MicroStrategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, has announced it will launch a decentralized identity solution on the Bitcoin network that uses Ordinal-based inscriptions to store and retrieve information.
The solution, MicroStrategy Orange, was unveiled by executive chairman Michael Saylor during the company’s Bitcoin For Corporations conference on May 1.
MicroStrategy Orange is open-source, not dependent on sidechains and can process up to 10,000 decentralized identifiers in a single Bitcoin transaction, Saylor claimed.
“[Its aim is to] deliver trustless, tamper-proof, and long-lived decentralized identities using only the public Bitcoin blockchain as a data source,” according to an unofficial draft document of the solution shared by MicroStrategy on GitHub.
The decentralized identifiers (DIDs) will allow pseudonymity in the same way that real-world identities are not tied to Bitcoin addresses and transactions.
MicroStrategy Orange comprises Orange Service, Orange SDK and Orange Applications.
Orange Service allows users to issue DIDs to their personnel and deploy applications, while Orange SDK and Orange Applications provide them with customization tools to integrate specific services on mobile and desktop devices.
One such application already built by MicroStrategy is “Orange For Outlook” — which integrates digital signatures into emails to ensure recipients can verify the true identity of the sender.
The onboarding process involves accepting an invitation email signed by MicroStrategy’s DID, which will then generate a unique DID, a public and private key pair for the user.
The user’s DID and public key are inscribed on the Bitcoin network, who can then start sending out invitations to their personnel to create their own digital identity.
The firm wants MicroStrategy Orange applications to extend to other messaging platforms, social media networks and applications in the e-commerce, enterprise and fintech industries.
It comes as MicroStrategy reported a $53.1 million net loss for the first quarter on April 30.
However, the reporting under the traditional accounting method didn’t factor in the 65% increase inthe market value of MicroStrategy’s 214,400 Bitcoin — worth $15.2 billion at the time — over the quarter.
