# Open Sats Depo Grant Proposal

Who Are You?
Your Name *

Christopher Allen

Email *

[e-mail]

Personal Website, GitHub profile, or other Social Media

https://twitter.com/ChristopherA
https://github.com/BlockchainCommons

Prior Contributions *
Describe the contributions you've made to Bitcoin Core or other Bitcoin-related open-source projects.

My organization, Blockchain Commons, focuses on improving interoperability among wallet developers and ensuring privacy, resilience, and independence for digital-asset holders. Our biggest contributions to date for Bitcoin include:

* Creation of Animated QRs/UR specification used by over a dozen wallets primarily for airgapped signature of PSBTs
* Creation of Lifehash visual hash for identifying digital assets by sight
* Development of security-reviewed SSKR libraries to allow safe usage of Shamir's Secret Sharing
* Authorship of the Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line course, which has brought new developers into the field and is now available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese
* Hosting of three international internship programs, which have further supported the development of new Bitcoin engineers
* Regular hosting of meetings to allow multiple stakeholders to work together to expand interoperability, including Silicon Salons, FROST Round Table, and Gordian Developer Meetings

See also:
* Blockchain Commons 2023 Report (https://www.blockchaincommons.com/quarterlies/Yearly-2023/)
* Blockchain Commons 2022 Report (https://www.blockchaincommons.com/quarterlies/Yearly-2022/)
* Blockchain Commons 2021 Report (https://www.blockchaincommons.com/quarterlies/Yearly/)
* Gordian Meeting Listing (https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/Gordian-Developer-Community/tree/master/meetings#detailed-list-of-meeting-summaries-with-archives-of-video-mp3-and-transcripts)

Besides leading Blockchain Commons and providing the architectural vision for these projects, I also am the founder of Rebooting the Web of Trust, which built on my pioneering paper "The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity" and has facilitated the creation of over 60 white papers on digital identity (including those that led to the DID standard), many of which interrelate with blockchain work.

* RWOT: https://www.weboftrust.info/papers/

I also spent two years as Principal Architect at Blockstream, where I shepherded work and support on a variety of Bitcoin-related projects.

Finally, I'm well situated in the standards world. I'm the co-author of both the TLS and DID standards and an invited expert on Verifiable Credentials and to other working groups. This is aiding my work bringing blockchain-focused specifications toward standardization.

What Will You Work On?

Project Description *
What do you intend to work on? Please be as specific as possible.

Distribution of seeds sharded with Shamir's Secret Sharing is the future of digital-asset resilience. It's already happening today: Ledger has released a program that allows shares to be stored with their hand-picked third parties, who require KYC compliance. Meanwhile, individual asset holders are storing shares offline or with friends.

None of the current methods are adequate (or even desirable). I want to testbed a pilot program that will allow developers to deploy their own online secret-share vaults, creating a foundation for an independent ecosystem of seed backups, before methods such as Ledger's privacy-busting model become standard.

These "depository" servers will allow Bitcoin wallet developers to shard a seed using Shamir's Secret Sharing, then store the shares on different servers on the internet using a secure transport protocol.

I've already done proof-of-concept work for this project:

* The first cut of a depo server (https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/bc-depo-rust)
* A specification for "GSTP" allowing secure transmission of shares (https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/Research/blob/master/papers/bcr-2023-014-gstp.md)

The intent is to take this proof-of-concept to the pilot stage by making it possible for technically savvy organizations to deploy their own servers, ultimately for production release, and thus create the shared infrastructure we need to make "collaborative seed recovery" a reality.

The following work is intended to be part of this pilot program:

1. Develop proof-of-concept Depo Server to allow for easy installation and deployment.
2. Deploy exemplar Depo Server at Blockchain Commons.
3. Document deployment of Depo Servers for other developers.
4. Publish best practices for Depo deployment & Depo usage.
5. Release new developer-focused documents on Gordian Sealed Transaction Protocol (GSTP).

If Open Sats is interested, we would also be happy to work with you to deploy your own Depo server, to help create this new infrastructure. (Supporting other companies in deploying their own Depo servers, turning this pilot into a production reality, would then be a further stage of this project.)

Potential Impact *
Why is your work important to Bitcoin or the broader free and open-source community?

The goal of the Gordian Depos is to create an open and independent standard for seed recovery. Right now, Ledger is pushing a similar idea with their Ledger Recover service, but their service is closed and dependent upon their select service providers, who require KYC. Other wallet companies planning to offer non-custodial backup services also are very restrictive.

I agree that a method for automatically & securely backing up seeds is crucial to the future of digital assets. Loss is likely the biggest threat faced by most digital-asset holders, especially for long-held assets. A service to hold seeds that have been sharded is a good way to combat this because it maintains the security of the seeds, as the shares are useless to attackers unless a threshold of the shares is combined.

However, I totally disagree with the methodology of Ledger and other companies: not only are they insufficiently open, but they also take away the trust choices of their users. In addition, those methodologies require privacy-busting KYC information, and all of the current parties are under the same EU jurisdiction. We need to normalize a better, more open method, and make it available to all users, not just Ledger customers. The Gordian Depos will allow users to make their own choices, even mixing offline, online, and social share storage if desired. This pilot program would enable these possibilities.

Budget Expectations *
Submit a proposed budget around how much funding you are requesting and how it will be used.

We currently have the budget for this project outlined as follows:

* Depo Server Development: 2 weeks
* Deployment of Blockchain Commons Server: 2 days
* Documentation of Deployment: 1 day
* Documentation of Server Best Practices: 1 day
* Documentation of Auth Best Practices: 1 day
* Developer Documentation of GSTP: 2 days

We are budgeting this at 17 days * 8 hours * $150 = $20,400.

If Open Sats would like to host a Depo server, we'd budget an additional 5 days to deploy another pilot server on your machine per your specs, which would increase the total budget to $26,400.

Our ongoing monthly Gordian Developer Meetings are expected to support this project, but are not included in the budget as they're a part of our standard operating procedure.

Anything Else We Should Know?
Feel free to share whatever else might be important.

Blockchain Commons is a not-for-profit company that has been in existence for five years. Our strong focus has been on the Bitcoin ecosystem. We have done considerable work on this project to date, but need additional funding to put together a full pilot project, and we hope to receive OpenSats' support to do so, as we think it's a project that could be quite important to the Bitcoin ecosystem when fully deployed.

If you receive or plan to receive any other funding, please describe it here:

We made a similar grant request to the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) back in November for a somewhat larger project. They are backlogged, and while we waited for a response from them, we were able to do some of the proof-of-concept work on our own. If our grant request to them were to also come through, it would allow us to increase the scope of our work, including updating our own Gordian Seed Tool app and possibly creating a new command-line app, either of which could be used to demonstrate the sharding of seeds to Depos and their recovery. (We do not expect this to happen, as we have since begun work with them on another project, but it remains possible.)

Funding for the project to date has come courtesy of a variety of GitHub Patrons, including Foundation Devices, Unchained Capital, Keystone, and Bitmark, as well as my personal investments.

Any References? *
Please list any references from the Bitcoin community or open-source space that we could contact for more information on you or your project.

Peter Todd ([e-mail])
Bryan Bishop ([e-mail])
Jesse Posner ([e-mail])