Edge Identifiers & Cryptographic Cliques (a followup on the TPAC Future Proofing Topic)

I appreciate the chairs of the DID WG for making time at TPAC during our
open topic sessions to discuss emerging cryptography that we need to be
aware of to future-proof our decentralized identity systems. One of the
topics I highlighted was "edge identifiers," which I believe could play a
significant role in making our identities more resilient, collaborative,
and reflective of the real-world relationships that define us.

To provide more depth on the concept of edge identifiers and how they fit
within the evolving landscape of decentralized identity, I've written an
article titled "Edge Identifiers & Cliques":
https://www.blockchaincommons.com/musings/musings-cliques-1/ Another
article, with more detail, I will post next week.

In this series of articles, I explore how cryptographic innovations, such
as Schnorr-based aggregatable signatures, distributed key generation (DKG)
multi-party computation (MPC), can support relationship-based identity
models that go beyond the legacy models of isolated, single-keys we have
today.

Others have talked about edge identity for some time (in particular Ian
Grigg's 2017 article "Identity as an Edge Protocol"
https://web.archive.org/web/20181216062416/https://www.r3.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Identity_indepth_r3.pdf)
but now for the first time we have sufficiently mature cryptographic tools
to support these approaches. In particular, MuSig2 was merged last week
into the venerable main branch of the libsecp256k1.c after several years of
cryptography and code review (usage at
https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/blob/master/examples/musig.c) and
our 2nd FROST Implementers Workshop (
https://developer.blockchaincommons.com/frost/meeting2) that we hosted last
week shows the increasing maturity of that protocol for threshold quorum
MPC.

I believe these approaches align with the broader goals of our work within
the DID WG to build a more secure, interoperable, and human-centric digital
identity framework. I invite you to read the article and consider how these
innovations might be integrated into our ongoing standards efforts.

I would love to hear your thoughts, and I am open to further discussions on
how we might support this at the W3C, as well other emerging cryptographic
innovations (adapter signatures, zkp, advanced merkle trees, and more), in
our standards efforts to ensure our work is robust against emerging needs.
My organization, Blockchain Commons, is actively moving forward to support
these innovations, and is seeking partners and sponsors to do more.

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-- Christopher Allen