Today, it gives everyone at Dock great pleasure to announce the release of our first test net. Those of you who have been following the project will know of our vision to replace the centralized platforms that keep control and silo the credential data of institutions and users with an open public network that facilitates maximum interoperability through adherence with W3C standards. And in doing so, unlock global frictionless record sharing and verification without the need for any intermediaries.

This release is an early yet significant step towards reducing the cost and time barriers to seamlessly issue immutable, universally verifiable data and our focus is to provide developers and a more technical audience with an initial toolset that enables the creation of decentralized identities, and the issuance, presentation and verification of credentials.

As you may know, the name Dock stems from the concept of being able to anchor credentials in the Dock blockchain and Northill is one of many types of anchors and therefore a fitting name for this release. We’ll introduce you to more in future releases.

What are we releasing?

The Northill test net is comprised of:

  • A Proof of Authority chain
  • A substrate node that facilitates on-chain identity management, implemented in accordance with the W3C specification, and revocation registry that facilitates the revocation of credentials.
  • A client SDK that interacts with the Substrate node for Decentralised Identity (DID) CRUD operations and the creation of revocation registries. It also enables the issuance of VCDM compliant credentials while also allowing both the issuer and receiver to create and verify credential presentations.

A key aspect of this release is facilitating the creation of self-sovereign identity meaning that there is no central issuer or provider of identities within the Dock ecosystem. Instead, the issuers control the creation and management of their own identities without the need for a central entity. As the Dock Network scales, this will ensure no entity or individual is reliant on large centralized entities, such as governments or large corporations.

We have also released several tutorials that enable developers to quickly get started with Dock platform. Each tutorial is targeted towards a specific feature and we recommend going through them in sequence.

The SDK is hosted on NPM and is open-sourced (using the BSD 3 clause license) and available on GitHub. Once the SDK has been downloaded, it can be configured to point to a full node and then the examples can be run against the full node.

The SDK can be used either by running a full node locally or directly interacting with the test net. However, writing to the test net requires tokens and these can be requested from the faucet.  For developers that want to run the Substrate node locally, it’s also open-sourced and available on GitHub. Developer support is offered via Riot and GitHub issues in the SDK or the Node.

New Dock website

The eagle-eyed amongst you will also notice that we also have designed and built a new website to accompany this release.  As with the test net, we will incrementally enhance the website over time as we add features to the network and advance our planned business partnerships. We will also be adding a roadmap in the next couple of weeks to the site that will incorporate both technical and business-related milestones and will provide some much-needed context to this release and our plans moving forward.

We hope you enjoy the release and trust you and your families are staying safe!

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