Dallas, TX – June 17th, 2020 - Hedera Hashgraph, an enterprise-grade distributed ledger platform, has joined W3C as a member organization, and has registered a DID Method to the W3C Credentials Community Group’s Decentralized Identifier (DID) registry. W3C is an international community where member organizations, W3C staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards with an overall mission of leading the Web to its full potential.

Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are an emerging standard for identifying persons, business, and devices in an architecture that may offer advantages in user privacy and security. The DID Working Group is standardizing the DID URI scheme and the data model and syntax of DID documents, which contain metadata about identifiers. DID methods define how identities are anchored into particular distributed ledgers - facilitating subsequent lookup and validation of those identities.

The Hedera DID Method was recently accepted into the W3C Credentials Community Group’s DID Method registry. The Hedera DID Method leverages the Hedera Consensus Service and can consequently support transaction volume of tens of thousands of identity anchoring operations per second - opening up use cases like the Internet of Things to the Decentralized Identity model.

Mance Harmon, CEO and Co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph, said, “The current pandemic has brought into sharp focus the importance of remote collaboration, which requires highly trusted and widely interoperable digital identities to keep us connected to critical services. As we continue to rely on the internet more and more, it is crucial that technical standards and guidelines are established to ensure that the Web remains open, accessible, safe, and interoperable to everyone around the world. We are pleased to be supporting and contributing to W3C’s vision for highly scalable, interoperable, decentralized identity.”

“We welcome Hedera as a contributing member to the W3C DID Working Group and congratulate their team for reaching this milestone of a published implementation of the latest W3C DID Identifiers v1.0 draft,” said Ivan Herman, W3C staff contact for the DID Working Group. “By adding DID Method functionality to their public ledger, Hedera has further validated market demand for decentralized identity functionality and the emerging industry specifications from W3C that enable it.”

Paul Madsen, Technical Lead at Hedera Hashgraph, noted, “Our W3C membership and active engagement across various identity, payment and security working groups demonstrates our commitment to contribute to the future of the internet - ensuring that the Web is safe, secure, and efficient for all. We are excited to enhance Hedera’s next-generation public ledger platform with interoperable features built upon technical standards from W3C and look forward to playing our part in improving data security and safety online.”

For more information, visit www.hedera.com/papers.

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About Hedera

Hedera is a decentralized public network where anyone can carve out a piece of cyberspace to transact, play, and socialize in a secure, trusted environment. Developers can build secure, fair, blazing-fast decentralized applications on top of the Hedera platform. Dr. Leemon Baird, Hedera Hashgraph Co-founder and Chief Scientist, and Mance Harmon, Co-founder and CEO of Hedera, invented and developed the groundbreaking hashgraph technology after working at the United States Air Force Academy and as founders of Trio Security, BlueWave Security, and Swirlds, Inc.

For more information, visit www.hedera.com, or follow us on Twitter at @hashgraph, Telegram at t.me/hederahashgraph, or Discord at www.hedera.com/discord. The Hedera whitepaper can be found at www.hedera.com/papers.

About W3C Consortium

The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to lead the Web to its full potential by creating technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the Web remains open, accessible, and interoperable for everyone around the globe. W3C well-known standards HTML and CSS are the foundational technologies upon which Websites are built. W3C works on ensuring that all foundational Web technologies meet the needs of civil society, in areas such as accessibility, internationalization, security, and privacy. W3C also provides the standards that undergird the infrastructure for modern businesses leveraging the Web, in areas such as entertainment, communications, digital publishing, and financial services. That work is created in the open, provided for free and under the groundbreaking W3C Patent Policy. For its work to make online videos more accessible with captions and subtitles, W3C received a 2016 Emmy Award. And for its work to standardize a Full TV Experience on the Web, W3C received a 2019 Emmy Award.

W3C's vision for "One Web" brings together thousands of dedicated technologists representing more than 400 Member organizations and dozens of industry sectors. W3C is jointly hosted by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) in the United States, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France, Keio University in Japan, and Beihang University in China. For more information see https://www.w3.org/.

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