During a presentation at the annual MicroStrategy World conference in Las Vegas, Michael Saylor, co-founder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy, introduced the MicroStrategy Orange decentralised identity protocol, an open-source initiative. "Michael made a compelling case for the need for decentralised identity and decentralised identifiers," Cezary Raczko, Executive Vice President of Engineering at MicroStrategy, told the audience. "He outlined why it makes sense to anchor digital identity in the Bitcoin blockchain, protected by the robustness and security of the Bitcoin network."
Alongside the announcement, MicroStrategy has published an unofficial draft of the MicroStrategy Orange specification on Github. Although the news was unexpected, Saylor had already hinted that his company was working in the field of identity and authentication. He told Decrypt last year that MicroStrategy was well aware of Ordinals after the protocol's launch in January and interested in how it could inspire software innovation.
"The idea of burning a piece of data to the blockchain opens the door to the possibility that I'm burning a digital signature, a record or a document hash," Saylor explained. "Currently, businesses have weak security compared to Bitcoin." Innovation using the world's largest cryptocurrency could introduce an entirely new level of security.
"The platform consists of three fundamental parts", Raczko explained on Wednesday evening. At its heart is a hosted cloud service that allows you to deliver these identifiers to users in your organisation. It also allows you to deploy pre-packaged applications that run on the MicroStrategy Orange platform.
Raczko said the Orange SDK would make it easy for programmers to integrate these capabilities into their own applications and systems. Using email as an example, he said that Bitcoin-based public and private keys generated with MicroStrategy Orange would be enrolled using the Ordinals protocol.
According to MicroStrategy Orange's documentation, the decentralised identity protocol uses a modified approach to enrolments like Ordinals, but stores only decentralised identity data (DID), meaning documents can be created and updated with few restrictions on size and content while taking advantage of Bitcoin's separate witness (SegWit) functionality. "Once you have established that this email is genuine, you accept the invitation, at which point we will generate your unique decentralised identifier and public and private key pair," explained Raczko. "We'll send the decentralised identifier and public key to the Orange server to be registered on the Bitcoin blockchain, and from that point on, you're ready to start sending Orange-signed emails."
Raczko added that the MicroStrategy Orange decentralised identifier could also be used to verify users on social networking applications or authenticate a text message, university degree or medical record. "Present them and then have them verified in a decentralised way, but with the ultimate identity living and being anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain," Raczko added, suggesting that Orange could make it possible for verified users to display an "orange tick" on platforms.
