The four-year ongoing development project aims to advance decentralized identities (DIDs) in the personal identification technology sector. Specifically, Microsoft wants to bring its decentralized ION identifiers to its user base by offering the ability to move away from traditional usernames and email addresses.
Also, he wants to upgrade to DIDs which are controlled solely by the owners themselves. The access and verification process facilitates the exchange of data applications and protects access to user resources.
The launch of the first version has already taken place
The released version, which is the first of its kind from the company, was launched on the Bitcoin mainnet. As announced in their official blog post: "We are thrilled to share with our community that ION v1 is complete and has been launched on the Bitcoin mainnet." The launch was followed by the implementation of an ION node in their “production infrastructure”.
ION, being open source, allows anyone to run the node on the network. The more nodes running on the network, the stronger the ecosystem becomes. “Since ION is an open and permissionless system, anyone can run an ION node, in fact the more nodes that are running, the stronger the network becomes. The development of ION and the Sidetree standard on which ION is based takes place at the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF) ”.
ION DIDs will be integrated into user wallets and applications that require credentials for registration or verification. For this to happen, an open source DID library has been made available.
“To help put DIDs in the hands of users and allow developers to easily integrate ION DIDs into wallets, decentralized apps, and credential-related services, we have provided an open source library for DID generation and opened our ION node for provide further options ".
Will xBox users soon be able to make purchases in bitcoins?
Microsoft integrating Bitcoin into its platform reflects the fact that the company is open to adopting the asset in ways that can serve its user base. The first time the company revealed that Bitcoin would be integrated into its platform was in 2014.
The progress made shows that more than anything else, Microsoft is taking careful steps to milk the most effective Bitcoin applications. Clearly, Microsoft is paying attention to user requests, hence the recent Xbox-Bitcoin survey.
Another tech giant that the crypto community hopes will adopt Bitcoin is Apple (Apple shares - AAPL ticker). RBC analyst Mitch Steve says Apple is in one of the best positions to offer cryptocurrency trading.
“The portfolio initiative appears to be a clear multi-billion dollar opportunity for the company. If Apple decides to enter the cryptocurrency trading business, we think it could immediately gain market share and revolutionize the industry. "
