Decentralized Identifier (DID)

A Decentralized Identifier (a DID) is an identifier you generate and control yourself, without a company, government, or platform issuing it to you and being able to take it back. An ordinary identifier, like an email address or a username, exists because someone else's system created it and can revoke it. A DID flips that: you generate it, typically from a cryptographic key pair only you hold, and no central authority can unilaterally take your control of it away, though whatever network hosts the DID still decides whether it's registered and resolvable there.

Structurally, a DID is a URI with three parts:

did:<method>:<method-specific-id>

did is a fixed scheme, exactly like http or mailto. <method> names which system's rules govern this particular DID, see DID Method. <method-specific-id> is whatever identifier makes sense under that system, often derived from a public key. Looking a DID up (DID Resolution) returns a DID Document: a small record listing the public keys and service endpoints tied to it.

Where it comes from

DID Core, the data model and syntax above, is a W3C Recommendation, the highest standards-track status a W3C document reaches, finalized 19 July 2022 after years of preparatory work in the W3C Credentials Community Group. Manu Sporny and Amy Guy have been its primary editors, with a much larger working group contributing across its life. Solidus contributes nothing to this layer; we build on top of it.

Solidus status

Shipped, testnet-live. Every account, issuer, and holder across the Solidus ecosystem is identified by a DID under did:solidus, our own method. Every one of those DIDs exists today on a public testnet: there is no mainnet DID yet, and none of this should be read as production-grade.

Proof you can run yourself: read the spec at w3.org/TR/did-core, then resolve a real did:solidus DID against rpc.solidus.network (exact curl command in the DID Resolution entry). Nothing here requires trusting Solidus's account of it.