verified-tag
Christopher Allen

Blockchain & Decentralized Identity Architect — Internet Cryptography Pioneer — Co-author TLS Security Standard — Collaborative Tools & Patterns

Alacrity, noun. From the Latin alacritas meaning promptitude. Similar in meaning to its synonyms Velocity and Celerity, all three mean quickness in action or movement. Alacrity stresses promptness in response to a suggestion or command, cheerful and eager willingness, appropriate quickness, and in general the beginning of fast movement.

Life with Alacrity is the personal blog of Christopher Allen, covering topics of community, decentralized identity, collective choice, online privacy, and more. Popular articles include “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Size”, “Dunbar & World of Warcraft”, and the Community by the Numbers series.

Christopher is available for personal consulting engagements on decentralized digital trust, online collaboration, identity management, digital assets, smart contracts, and human-rights privacy. Please email if you are interested.

Most Recent Post

2026-04-26: Dispatches of a Trust Architect: Ten Years of Self-Sovereign Identity

Ten years ago this week — on April 26, 2016 — I posted “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity” on my Life with Alacrity blog. I had been thinking for a while about what a digital identity movement would need to stand for, and the piece ended with ten principles and a request: I seek your assistance in taking these principles to the next level.

I did not expect what happened next.

Those ten principles — which I had written more as a first draft than a manifesto — became the conceptual foundation of an industry. They have accumulated more than a thousand academic citations. They’ve been quoted, adapted, debated, critiqued, translated, and deployed in contexts I could not have imagined. They anchor work on decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, show up in United Nations discussions, and (occasionally) on conference T-shirts. And for most of a decade, they have stayed largely unchanged.

That is, in part, a compliment. And in part, a problem.

Principles written in 2016 could not have anticipated the commodification of behavioral data at the scale we now live with, the normalization of mandatory digital ID as a precondition for civic life, or the ways “self-sovereign” would come to be invoked at the protocol layer, in regulatory filings, and at venture pitches, by organizations whose interests are not the same as the interests of the people the principles were meant to protect.

Capital flows to centrality. We wrote the principles loosely enough that the loopholes were exploitable. And they have been exploited.

I have spent much of the last year talking about this with others in the RevisitingSSI project — working circles on principal authority, anti-coercive design, properties vs. principles, and what it means to exist at all in a digital age. Those conversations, with academics and standards people, with civil society practitioners and critics that I learn from, have convinced me that the original ten were not wrong. They were incomplete.

Today, on the ten-year anniversary, I am publishing the first community draft of a revision:

Principles of Self-Sovereign Identity — 2026 Revised, First Community Draft

A stable archival copy is mirrored at revisitingssi.com/library/ssi-principles-2026-redline/ for permanent reference.

The draft keeps the 2016 language verbatim wherever it survives, so continuity stays legible alongside revision. It updates each original principle, introduces six new ones (Inalienability, Cognitive Liberty, Relational Autonomy, Stewardship, Equity, Anti-Coercive Design), and organizes all sixteen principles into four layers: foundational, relational, technical, and political.

It is unfinished on purpose.

I am publishing it in redline form, on the anniversary, precisely because I do not want it read as a press release. I want it read as a draft: a draft I expect others to push back on, to correct, and to sharpen. That is what I asked for in 2016. It is what I am asking for again.

What has changed is that I now know how long this work takes, and how much of the work that the community has to do.

If you have been in SSI for any length of time — whether as a believer, a skeptic, or both at different hours of the day — the Google Doc is open. Leave comments. Argue in the margins. Tell me where the new language is weaker than what it replaced. Tell me which of the six new principles I should not have added. Tell me which ones I am still missing.

I will be at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View this coming week (April 28–30), as a guest on the W3C Credentials CG call on May 5 (9am PDT / 12pm EDT / 6pm CEST), and hosting a dedicated community discussion on May 20 (10am PDT / 7pm CEST). The goal between now and September, when we aim to present a more mature version at the Global Digital Collaboration summit in Geneva, is to take the redlines from “first draft” to something worthy of the next ten years.

If you would like to be part of that, join the announcements-only email list, the Signal group, or simply open the doc.

The goal is not to settle the questions of self-sovereign identity.

The goal is to make these principles worthy of the next ten years.




All Recent Posts

See all Posts


All Recent Social Media Posts