Glossary

This is a glossary of the terms and definitions that are often used in our articles or other materials.

Web3 primitives

Web3 primitives are basic building blocks that enable novel economic and social mechanisms on the decentralized web. They include identity, compute, communication, storage, and value. Web3 primitives allow users to own and control their data, assets, and interactions on platforms that are minimally extractive and governed by protocols.

Some examples of projects that use Web3 primitives are Braintrust, a user-owned talent network; IPFS, a peer-to-peer distributed file system; and Ethereum, a programmable blockchain platform.

Decentralized Society

A society in which power, resources, and control are evenly distributed among a multitude of independent, self-regulating units, organizations, or communities. In such a society, there is no centralized authority or management, which allows each participant to have more opportunities and control over their living conditions and decisions.

Digital identity

A set of attributes and credentials that can be used to identify and authenticate a person or entity online.

Self-sovereign identity

A model of digital identity where users have full control over their own data and can share it selectively with others without relying on intermediaries or centralized authorities.

SSI enables users to authenticate themselves and prove their identity using cryptographic methods, such as digital signatures and blockchain technology.

Decentralized identifiers (DIDs)

A type of identifier that enables verifiable, decentralized digital identity. DIDs are URLs that relate a DID subject (such as a person, organization, device, or service) to a DID document containing information such as public keys, authentication methods, service endpoints, and other attributes.

DIDs should have the following characteristics

• decentralized there should be no central issuing agency;

• persistent the identifier should be inherently persistent, not requiring the continued operation of an underlying organization;

• cryptographically verifiable it should be possible to prove control of the identifier cryptographically;

• resolvable it should be possible to discover metadata about the identifier.

Verifiable credentials (VCs)

A standard way of expressing and exchanging credentials that can be cryptographically verified by any party. VCs are based on JSON-LD data model and can be issued by any authority (such as governments, universities, banks, etc.) to any holder (such as individuals, organizations, devices, etc.) who can then present them to any verifier (such as employers, merchants, websites, etc.).

Key advantages

• resistant to fakes they are cryptographically signed by the private key of the attester and can be verified against her public key by anyone;

• resistant to impersonation they are issued to the public key of the subject of the credential, who can prove her identity by cryptographic signature with her private key;

• flexibility in custody they can be stored by anyone, anywhere, and with replication without losing authenticity (e.g. on mobile devices, centralized and/or decentralized clouds, as well as on personal decentralized web nodes) – this increases flexibility, reliability as well as censorship resistance, since no one can stop a user from showing a credential in self-custody; a challenge is, however, that users might be overwhelmed by optionality as well as the responsibility of self-custody;

• efficiency they are cheap to issue, replicate and send;

• privacy

  • since no centralized intermediary is required to store VCs, attack vectors for surveillance and data leakage can be minimized (however, when revealing a VC to a verifier, he could save, share or publicize them allowing actors to build a graph of credentials revealing correlatable information);

  • as opposed to the DID which could be an on-chain address and should be public in order for parties to verify signatures against, VCs should not be on-chain since they will mostly contain personal information, which should not be stored publicly forever (based on regulatory and ethical grounds);

  • zero-knowledge proofs can be leveraged to prove aspects of a credential without revealing everything;

• portability since DIDs & VCs are an open standard, lock-in to a specific system or platform (and thus dependency) is minimized, which is especially important for such a fundamental piece of infrastructure of people’s lives as their identity.

Bitcoin

It is one of the most prominent examples of new financial institutions that use decentralized principles. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that operates on a peer-to-peer network without any central authority or intermediary. Bitcoin transactions are recorded and verified by a distributed ledger called blockchain, which ensures security, transparency, and immutability. Bitcoin users can send and receive payments across borders without intermediaries like banks or payment processors.

Web3 digital economy

It is a term that refers to the emerging paradigm of decentralized, trustless, and programmable commerce on the internet. It is enabled by technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, IPFS and decentralized applications (dApps), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and metaverse platforms.

Decentralized financial and social institutions

Decentralized financial and social institutions are organizations that operate without relying on centralized intermediaries or authorities. They use blockchain technology and smart contracts to enable peer-to-peer transactions and interactions that are transparent, secure, and verifiable. Decentralized financial institutions offer alternative ways of accessing capital, lending, borrowing, trading, investing, and saving money without intermediaries like banks or brokers.

Web of trust

Web of Trust is where Internet native digital identities can begin to emerge. Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers are two closely related W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications. When used together the two specifications can enable what is called a Web of Trust.

Trust framework

Set of agreements among participants in an identity system that define the roles, responsibilities, rules, policies, standards, and legal obligations for issuing and verifying credentials.

Reputation curated registries protocol

A reputation list management protocol based on community curation.

Reputation-only sharing economies

Reputation-only sharing economies an economic exchange system in which access to services and resources is based solely on the reputation of the participants.

Individual Empowerment

Create value, not extract profits. Coordinate, not manage and control.