Today The Accumulate Foundation is announcing the activation of the Accumulate Mainnet Alpha Version. This activation will unlock the full capacities of Accumulate’s decentralized digital identity solution for both the crypto and traditional economy.
Accumulate intends to establish a communication and audit layer for individuals, entities, and blockchains to transact with each other using the protocol’s Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs).
Unifying Web3 With Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs)
Digital identity is viewed as a core piece of Web3 infrastructure that provides legitimacy to the concept of ownership and property rights in the digital world.
While blockchain technology promotes open source and permissionless innovation, a by-product of the unrestricted expansion of new protocols and Dapps is that our ecosystem has become increasingly fragmented.
These market sectors offer a different set of value propositions and compete with one another for users, liquidity, and network effects. Over time, the desire for end users to access all sectors of the crypto economy has led to a series of patchwork solutions for interoperability like cross-chain bridges and centralized exchanges.
For those operating on the inside of the industry, migrating funds from one chain to the next is a relatively simple process. Yet for most of the traditional economy, including banks, companies, and governments, the web3 ecosystem is still far too fragmented and complex to navigate.
The key element that has been missing from this equation is a protocol focused on linking the entire crypto economy and the traditional economy together through decentralized digital identifiers.
Digital Identifiers refer to a system for assigning unique digital identities to assets, individuals, or entities on the blockchain. Traditional blockchains are organized based on randomly generated public and private key pairs which are used to store funds and record transactions on a distributed ledger.
The problem with the current key management system is that it lacks simplicity for the average user. The common approach of using the first and last characters of an address can leave users exposed to what is called the ‘man-in-the-middle attack’, which is a form of cyber attack where a bad actor could intercept or manipulate a transaction by injecting wrong information or changing the recipient’s address to their own. This is made easier due to the complex nature of randomly generated addresses.
Additionally, due to these addresses being randomly generated, public/private key management systems make it difficult to store ordered data sets or assign different levels of permissions to specific keys.
Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs) solve this problem by presenting human-readable addresses that are chosen by individuals or assigned by organizations to represent their presence on the blockchain.
ADIs enable more flexibility and deployment of complex operations by issuing a hierarchy of keys with different permissions or levels of security.
This allows entities operating on the blockchain to more easily build standardized yet scalable protocols for other entities to interact with and exchange sensitive information with them based on their access permissions for specific data sets.
Using ADIs, Accumulate can serve as the de-facto communication and audit layer between blockchains, enabling the seamless transfer of tokens or other kinds of digital assets between ADIs across different chains regardless of their consensus mechanism.
Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs) as a Single Source of Truth
The ultimate purpose of a decentralized digital identity is to serve as a single source of truth and a standardized form of accounting for all on-chain and off-chain activities that the identity holder has participated in and for all digitally native and digitized (or tokenized) assets that they hold.
Under this description, we aim to make it possible for not only dApps and blockchains, but also schools, hospitals, corporations, and government agencies to integrate ADIs into their current system in order to create a singular yet permissionless and censorship-resistant representation of all assets, entities, and people operating digitally.
This opens the doors to all kinds of unique possibilities, including creating new DeFi infrastructure for Fortune 500 companies, auditing the multi-trillion dollar real-world asset economy, enabling a truly decentralized social media based on ADIs, replicating large corporate structures on-chain, and many more innovations.
A core component of these next-generation web3 solutions is our unique set of wallet key management and authorization schemes. These are effectively tailor-made protocols that enable private-permissioned institutions to operate effectively on-chain.
Key Management & Authorization Schemes
The Accumulate key management system allows entities to generate multiple wallet keys that are linked to a decentralized digital identifier or ADI. Entities have access to a set of key books which reference multiple keys within a Key Page. Keys can be arranged based on a set priority. For example, you can create high-priority keys that are placed in cold storage for use in case your other keys are lost or compromised.
In addition, each account or sub-identity on the Accumulate network can be designated a specific key page. You can have a key page consisting of keys for very important transactions such as moving funds on behalf of a DAO treasury of institutional clients and another key page for transactions of lower importance, such as testing newly deployed Defi smart contracts.
Key Books can also allow ADIs to update their security settings to include multi-sig transactions (transactions that require 2 or more digital signatures), delegated transactions (transactions that can be initiated by an external authority based on 3rd party verification), managed transactions (transactions that include self-imposed limits on spending or frequency) or other conditions without having to touch high-priority keys, thereby maintaining the highest possible security standards and minimizing vulnerabilities.
Accumulate’s key management system makes it possible for entities to create a single signature or multi-signature authorization schemes. These are rules for determining the number of digital signatures required to validate transactions from an account and can be especially useful for funds that are looking to custody billions of dollars worth of digital assets on-chain and need to establish a hierarchy of permissions for how to securely manage those assets.
Ultimately, Accumulate is paving the way for a more decentralized, transparent, and intuitive user experience for both native and non-native web3 adopters.
The Accumulate Foundation and core protocol developers are excited to activate the Mainnet Alpha Version and begin onboarding individuals, enterprises, governments, and other blockchains to Accumulate’s universal identity, communication, and audit layer.
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