keybinding
type of stuff feature…

Will Abramson: I'm

Greg Bernstein: which is important. pseudonyms is we added some new
features to it. and if anybody is working on this stuff I would encourage
you to take a look at the test vectors and pseudonyms because we're trying
to make sure those are verified not just by me. we need multiple people and
if you are early on trying to do that you can directly contact me if you
run into any problems but we'll be rolling these things into the BBS crypto
suite and updating those references and adding some privacy and security
considerations to the crypto suite draft which is based on these IEF CFR
00:05:00

Greg Bernstein: RG drafts.

Will Abramson: Great. So that's changes to the F drafts that need to bubble
up into the data integrity crypto suite, right? Right.

Greg Bernstein: So, we are working this from both angles from the
fundamental crypto stuff over at the CFRG at IETF and into our credentials
because one has driven the other. the requirements for this blind signature
stuff and these pseudonym things really came from us, for the credential
community and…

Will Abramson: Cool.

Greg Bernstein: the needs of anonymous credentials. So, it's kind of a
two-way street here.

Will Abramson: Thanks, Anybody else have any reminders for the community?
man is not on.

Will Abramson: He would usually have some. I guess I can go one for Manu. I
haven't yet done this myself, but I saw Manu sent an email reminder for
folks to please fill out his questionnaire about the BC getting So
hopefully at TAC this fall, the VC working group will be recharted and
we're trying to decide what work should go into that working group. to what
specs needs to be adopted and that is really about interest and also
willingness to do the work. So if you have time and you intend to
participate in that working group, you'd be great to hear from I think
that's Last chance for anybody to say hello before I hand it over to I
think nobody's joined. So okay, with that I'll hand over to Yanti.

Will Abramson: Yanti is going to talk to us about Metal Label which I mean
I'm delighted Yanti is coming on I've been following Metal Label for some
time now and when I learned that they use decentralized identifiers I
reached out and hopefully we're going to learn how this platform uses it.
So that's cool. Thanks. Yep. Zon.

Yancey Strickler: All right, good morning, afternoon, everybody. my name is
Yansancy Strickler. I'm joined here by my co-founder, Brandon Valisk. and
together we are two of seven founders of a project called Metal. and we're
going to talk about what we've made and the technical structure of what
we're making. you'll first have to deal with me doing some storytelling for
a bit before we get to Brandon's more fun technical deep dive. but we want
to frame this talk about what we see as a real sea change shift in the
internet. one that I think people have predicted or wanted for optimistic
reasons.

Yancey Strickler: one that may result from more pessimistic reasons. and we
want to talk through sort of our journey in navigating these waters. so the
whole metal label project starts with my own personal creative crisis.
previously I was a music journalist. I was a co-founder and former CEO of
Kickstarter. And I'm a writer by trade. And a few years ago, I found myself
hitting a real point of burnout. I was running a popular newsletter and a
community and was doing everything I thought I wanted. but yet was just
constantly dissatisfied and found myself on a treadmill of a lack of joy.

Yancey Strickler: basically and a lot of it came from the fact that as a
creative person the actual job of making something creative was an
increasingly small slice of the pie. It was just as much about community
management, admin, endless promotion and all these things that are much
more dispiriting compared to just doing the work. and I ended up sort of
crashing out of what I was working on and in looking for inspiration read a
book I've read many times before called Our Band Could Be Your Life, which
is a kind of an oral history of the origins of punk and hardcore music in
America. And the book tells a story of all these weird noisy bands one
would release and who had to make their own label and release themselves as
a way of putting out their music.
00:10:00

Yancey Strickler: But this amazing thing happened that when they put out
themselves under this fake name and PO box address, other bands would come
out and say, "Can you put us out too?" And suddenly the act of just one
group would create a whole scene. And a lot of the amazing independent
music record labels of the past 30 years started from first an artist
wanting to put out a friend and then it just turning into something bigger.
you can manifest something not just of you but appears in a whole
relationship. And I started to think about this frame of an indie record
label as a sort of a metaphor or a superructure for how as a creative
person could have a more collaborative cooperative relationship with people
around me.

Yancey Strickler: And I thought of this concept of a metal label as being a
structure that pairs a shared purpose, a group of people, a squad, public
releases, things you put out to manifest your vision, and then some sort of
economic rules that determine how the money works. And that with these four
components together, this would allow you to create an organization that is
both very old but also could be very new, especially in the internet era.
So this has been the focus of energy for quite a while. And at the same
time, there was another force emerging in my life that has a dual track and
it's the concept of the dark forest.

Yancey Strickler: in 2019, I wrote a blog post about the dark force theory
of the internet, introducing this idea that and many more people were
increasingly anxious to share our opinions or to be vulnerable on the
internet because we thought we would be exploited by trolls or advertisers
or who knows what. And instead I found that I was only being really honest
and open in group chats, in private spaces, in podcasts, things that
weren't a part of the indexed internet. And this little po post was sent to
a tiny letter list of about 300 people, but ended up going hugely viral.
This idea really resonated and other people ended up building on this
concept.

Yancey Strickler: Vinitesh Ralph wrote a piece about the cozy web sort of
another way of talking about the space just a couple days later and Maggie
Appleton the great designer technologist she made this visualization of
showing this new map of the internet where you have the clearet at the top
just the main social channels which are basically all ads it's just all a
honeypot and then below that you have these dark forests this cozy web
these spaces is where we hide out and are ultimately plotting and doing
things together. And then there's, an even darker web below that. And then
another group called Trust based out of Berlin. They also wrote a great
piece building on this called Moving Castles, theorizing about ways that
groups of people could move around the internet in a sovereign way and what
that might look like.

Yancey Strickler: And these forces were really coming together in our minds
as the metal label team as we were trying to enact our ideas and to make
them real. And so it ended up being a group of about a half dozen of us who
all resonated with just the loneliness, the grind of the internet as we
know it and who were attracted to the idea of making things together. And
we started making zenes and experiences and just sort of trying stuff and
at the same time building technical products because we were a technical
team. And the first version of metal label that we made because it was so
strongly based on ideas of shared economics. We used a crypto backend to
make it. It was an onchain product built on Ethereum. This is in 2023.

Yancey Strickler: and the first release we had was this release with
Vitalic Bdderin and Gitcoin. which is about reissuing the quadratic funding
white paper as a signed and open edition. Ended up raising almost a million
dollars. but we took our ideas about the ways collectives or labels release
things and people share and their split profits, all these things. we put
that into an onchain product. this is a product a project from the
University of Colorado to release a Zen that we did on chain that sold out.
So we were playing around in this kind of space. but at the same time that
we believed in many of the technical primitives we were very aware of a lot
of the social constraints and usability constraints of crypto and we ended
up deciding to exit the space later that same year in 2023.

Yancey Strickler: We wrote a private Google doc called climbing out of the
rabbit hole that we circulated among friends that ended up getting hundreds
of comments explaining our process and why we'd come to this decision. but
one of the reasons why we were comfortable making this decision is because
we saw a way to get a lot of the same outcomes that we were looking for
with crypto but using another tactic to get there. And that is where I'll
turn it over to so m Brandon. I'm one of the founders here alongside with
Yansancy with Metal Label. I've been writing code for a little over 20
years. In the last 10 years I've been focusing on architecting, designing
and shipping cloud platforms mostly in small startups and then had a little
tour of duty in the crypto world with Dows building fund protocols over
there with NFTs and that brought me to Metal.
00:15:00

Yancey Strickler: So our platform technical journey, we started out in the
Ethereum ecosystem with the NFT project that Yansy mentioned and we were
drawn to it for the economic reasons and openness and transparency. And for
me on a technical level, I've was really inspired by the interoperability,
the openness, and what felt like an entirely new way of thinking about how
you represent store and interact with identities and resources on the web.
so while we started with the ETH ecosystem, we moved away for it for all
the reasons that Anie mentioned adopted more of a kind of traditional
finance rails using Stripe. but we wanted to bring what we could along with
us that we liked in the ETH ecosystem around this time which was about 2
years ago now.

Yancey Strickler: This was when Blue Sky was first launching and I was
really inspired by their use of DIDS of the decentralized identifier spec.
that their full platform was open sourced and seeing how they approached
building what was a very traditional web platform with their version of a
centrally issued decentralized identifier. I thought was a very intriguing
mix. talking more in depth about the technical structure of how we're using
some conclusions we came to after using them for the last two years and
we'll go into some more detail. I'll kind of skim through this at a high
level and we'll take questions at the end on the technical stuff. Happy to
get into the nitty-gritty with y'all. So, I would say that our current
architecture with the platform is what I would call a DID verse platform
architecture. So, all users and all groups, which we call labels in our
product today, are identified using a most of these DID MLR method.

Yancey Strickler: This is a custom method that is similar to the way that
Blue Sky has their method with a few tweaks and a few simplifications, but
otherwise it's a pretty straightforward method. We also support using the
did key method as well as a way of having fully self- sovereign identities
that work fully with our API. Now, so for most users, when a user signs up,
the platform will generate private key material. It will encrypt that with
AWS KMS and fully manage the keys on our side. all JWTs that are issued,
these are the credentials used by the front-end client to authenticate with
the backend. All of these JWTs are signed by the key specified within those
DID documents. in addition to using DIDs and that we also go all in with
content addressing as a strategy on how we're representing things.

Yancey Strickler: our structured document in terms of our catalog data. So
everything you see on our release pages, all of the creator content that
lives there and all media is addressed using CIDs. and this kind of plays
into our overall technical strategy with how this works of two values that
we really were focusing on. The idea that we can have offline verification
so that any information or documents created on the metal label platform
can be verified to be structurally consistent and coherent and not forged
or tampered with without relying on metal label still being around. And
then the idea of offline authenticity was very intriguing as well where
when we can establish that this user generated content was signed by these
keys which is associated with this did document and it is all nicely
content addressed it gives us a very intriguing story of data that makes
sense stays cohesive stays coherent even in the case of our servers being
offline and the data living elsewhere.

Yancey Strickler: So DIDs and CIDs all the way down is that was how I like
to look at that. getting into a little nitty-gritty here on some of the
stuff, we structure our DIDs in a way that in retrospect was probably a
little too cute for its own good, but it is something that is I think
worked out pretty well. and that similar to Blue Sky that the did
identifier is generated from the hash of the unsigned creation operation.
And so this is part of that content addressing and kind of inability to
forge. And just with blue sky, so long as you have the operation log of the
DID and how it's been iterated on, you can locally verify that it's all
consistent and makes sense. And so it's not even possible to forge an
operation log for DID. The way we generate that when we're looking at this
code here is to have the first few bytes of that hex encoded.
00:20:00

Yancey Strickler: I like that sight readability of the hex character set in
the middle for a little bit more entropy is base 32. So this creates a very
interesting what I would call an ID aesthetic in a way but a little too
creative for its own good but still a very interesting kind of approach. in
addition to the did MLR which are a custom DID method as I mentioned
earlier we're DID key method for the intrinsic key material that's just
present in a DID. this is used for admin tooling that I use locally. So
instead of logging in through an email or any other normal account, there
is a local credential that is created and then authenticated through the
back end that way. in addition, similar to blue sky, there's a standalone
directory service and a public API. This isn't published and this isn't
shared elsewhere, but the original vision for when we were doing this was
that it could be a standalone service that could be used and queried.

Yancey Strickler: This is an example of our actual DID documents look like
and would love to hear if this lines up with how y'all tend to look at
these things and if this makes sense from a spec compliant perspective. But
it has all the standard goodies in here. Has a service specification that
points to our API that is used with all of our interactions with the
platform. It has also known as tags that are synced up whenever a user
handle changes on our platform as well as key specifications for
authentication, assertion and capability. I think all the keys at this
point in the platform are using these multibase encoded keys here and it's
all using the se the secp 256k1 algorithm when it comes to these keys
borrowing from the ethereum and bitcoin ecosystem there. This is what the
operation logs looks like.

Yancey Strickler: So when a did is created, there's a genesis operation
that specifies the public key material and any other information. And any
updates will have a previous C ID referenced in the following operation
log, creating a nice chain all the way back to the genesis operation.
because the genesis operation, the hash of that is used to determine the
actual did you can verify the full operation log and the ID itself fully
offline. This is what they look like. You can see the cute hex on the
beginning and the end with some base 32 mixed in the middle, which is kind
of nice. and so something that I think is maybe an interesting design
decision, I would love to hear y'all's thoughts on this is that despite
being decentralized identifiers, this is a fully centralized issuance
approach. My reasoning for that is that I found the DIDS spec in of itself
to be very useful.

Yancey Strickler: the ecosystem around it, the tooling around it. Even in
2023, it is way better now in terms of open source tooling after looking
into it a little bit more. But on its own, it's a powerful container. I
also think that decentralized at times I see to be a little bit
overromanticized in terms of what it actually brings you. So it doesn't
mean that It's in an alternative rability Our durability stance is
different and it's that our centralized issuance of these DIDs which can be
replicated of course because it's all deterministic. and the hosting of
those which doesn't require trust because they're self authorizing means
that we're okay with that kind of durability stance. These did documents
can live on any substrate and any storage platform. You don't need to trust
the server for that and our servers don't need to be online to verify this.

Yancey Strickler: So really we were looking at this from a portability and
a post story of what happens after a platform is shut down or a platform is
superseded and what that actually looks like for your data and what that
means. Censorship resistance and the technical substrate blockchain were
not actually important and were actually some of the things we're moving
away from because of the challenges that came with that. So as I mentioned
before, all JWTs are signed by DID specified assert key. And this is
independent of the actual DID document itself. And so while we only DID key
and DID mlr from top to bottom throughout the entire system, all
authorization happens through looking at the incoming principle, resolving
the corresponding DID document, finding the correct key, and checking that
those signatures match the key.

Yancey Strickler: And so in addition to that all of our content operations
are keyed by CIDs as well. This goes into that content addressability and
the tamper prevention, things like that. And even our media. So whenever
images or videos are uploaded, we actually compute the IPFS CIDs for those
and store those media references within our content addressed documents as
IPFS URIs. This also allows offline verification that any media or images
that a document references are the media that it's pointing to. So again
allowing creators information and their arts and media to live outside of
our servers and still carry some sense that this is what they wrote, this
is what they meant and a untrusted server hasn't modified them. So this is
just an example of our CIDs what they look like.
00:25:00

Yancey Strickler: of course the base 58 bitcoin style cids coming out of
there from I believe the IPL suites of cooling. So as I mentioned this was
two years ago that we built all of this out and at the time this was coming
right off the momentum we had of building crypto. We were still potentially
looking at building an NFT product at this time. and DIDs feeling very hot
with Blue Sky coming out and a lot of technical momentum around that. it
felt like a very intriguing direction to go in terms of building it out,
not going with a decentralized substrate like a blockchain, just pulling in
DIB primitives, the open source libraries around that, parsing libraries,
crypto libraries. It was actually relatively trivial to implement this top
to bottom in a green field application, of course.

Yancey Strickler: so long as we architected around this idea that identity
involved cryptographic primitives and signatures and keys, it was
relatively straightforward to build that in at a very deep level and sort
of just forget about it that it was there, which is kind of what happened
in a way. there was no interoperability play that was here. There was no
taking your metal label identity elsewhere. There was no bringing your blue
sky identity into metal label. I had considered and designed some of these
paths in a way, but none of that really felt like it made sense from a
product perspective. In addition, the idea of self-s sovereign identities I
think is just incredibly cool and aesthetic from a technical perspective.
And this is used internally for administration operations where we'll of
login and emails and things like that.

Yancey Strickler: But for almost all use cases, it seems increasingly
difficult to imagine a lot of people custodying their own keys for consumer
applications, which was one of the primary reasons we moved away from
blockchain because wallets and asking all of our customers to figure out
wallets and use that and all the trouble that comes with that seems
challenging. this was two years ago when I kind of reflected on that. I
still think that is mostly the case just on seeing the way that consumer
crypto has moved today of abstracting all that through various mechanisms.
I think the spec and the ecosystem is really great with so much cool stuff
in there.

Yancey Strickler: I recently came across or refreshed myself with the full
Jose suite of all of these things around how keys and signatures are all
represented. The way that we're signing JWT today is non-standard. and so
moving something a little bit more standards approach I think could be
really interesting just from an interop perspective. and really too I've
been considering the idea of issuing DIDs for content as well. And so using
keybased access delegation where the assert key associated with a media's
identity is owned by the principal who created it. And so this sort of
creates a chain of ownership that is enforced or expressed through the kind
of cryptographic key material. which has interesting shapes. And so these
are just considerations that we're looking at for the future. Bassing it
back to Anthony. Yeah.

Yancey Strickler: so we'll get into more questions with Brandon in a
moment, but just to talk through how our product uses this and where we're
going. we'll have a last few thoughts. so we've been working for the past
year and a half on metalabel.com, which is the non-crypto version that did
stripe a whole backend we made to approximate the outcome we wanted. and
the product is around a group of people who collectively form and own That
entity can then release work and a work is like selling a book or a zip
file whatever it might be. And within that work there's a set of splits
that determine how money should flow as a result of that. in addition with
any work you create or sell you can also divert a portion of money to a
treasury that you can use to fund future projects.

Yancey Strickler: This is the architecture underneath and the product
itself reflects this and of course all this also has divids running
underneath it. but it's very simple to start a label. create a group based
around some shared interest. and the release page allows you to tell the
story of all the people who are part of a release. allows you to create
additions that package together different components, digital and physical
media together into one package. This is like our early onchain record
ideas. lets you set a split through the I in a very intuitive way, just
sending percentage of earnings. and allows you to execute that split and
automatically just pushes the funds out to all the parties who are
notified. They basically have a royalty they can collect.
00:30:00

Yancey Strickler: and so this is the way our system runs and we've
processed I think 600 plus thousand dollars through this system in the past
year. so it's been used by people like Brian Eno who published a new book
this way and explicitly used the splits to direct some of the money to
charity. and the project that's live right now called a sexual history of
the internet actually creates a split within the split that's a pool of
funds that will go to people who are cited by the work. So a different
notion of how profits or money can flow. And so people are able to build
whole cataloges this way of building universes around their shared tastes
just like the label ideas that we were imagining.

Yancey Strickler: some of these projects have gone on to have bigger and
bigger success. And we've also been working on a legal project for the past
year called artist corporations or AC corps where we're trying to create a
new legal structure for creative work. This involves passing laws and
making something like an LLC or a BC Corp except one just for artists. And
we're making a lot of progress on this. And this also fits into our
technical vision of what we're doing because if we look at this same group
today the Dark Forest Collective that's releasing work and splitting it,
you can also imagine a moment where they need to incorporate or they want
to take on more money or get more legit in what they're doing. And so our
system will allow them to convert to becoming an Acorp. we'll have a web
app that makes that possible. and as an AC corp you have additional
capabilities.

Yancey Strickler: You can receive more funds, you can own things, and you
can also sell shares and take an investment into your creative project. And
we're imagining a universe in which a metal label label and an Acorp and
all these things and each of these members are sharing a back end that the
actions you take in one space can be brought to another and that we're
building a real ecosystem of projects together. And where we are now in
this area of the internet that I think we're beginning to lose has been
very much a solo individual mode we're all trying to build our moes around
ourselves to build our brands but the reality of the claronet of the dark
forest of the conditions of the internet that we find ourselves in the
sloppification of everything and the fact that to put out work or to bring
attention to your

Yancey Strickler: ideas today. It's about triangulating opinion, bringing
lots of people together around things. it's producing a different social
experience on the web and it's ultimately going to produce frastructure,
different kinds of institutions. And when we look at the work we're doing
with Metal or with Acorps or another project that we'll introduce later
this year, we feel we're trying to build both the infrastructure and the
tools that reflect this narrative. they reflect the story that we've been
on that reflect both the burnout and the ways that we've responded by
coming together and Brandon and I and the group of us working on metal
label were a real example of this and as we look into the future we really
believe that ds and other shared technical infrastructure things that allow
a degree of sovereignty that allow portability that is important that is a
way that we escape some of the conditions we continue to be trapped

Yancey Strickler: and for those of us who believe in the internet's future
and I think what the corporation was to the 20th century as the dominant
social form that shaped the world that's that's what internetbased groups
are for the 21st century. We are the ones who are really defining the new
values the new tools the new capabilities that are around us. And we think
this is the sort of infrastructure both socially and technically that can
get us there. thank you for humoring us, listening to us and happy to get
into your questions.

Will Abramson: Wonderful. Thanks for that, That was great. What I really
appreciate about what I think is interesting, right, is you guys have just
been working in your own little bubble,…

Yancey Strickler: Okay. Holy crap.

Will Abramson: Using some of the specs and stuff developed by this
community. I mean, I only found out you guys are using did through a
sentence or something in a blog you wrote right at the bottom. It's just up
in there and I was like, I don't have been following the platform, right?
there's nowhere on there. There's no material that sells it because I think
you're totally it's not what creators are looking for. They don't care
about that, they want the place to release work and that's just a
distraction. It's another one of those things in that box on the right
that's stressful. I don't want to have to deal with it.
00:35:00

Will Abramson: But I wonder, if we're looking towards the future to a world…

Will Abramson: where maybe people are more competent with managing private
keys and all that stuff like what is your strategy to educate existing
people and maybe making that more aware because the fact that you enable
persistence potentially metal label goes away it only enables persistence
if the people are able to and confident enough to take on some of that
responsibility I suppose. Have you thought about that?

Yancey Strickler: Yeah, I think that's a great frame…

Yancey Strickler: because we have this interesting stance, this
technological stance, but without the ability to kind of pull your data
out, it's kind of lost. And so what feels really important to me is the
ability with the right to exit. And so being able to export your own data,
having that come out in a spec compliant way, having the supplemental
documentation or supporting operation logs or signature chains and things
like that that allow for fully offline verification and proving would be
that.

Yancey Strickler: what that looks like export functionality open source
modules that allow parsing that things like that and that would be what my
vision would be of allowing people to do that of letting the data exist in
such a way where here's an easy way to export it here's an open source repo
where you can do offline verifications things like that and then the story
for that I think is not one that is centered so much on tech and more
centered on what is your stuff is your stuff and being able to take that
out of

Yancey Strickler: the system. We aren't being precious about holding on to
that and allowing it to be used in any way that you want. and supporting
that. So, that's not just all the cool did stuff and…

Yancey Strickler: crypto things. It's just the ability to get your data in
and out of a system I think is a very fundamentally critical philosophical
pillar of what we're doing.

Will Abramson: I see Phil maybe you can speak to your com. I just want to
add to that for me I think maybe in some future the power is on the labels
right not everybody in that label might be technically competent…

Will Abramson: but throughout the collaboration of that label maybe they're
able to persist the media or content that they're releasing in some way a
bit more creatively.

Yancey Strickler: Yeah, I think we've spent a lot of time trying to explain
to people especially in the blockchain era the benefits and…

Will Abramson: I agree.

Yancey Strickler: we tried to do that too with DIDs at first and it was
like explaining blockchain without blockchain which is just death. but I
think we're really focused on the product outcomes that can result and…

Will Abramson: Cool. Phil,…

Yancey Strickler: happy to nerd out with people once they get excited by
that, but I think we've really tried to ground it there.

Will Abramson: do you want to ask a question?

Phillip Long: Really an interesting presentation and…

Will Abramson: I should ask

Phillip Long: I was just curious because there has been the legal work
around creative commons and…

Phillip Long: licensing for creative work and such and one of the
challenges has been how do you protect creative work that is in fact
collections of code and…

Yancey Strickler: I don't understand.

Phillip Long: expressions in the web etc in a way that actually adds a
certainty that is not being reused inappropriately or at least lets you
know whether it has been reused. And so just the connection between the two
because it seems like there might be an application of some of the legal
work that creative commons did to come up with their various licensing
structures which I think was one of the reasons it was so successful. but
also how does that apply or does the content that you're describing differ
in a way that requires a different paradigm? Thanks.

Yancey Strickler: Yeah, I mean the whole CC infrastructure

Yancey Strickler: philosophy everything it is fantastic love how it extends
across the web and the model they built for it I think for the work
happening in our space yet we don't have a field for a say if there's a CC
license or something associated with this I think the things in our world
are mostly personal creative output that live in a different universe but
obviously we're heading towards a murky bleak future I think when it comes
to setting boundaries around attribution and use and it's unclear where to
even try to draw those lines.

Yancey Strickler: I think that we're imagining sovereignty beyond technical
borders as being a way but that doesn't stop things from spreading of
course Brandon do you have anything on this? nothing too much. But maybe on
the adjacent side is that I do find that attribution and the ability to
kind of show proof of here's my anchored Shaw hash on a blockchain or
something like that. The idea of allowing technology to provide proof of
providence or ownership or just even kind of historical context in a way I
think is something that is very appealing to me when it comes to that.
00:40:00

Yancey Strickler: specifically on the licensing thing. Like Nancy said,
it's a little outside of the world that we're in, but I do like the
attribution piece quite a lot.

Will Abramson: Thanks to please…

Will Abramson: if you have any questions do jump on the queue. I have more
but people second to just jump on if you don't. I mean I have a quick one
actually which is the spec anywhere? Do you have a spec that's public or is
it just in your end?

Yancey Strickler: No, there's no public The original idea and the way that
the code was originally physically architected within the repo was to have
a subset of this code be open sourced which would include the did
generation method all of the cataloging stuff around how we're doing
signatures and things like that. because of maybe the lack of take when it
came to being part of the story of what we're trying to do with our product
and our vision and where we're going with metal label.

Yancey Strickler: the open source part never happened because there wasn't
necessarily a demand for that. It didn't necessarily make sense. as we are
looking to the future of thinking about how we're continuing to use DDS and
what that might look like, I am revisiting this idea of having an open
source core within some of the stuff that we're building so that key
cryptographic operations can not only be audited but be part of and
released to the community so that people can weigh in on things like that.
and have available all of the same cryptographic signing verification code
that is used within the platform in the open source community as well. So
no, on this is not open source, but that certainly was part of the original
vision and something that I've been revisiting lately.

Will Abramson: Yeah, I guess that gets you back more to some of the
features of blockchain that are nice, this s of open place where innovation
can happen without permission.

Will Abramson: Not seeing anyone on the queue. I can keep going. I have a
different question did you consider any other did methods when you were
starting from a green field what was your decision process to get to we're
going to build our own or did you just

Yancey Strickler: So I thought about maybe using Blue Skies originally…

Yancey Strickler: because their directory is open and I believe at least at
the time when I was looking at in 23 we could have just integrated with
them and created identities using that and using that as part of that since
we didn't control the private key material that wouldn't work. I thought
about maybe going with just did keys everywhere and so that these keys
would be just part of an intrinsic key but then you don't have key rotation
and so that's not particularly ideal.

Yancey Strickler: And I remember there was a few other ones that I came
across and there were some did methods that were popular in crypto circles
that used blockchain for their actual storage substrate. And I forgot the
name of them now, but one of them just had a three in the did method
identifier ceramic I think it was called at the time. And so I looked into
some of these and…

Will Abramson: Oops. Is he

Yancey Strickler: either it was too low level of a primitive did key and I
wanted to have key rotation or it was too opinionated on storage substrate
because it was living on a blockchain or something some other kind of
storage network. And so rolling our own seemed like a pretty simple
approach, especially because in the end, and this is a little bit more kind
of on the retrospective side, but just having a container for what is an
identity, what is a key, what is the relationship between those? how do you
have different types of keys that exist and associates with identity and
then how are those stored and represented? Having your container just for
that alone was really useful.

Yancey Strickler: And the did method itself was less of a design decision
because it is a few modules of signing and it's tucked away and that's
basically So looking at open did methods or more interoperable ones
probably would have made a lot more sense…

Yancey Strickler: if we felt like that was a compelling part of the
platform but it just decreasingly became clear that there wasn't going to
be much of a use case for that or have it be part of the story.

Will Abramson: Thanks Har.

Will Abramson: Go for it.

Harrison Tang: Yeah, I'm just curious…

Harrison Tang: ble credentials? Have you guys thought about the use of
verifiable credentials? in addition to bids and if so what are the plans?

Yancey Strickler: And so verifiable credentials,…

Yancey Strickler: it's a JWT spec, right, with claims and signatures. Is
that correct?

Will Abramson: I think the VC is more like a general data model that can be
represent or…

Will Abramson: signed over using a JWT but it's a data model for
representing claims here and…
00:45:00

Yancey Strickler: Yeah, I think something like that could be really
interesting and…

Will Abramson:

Will Abramson: be signed claims He's fine.

Yancey Strickler: compelling. It was not at all something that we
considered. Our permission model is pretty straightforward, but that would
be for me within the larger ecosystem of these spec compliant ways of
representing key material representing signatures. The way it works in the
current system is it's all bespoke for The intermediate representation of
signatures and key material is all low-level and simple. And bringing in
something like that could be interesting.

Yancey Strickler: I wouldn't immediately think of…

Will Abramson: Cool. Yeah.

Yancey Strickler: how we would use that in some of the stuff that we're
looking to build, but the spec compliant thing from an aesthetic
perspective is great and I see a lot of value in it for just being open and
more transparent.

Will Abramson: I guess one thing that comes to mind in terms of, or maybe
it's the label, right, is issuing or Signing that work as a verifiable
credential would give a standard way to represent that as a signed release
that could be verified in a compliant.

Yancey Strickler: Totally And so today the way that would have to work is
you'd have to get access to that signature. You'd have to reproduce our
signature verification methods in a way that has a lot of implicit context
on that.

Will Abramson: Mhm.

Yancey Strickler: And so moving to a spec that has a lot of explicit sort
of context and everything you need to reproduce would be pretty sick.

Will Abramson: Harrison.

Yancey Strickler: And so these are things I've kind of looked into to
technical options to move away from just the simple low-level kind of
embedded within a very specific context primitives and moving to something
more interoperable like that.

Will Abramson: Yeah. Yeah. I'll be at Harrison.

Harrison Tang: I'm sorry. Thank you. Thanks, a different question. So,
earlier I think Yansi, you mentioned that in retrospect a lot of solutions
don't really require blockchains, right? So, you mentioned for example
educating users about the wallets and…

Harrison Tang: setting up wallets that's quite cumbersome. But I'm just
curious what are the other considerations and lessons you learned in
retrospect because if I recall correctly you mentioned you wrote some blog
and to share those lessons. So I'm just curious what are those lessons and
learnings?

Yancey Strickler: Yeah, I mean I think it's been a minute.

Yancey Strickler: I mean, I think it was a small pond. It has gotten
bigger, but it's for our universe of working with creative people, there
were more artists releasing work than there were collectors supporting it.

Yancey Strickler: when we asked ourselves how do we feel about on boarding
our friends or communities into the space it increasingly felt like not
something you would do for a friend. getting my wallet drained around the
same time through a fake Twitter blue check link. That was a demoralizing
experience. and just the fact that what we saw with some of those early
record releases is that because they were NFTTS and onchain, one in
particular became a speculative object. It became hugely traded and it made
all sorts of weird vibes and outcomes and on the one hand, people were
congratulating us internally and knowing what was going on within the group
it was a pretty terrible experience.

Yancey Strickler: And so it increasingly felt like whereas crypto was
promising, hey, this is sovereignty and you could control all of your
things and it's this new world, it really felt like you were entering a
world that had financialization at its core.

Will Abramson: Understood.

Yancey Strickler: That was not something that could be changed that as a
result attracted a very specific sort of customer base and was by its core
nature an adversarial space. and those things just made it feel a very
unsteady ground to build a business on and to ask anybody else to really
build their practice on top of that. and we've been wrestling with those
feelings I think as everyone back then and probably still internally if
they're being really honest with themselves they ask these questions.

Yancey Strickler: And for us, the blue sky path revealed, hey, here's
another way to think about how data could relate to one another. we doesn't
have to be onchain. And then the real breakthrough was Brandon and I spent
some time looking at how could we remake splits using bank accounts. And
basically, we were able to design a ledger on top of Stripe that would
allow us to have splits and all the things that we want. financially at a
crypto,…
00:50:00

Will Abramson:

Yancey Strickler: but without the financialization, speculation bits and so
those things together like data portability plus shared economics without
speculation that's outside of your control, that is precisely the system
that we want. now, I've continued to follow crypto.

Yancey Strickler: still many of our friends are in space and certainly I
see what's happening with stable coins now and absolutely think that, the
crypto promise of it being the future of internet money. Yeah, I do think
that will happen. It's just going to be really boring and it's going to be
the same players just replacing one set of pipes with anothers and we're
all going to make it slash that's now JP Morgan Chase and gold visa so I
think I feel like the currents and the directions are still similar and the
reasons have changed and the players have changed but

Yancey Strickler: I think we're just big believers in the power of the
internet of software and see it all as being tilted towards a very specific
set of goals and, certain paradigm of what a user is and what we're online
to do. but everything around us clearly points to something that's changing
and so yeah so we do still have those crypto values and we are still
optimistic and maybe not fully utopian but we have big beliefs and it's
been exciting to have a technical infrastructure that is neutral that is
enables us to do what we want to do and hopefully in

Yancey Strickler: The next phase is allowing some of these dreams that
we've always had of a meaningful portability or…

Yancey Strickler: interoperability. hopefully we can give a couple real
examples of that happening in our product universe in the next 12 months.
that would be great. yeah, I'll share the Google doc in the chat.

Will Abramson: Cool.

Will Abramson: That'll be great.

Yancey Strickler: Yeah, you can snoop.

Yancey Strickler: Yeah. Here we go. It's coming.

Will Abramson: I guess one more question I have for you guys is have you
considered in the future maybe supporting other did methods or…

Will Abramson: having a bring your own did method into the system, right?
Because…

Will Abramson: if you're already putting did and cry signatures, it might
not be that much more work to plug in assuming you can resolve them, right?

Yancey Strickler: Totally. Yeah.

Yancey Strickler: And when I think of what that looks like in the ideal
state, it's something along the lines of the module that's responsible for
resolving DID documents and the glue logic in between giving this key
material, doing a signature verification check. That could all be open
sourced. And so that allows the community to decide and elect what kind of
DS are supported. And so long as the kind of internal cryptographic and
identity model is congruent enough with a specific DID method which most of
the time it is because we're building around the DID spec then it allows us
to support any of that and we kind of can pull the community and if someone
really wants the BYO identity so long as we can wire it into that adapter
layer then that gives us the ability to bring that in.

Yancey Strickler: So that seems like a compelling approach there if people
are doing that. And that I think tends to be the real question of I
appreciate DIDs as a technological container for expressing and
representing identity keys and how all that works. But most people don't
think about identity outside of something like their Google identity or
their email login. And so those to me are closer to what people actually
associate with their digital identity in And so DIDs as an interoperable
base layer could make sense. But for me, what I think I would have to see
first is that there is an ecosystem of people caring about their DIDs of
this is my digital identity. And until that moves beyond here's my email or
here's my Google ooth login or something like that. I love see I would love
to see people do their own. I love how Blue Sky supports the DID web
method. I think that's a very interesting approach there.

Will Abramson:

Yancey Strickler: That's something I think would be cool for us to support
as yeah. So, we'll have to see it. It did take off then. That sounds
awesome. and kind of more than that, kind of adding to what Yansancy was
saying too a little bit of it's very brutal to think as an entrepreneur and
a business owner asking people to use crypto or this wallet or some did
sign in that doesn't look like Google Oath. But as the builders of this
platform, we bake into every layer the values that we hold as builders and
software creators and writers and artists already. And part of that is
adopting these things that even if they don't make it to the surface, I
have to believe add to the texture of the truth that this thing is trying
to build.
00:55:00

Yancey Strickler: And so that's where a lot of this stuff comes in for me
in particular is that making the right technological choices that reflect
the aesthetic and…

Will Abramson: Cool. Yeah,…

Yancey Strickler: philosophical direction of our platform more than doing
it for the benefit of our actual users of hey we're using DIDs and hey
we're using this. a lot of most people aren't going to care about that any
more than they care about hey we're using JSON for our API. Most people
won't care and shouldn't care.

Will Abramson: I hope we get that too,…

Will Abramson: but we'll have to I mean one question on that is have you
been following the did resolute I currently chair the did working group
version 1.1…

Yancey Strickler: Don't look.

Will Abramson: but the spec we're really working on is did resolution and
the idea of did resolution is defining this API across which we can like a
consistent API for resolving any did method to the document and then did
resolvers might support different did methods through a plugin but there's
a consistent API to call to get back to a consistent DID document defined
by the spec …

Yancey Strickler: Excellent. Yeah,…

Will Abramson: so hopefully we're moving in that direction.

Yancey Strickler: that's awesome. See that?

Will Abramson: Okay,…

Yancey Strickler: Totally dig it.

Will Abramson: Any final questions? Four minutes. We can always close
early. You guys can have I think I captured all the things I wrote down.
But, …

Will Abramson: yeah, I will say I have a meta label. I created a label.
I've been enjoying just playing around. I think it helps you think
differently about the way creative work just gives you a different space to
experiment like Ted go for it

Yancey Strickler: Nice. Okay.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: Yeah, a couple things. first thing is that you really
validated the design that we did with the first edition of DIDs in that you
implemented a centralized identificator system with the decentralized tools.

Yancey Strickler: Madam President. Please.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: We intentionally made it so you could do that. On the
other hand, it's kind of troubling that as much commitment as you clearly
have to the open world that you don't have the open- source and you're not
using a decentralized kit. given that I'm pretty sure you want this
ecosystem to grow and I strongly encourage you to move in that direction as
quickly as you can. even if it doesn't necessarily mesh with the immediate
needs to put a roof over your head and…

Yancey Strickler: totally. Yeah.

Ted Thibodeau Jr: such the open- source part is where the growth comes in.
I'll leave it at that.

Yancey Strickler: No, I love that I couldn't agree more with that. And I do
think and in and some of the stuff that Yansancy was alluding of as we're
thinking about what's next for Metal and we're looking at how we can
continue to evolve what we're doing from our perspective and what we're
trying to do with our product. I think there is a technical story of that.

Yancey Strickler: And even if this isn't something that is immediately
actionable by our users, there is a different audience which is sort of
y'all in a way and people like me who see this as a indication of
directionality of where things ought to and should go and if people Metal
Label are doing things like this, that is a really important kind of
vouchity on where we're going. So I do see that as something that we're
doing more going forward. we're going to do it right and we're going to do
it in a way that integrates with our story and…

Yancey Strickler: makes a lot of sense and with the type of narrative and
supporting kind of thrust of getting it out there. That makes sense. So, I
appreciate that comment and I think I totally agree. Yeah, maybe something
we get y'all's help with. we appreciate it.

Will Abramson: Cool. Thanks,…

Will Abramson: Quickly,…

Will Abramson: let's comment.

Erica Connell: Yeah, I just want to say thanks for presenting this.

Erica Connell: Super exciting. I'm an artist and relatively newish to the
technical world. So working primarily in the performing arts and theater
community, the artist corporations really interesting I think especially
for what you described which I think happens a lot in the music world where
individual artists come together to do a certain project and to have a
resource for structuring all of the financial aspects but also the legal
stuff is I think a huge benefit for artists who usually don't have a lot of
expertise in that area. super exciting work. I'm very interested in where
it goes and watching it develop and participating as well. So, thank you

Yancey Strickler: Thank you.

Yancey Strickler: Glad to hear it. All right.
01:00:00

Will Abramson: Wonderful. Yeah,…

Will Abramson: I'll take thank you too. Thanks for coming on and sharing
this knowledge and your experience with dibs. I think it's cool to see
these dibs being taken off and used by people in their own little spaces
and come back and tell us about them. Thank you. yeah,…

Yancey Strickler: Thank you all.

Will Abramson: thanks a lot. Have a great rest of your week. See you later.

Yancey Strickler: Thanks y'all.
Meeting ended after 01:00:35 👋

*This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors.
People can also change the text after it was created.*