Monthly Archives: July 2021

Michael Herman (Trusted Digital Web) 8:35 PM
What are the common/known strategies for bootstrapping a VDR-based decentralized credential/object platform? …asked naively on purpose.

• Strategies for placing the first/initial DIDs in the VDR?
•  …presumably purposed to be the initial Issuer(s) of verifiable identifiers on the platform?

Best regards,
Michael Herman
Far Left Self-Sovereignist

Stephen Curran 5:37 PM
In Hyperledger Indy, which is a permissioned public network, the first transactions are a DID for one of the  “SuperUser’s (aka “Trustee”) of the network, and DIDs for the initial node operators that verify the transactions.  From there, DIDs for additional nodes are added, DIDs for other Trustees and then DIDs of other types of users (Endorsers, authors), who in turn create other DIDs and object types. 
If you look at von-network (https://github.com/bcgov/von-network) you can spin up a little network (4 nodes in docker) and see the transactions that are used to start the network. In that, the seed for the Trustee DID is well known, so once you’ve started the von-network, you can control it. In a “real” network, that seed (and associated private key) would of course be protected by that first Trustee.
For Sovrin, a ceremony was video’d of all the initial Trustees and Stewards (node operators) when MainNet was started in 2017.

VON Blockchain Explorer

Reference: http://greenlight.bcovrin.vonx.io/browse/domain

Reference: http://greenlight.bcovrin.vonx.io/browse/pool

Initial DID Transactions

Initial Node Transactions

First SCHEMA Transaction