Re: did:cel libraries and tools released

Congratulations, Manu, and thank you for sharing this and for all the work
that went into bringing did:cel to a public release.

The approach is very interesting, and I’m looking forward to reading the
specification and experimenting with the implementation.

I’d also love to explore building Rust and Python libraries and tooling
around DID:CEL to help broaden the ecosystem and make it easier for more
developers to experiment with and adopt.

Congratulations again on the release, and I’m looking forward to seeing how
the community evolves around it.

Best

Amir Hameed Mir


On Sat, 4 Jul 2026 at 6:27 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> We are doing an initial public release of the did:cel libraries,
> tools, and updated specification.
>
> did:cel is a fully decentralized DID Method that is built on top of
> cryptographic event logs. It has no dependencies on DNS, requiring
> only IP and basic HTTP to operate. It supports change history, forking
> protection, and is an attempt to live up to the "fully self-sovereign"
> goal of DIDs. Change history is achieved without the need for web
> domains nor blockchains.
>
> The updated specification can be found here:
>
> https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-cel-spec/
>
> An implementation of a did:cel software library can be found here:
>
> https://github.com/digitalbazaar/didcel/
>
> A command line interface and did:cel tooling are available here:
>
> https://github.com/digitalbazaar/did-cel-tools/
>
> It uses the hmbd oblivious witnessing service to perform event witnessing:
>
> https://github.com/digitalbazaar/hmbd
>
> An example of a published did:cel log can be found here:
>
>
> https://msporny.github.io/cels/dids/did:cel:zW1mH6eRGUmQPXwuh7TvpE2yEvM1kUSuSbg2tW6tEmnDFiM.cel.gz
>
> You can resolve the did:cel DID above via the did:cel CLI (available
> in did-cel-tools):
>
> $ ./didcel
> Encryption password:
> Re-enter encryption password:
> did:cel> resolve did:cel:zW1mH6eRGUmQPXwuh7TvpE2yEvM1kUSuSbg2tW6tEmnDFiM
> Storage URL (ending in "/"): https://msporny.github.io/cels/dids/
> resolve: fetching
>
> https://msporny.github.io/cels/dids/did:cel:zW1mH6eRGUmQPXwuh7TvpE2yEvM1kUSuSbg2tW6tEmnDFiM.cel.gz
> resolve: valid CEL with 4 event(s):
> did:cel:zW1mH6eRGUmQPXwuh7TvpE2yEvM1kUSuSbg2tW6tEmnDFiM (read-only)
> did:cel> ls
> did:cel:zW1mH6eRGUmQPXwuh7TvpE2yEvM1kUSuSbg2tW6tEmnDFiM
>   @context: https://www.w3.org/ns/did/v1.1 https://w3id.org/didcel/v1
>   heartbeatFrequency: P1M
>   heartbeat: zW1btJjee2s55MfaGaa7bxM8DkqDDWVek6V53AqXHNgFtD4
>   authentication: Multikey#zDn...a25M
> did:cel>
>
> I expect there to be bugs-a-plenty, so treat all of this as experimental.
>
> Interested in questions and feedback from the community about the
> general approach and/or features that would be nice to have.
>
> Happy independence day to anyone that celebrates that sort of thing. :)
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> https://www.digitalbazaar.com/
>
>