SSI vs SBTs vs Web5

By Fraser Edwards, CEO & co-founder of cheqd

With Jack Dorsey’s announcement of Web5 straight after Vitalik Buterin’s introduction of the soulbound tokens (SBTs), the decentralised web has been buzzing and making waves in the mainstream media. Although these are two separate announcements, both have been essentially putting the decentralised digital identity technology - self-sovereign identity (SSI) in the spotlight. In this article, we compare SSI to SBT and argue that SSI has been repackaged as Web5.

Web5 explained:

First things first, Web5 has been introduced by Jack Dorsey’s TBD firm, which is a subsidiary of Block Inc and defined as: “a Decentralized Web Platform that enables developers to leverage Decentralized Identifiers, Verifiable Credentials, and Decentralized Web Nodes to write Decentralized Web Apps, returning ownership and control over identity and data to individuals”. In practice, this means that TBD is developing a platform or a protocol where various applications or solutions can be built. Users of these applica…