[Din] Greetings from the DIDComm protocol community

[bumblefudge von CASA <[e-mail]>]

Hey DINers:

Some of you may have heard of the "DIDComm" protocol [^1] incubated at the Decentralized Identity Foundation[^2], which establishes a persistent, transport-agnostic, e2ee peer-to-peer channel between actors for arbitrary messages. It's somewhere between the original Signal protocol, Matrix, and MLS, and its core architecture is similar to recent base-layer identity solutions like the Modal Collective's recent proposal for a local-first contact manager for GNOME or the Nostr-based Bitchat. One difference from these protocols and platforms is that DIDComm was highly extensible and community-governed from the start, and another is that it strives to bootstrap into other protocols or into more non-repudiable communications channels by upgrading from ephemeral, one-off keys to long-lived PKI identities (via, e.g., published DIDs from other methods).

As the DIDComm protocol affords little in the way of analytics (the channels it establishes are not very observable and there is no client registration or licensing to speak of), there has historically been no good way of estimating how much DIDComm is being used in the wild. Until the Decentralized Identity Foundation did a poll recently to talk to implementers, it was hard to know which projects were taking DIDComm to prod or on what scale. DIF recently published a blog post about the results of that poll [^3], and is hosting a breakfast Wednesday morning at Oberlaa (across from the main venue) before the first session for interested parties. We welcome anyone reading this to stop by for an exchange of ideas and identifiers!

Thanks,
__bf

[^1]: https://didcomm.org/
[^2]: https://identity.foundation/working-groups/did-comm.html

[^3]: https://blog.identity.foundation/who-uses-didcomm/

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bumblefudge
janitor [@Chain Agnostic Standards Alliance](https://github.com/chainagnostic/CASA)
contractable via [learningProof UG](https://learningproof.xyz)
mostly berlin-based