Today, Blockchain Commons published a progress report on Amira. This is a use case that I wrote almost a decade ago supporting one of the real-life situations that I felt that DIDs needed to support:
“[Amira] wishes to take a more active role in making a better world. However, she knows if she stands out from the crowd that any activism she may get involved in may not only affect her, they may affect her parents or even her extended family abroad.”
It detailed the need for a pseudonymous identity that was separate from a user’s real-life, physical-world identity, but that would be stable and could progressively gain measures of trust over time such as endorsements and links to completed work.
Amira has been my North Star for much of the last decade. It informed my work as a co-author of the DID standard and after we finished that work, it continued to inspire my development of my own decentralized identifier, the XID.
Today, I’m very pleased that my 2017 use case has become a 2026 reality. My Learning XIDs course demonstrates how the requirements of the Amira use case are now being met by a working technology.
There’s a lot more in the Blockchain Commons article, including how we got from there to here, what requirements the Amira use case surfaced (in a few different iterations), what requirements were still missing even after DIDs were published, and how it’s all gone into the development of the XID technology. I hope you’ll take a look!