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Open Standards at TBD

· 4 min read
Gabe Cohen

At TBD, we are committed to building a decentralized future where users have greater control over their data and organizations can interact in a more open, trustworthy, and secure way. Open standards are the foundation of this vision, enabling the seamless collaboration and interoperability across systems.

Everything we do at TBD is enabled and strengthened by open standards. Our most notable projects, Web5 and tbDEX, are deeply rooted in these open standards. The frameworks for decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials (VCs), and the protocols that facilitate their sharing form the backbone of our work.

Our Approach to Open Standards​

Open standards ensure that different systems and organizations can work together seamlessly, creating a cohesive environment where data and identity can move across personal and organizational boundaries.

At TBD, we are deeply involved in several key standards bodies to ensure that the standards we rely on are robust and interoperable:

  • Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF): This organization serves as an incubator for new ideas and standards related to decentralized identity. We are actively contributing to several key initiatives here, such as decentralized web nodes and trust establishment protocols.

  • W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the authority on web standards, and we are heavily involved in their work on DIDs and VCs. W3C’s role in defining these standards is crucial for ensuring their broad adoption across the web.

  • OpenID Foundation: We’re also working with the OpenID Foundation to integrate their standards with VCs and DIDs. This work is focused on extending OpenID’s capabilities beyond web-based applications, making them applicable in backend services and mobile environments.

One of our main tasks is ensuring that our software aligns with these standards. Our Web5 spec and tbDEX spec are prime examples of adopting existing specifications to meet our broad interoperability needs.

Current Focus Areas​

Our ongoing work in the standards space is focused on several key areas:

  • Interoperability: We’ve defined an interoperability profile for tbDEX, which outlines the standards we’re using and how they interact. This is a starting point for enabling seamless exchanges on the tbDEX network.

  • Selective Disclosure: As we look to enhance user privacy and control, we’re exploring the use of selective disclosure credentials. This allows users to selectively share the information necessary for a specific interaction, rather than their entire credential.

  • Trust Frameworks: We’re also working on establishing a trust framework that will enable different organizations to agree on legal and compliant ways to trust one another. This is particularly important for interactions on the tbDEX network, where trust is paramount.

Looking Ahead​

As we advance our projects, we remain focused on refining our specifications to ensure they are well-defined, thoroughly tested, and widely adopted. This includes ongoing work on the Web5 spec, which we are continuously improving with better test vectors and more robust compliance checks.

We’re also making significant strides with our Rust Core approach, which will form the basis for many of our SDKs. This effort will allow us to support multiple languages more efficiently and ensure greater consistency across our implementations.

The work we’re doing now is laying the groundwork for a decentralized future where users have more control over their data, and organizations can interact in a more open, trustworthy, and secure way. As we move forward, our commitment to open standards will remain at the heart of everything we do.

Get Involved​

If you're working on implementing Verifiable Credentials (VCs) or Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), please reach out!

Join our Discord community for direct access to our team and ongoing discussions. You can also find us on Twitter @TBDevs.

We look forward to your contributions and questions!