Blockchain Commons Overviews Its Technology in New Video

In the last year, Blockchain Commons has produced a large collection of specifications, reference libraries, architectures, and reference utilities meant to improve blockchain infrastructure by enabling interoperability among Bitcoin wallets — and in the future, other cryptocurrency applications, such as Ethereum wallets, and other cryptography programs, such as chat systems, key management programs, and more.

So, what do Blockchain Commons’ technologies do? We’ve just released a Technology Overview video that discuses the concepts and foundations underlying our work and also highlights many of our most important technological releases.

As the video notes, our work is built on a considerable volume of existing literature. We work with entropy, seeds, and keys and use airgaps, multisigs, and secure storage to ensure robust key creation, safe key usage, and responsible key management. We also build on crucial technological foundations such as CBOR, CRC-32, Fountain Codes, QRs, SHA-256, and Shamir’s Secret Sharing.

This results in a number of core Blockchain Commons technologies:

• Bytewords are a text-encoding method for binary data.
• Uniform Resources support self-describing data that can be used interoperably.
• LifeHash allows for graphical recognition of seeds, keys, and other data.
• SSKR provides new libraries and methodologies for sharding secrets.
• The Torgap architecture creates security by partitioning blockchain services.

The Technology Overview video discusses all of this and more.

We are also continuing to produce documents of use for the entire blockchain community, with our newest tutorials offering more depth on how to use the technologies highlighted in this video. That begins with some just-published developer-focused documents that expand on the overview of Uniform Resources (URs) found in the video. Uniform Resources: An Overview explains how URs are put together, and then A Guide to Using URs for Key Material looks at ur:crypto-seed, ur:crypto-bip39, and ur:crypto-hdkey as three different ways to transmit key material in a standardized, typed format. (We have more UR docs planned on SSKRs, PSBTs, and our new request and response system.)

The specifications, architectures, references, and documents that we’re creating at Blockchain Commons are all meant to improve interoperability among many different vendors, to support the creation of wallets (and future cryptography applications) that enable independence, security, and resilience for their users. We’ve been working with an Airgapped Wallet Community to create these various technologies. If you’re designing blockchain applications of your own, we hope you’ll view the video to see how some of our technologies can help you.

You can also support the continued development of technologies like these, meant to support the entire community by becoming a sponsor at GitHub or by making a one-time donation at our BTCPay.