Dock’s vision is to move the control of our credentialing data away from third parties and finally enable claims issuers and recipients to have shared ownership over their data. This could be for any type of credential; a drivers license, professional qualification, academic achievement or even their medical history. We also aim to empower organizations to be able to create their own identities and be able to issue claims where both the date and issuer can be verified beyond doubt (cryptographically) and where the claims themselves are tamper-resistant.
We realize this vision by creating a set of tools custom made for the purpose of issuance, presentation, and when required, revocation of credentials. Those of you who follow our progress will know that we recently released our Northill test net, a first yet significant step toward our vision. With a view to putting Northill into context, and to provide an insight into our plans for the remainder of the year, we now release our 2020 roadmap.
Roadmap
The roadmap milestones are a combination of business objectives and network features. By the conclusion of 2020, we aim to have a decentralized network hosted by a number of diverse validators who are incentivised via a native Dock token running on our own blockchain.
It would be remiss to not highlight that the development of the Dock Network is still at an early stage with many moving parts and consequently changes in the roadmap may occur. This could be the order of the roadmap or the time taken to complete a milestone. We will, of course, endeavour to keep you informed of progress via regular company updates. That said, we believe that this roadmap is achievable with the skills and resources we have at our disposal.
Milestones
Here’s a brief explanation of each of the milestones:
Q2 - Schema: A large part of the integrity of a verifiable credential is how to structure the credential so that all three parties (issuer, holder, verifier) have a singular mechanism of trust into what they are using. This structure is the credential schema.
Q2 - New Dock non-profit: It has always been part of our vision to decentralize governance of the network and we believe a non-profit is the best entity to oversee the future promotion, development and adoption of the network. It should also be in a jurisdiction that provides legal clarity. We have therefore decided to set up a non-profit association based in Switzerland.
Q3 - Interop: A milestone with a focus on making Dock more interoperable with other projects in the identity and credentialing ecosystem. Open-source and building on W3C standards, our aim is to provide maximum value without locking users into a particular stack.
Q3 - Validator test network: Soon, we will start reaching out to validators to participate in future test networks as we start to decentralize the infrastructure behind Dock. The setting up of the Swiss Association and the establishment of network governance will happen in parallel. In short, we will shift control of the Dock network away from a single entity.
Q3 - Claim deduction: Because W3C credentials are expressed as JSON-LD, the claims have semantic meaning and can be linked. This allows for deducing new claims from the existing claims in one or more credentials.
Q3 - Security audit: Dock will commission a third-party to perform a security audit to assess the network for current security vulnerabilities and bugs, and to help put in place processes to mitigate against any future security issues.
Q3 - Main net launch: Dock will initially launch as a Proof of Authority (PoA) network and will migrate to Proof of Stake (PoS) during 2021. Our aim will be to have a diverse range of geographically dispersed validators to provide our users with a fast and sufficiently decentralized network.
Q4 - Anchoring: A feature that enables users to store a digest of the credential on-chain in order that the credentials creation is timestamped.
Q4 - Token migration to Dock main net: The Dock token is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain. During this milestone, we will commence the migration to Dock’s blockchain, tokens will be swapped on a 1:1 basis.
We hope that this update serves to provide a useful insight into our plans for the remainder of the year, it promises to be an exciting one! As ever, you can keep appraised of our developments via our social channels where we will post frequent updates.
Stay safe,
The Dock team
