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title: Updates about Projects

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# Updates about Projects

## Summary (for other pages)

In 2024, the Blockchain Commons community is focused on advancing its Gordian Architecture, which supports the self-sovereign control of digital assets and identity. This includes continuing the development of the Gordian Envelope specification for privacy-focused data transmission and storage, and the Collaborative Seed Recovery (CSR) reference implementation for secure seed recovery. Blockchain is also exploring experimental projects in areas such as airgapped wallet interoperability; Tor's ability to offer the Gordian Architecture additional privacy, service anonymity, identity pseudonymity, non-correlation, censorship-resistance, and separation-of-interests while reducing single-points-of-failure; and enhancements to the privacy of decentralized identifiers, authenticiated credentials and claims. In addition, Blockchain Commons offers reference apps and CLI tools that demonstrate the use of the Gordian Architecture. The organization also plans to create a Gordian Seal program to denote companies that follow the Gordian principles, and will continue to advocate for laws and regulations that support decentralized technologies.

## Detail for the Project Page

The key projects that Blockchain Commons is committed to for 2024 include:
* The Gordian Architecture: This is the core architecture of Blockchain Commons' work, and is intended to support the self-sovereign control of digital assets and identity in a way that is safe, secure, and private. It enables progressive trust between parties with different interests, business models, risk scenarios, and legal systems by preserving their authority, agency and control. The Gordian Architecture is built on a foundation of principles for responsible key management that are embodied in code and supported by tools, documentation, resources, and reference apps. The Gordian Architecture consists of a number of other cryptographic and privacy-related technologies to solve problems for different industries, including education, software & AI, healthcare, finance, and legal sectors to secure against risks of collusion, compromise, or privacy of their sensitive information and by increasing resilence against failure.
* Gordian Envelopes: This is a specification in the Gordian Architecture as a privacy-focused solution for the transmission and storage of complex data structures. It uses a hashed Merkle Tree to provide privacy features and allow for the elision, encryption, or external reference of certain parts of the envelope. This enables access to only certain parts of the envelope for specific recipients while still maintaining the security and privacy of the rest of the data. The envelope’s routing instructions and seals can be used to verify the authenticity and provenance of the data.
* Collaborative seed recovery (CSR): This is a specific implementation of the Gordian Envelope intended to automate the recovery of seeds and other sensitive digital data in a way that is safe, secure, and simple to use. It leverages the Sharded Secret Key Reconstruction (SSKR) cryptography specification, which allows users to split their cryptographic seeds into pieces and send them to trusted parties for seed recovery.

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Blockchain Commons has developed several reference apps that demonstrate the use of the Gordian Architecture and principles. These include:

* Gordian Seed Tool (iOS/macOS): This is Blockchain Commons’ most fully featured reference app. It demonstrates independence and resilience by protecting cryptographic seeds while also making them available for easy use. Using Seed Tool, users can generate seeds, store them securely on their device, and derive and share multisignature signing and verification keys from those seeds.
* Gordian Server (macOS): This reference installs a Bitcoin Core server, protected by Tor, on a Mac computer. It gives users complete self-sovereign control over their Bitcoin, and supports easy connectivity to mobile wallets that support the QuickConnect API.
CLI Tools: Blockchain Commons offers a number of CLI (command line interface) tools that can be used from the command line to perform various tasks related to the gordian libraries. In particular, there is seedtool, for the creation and storage of cryptographic seeds; keytool, for deriving keys from seeds and signing with them; and envelope, a tool for the creation, testing, and debugging of Gordian Envelopes.

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Blockchain Commons has several experimental projects that are currently in development. These projects are designed to explore new technologies and approaches that could potentially be integrated into the Gordian Architecture. Some of the experimental projects that Blockchain Commons is currently working on include the following:

* Airgapped Wallets: This project explores the use of airgaps to protect hardware devices from network attacks and improve the security and privacy of digital asset transactions. This project focuses on the development of specifications for Universal Resource (UR)-based QR codes and other physical communication methods to transfer data between online and offline devices. These specifications are used by many different digital asset wallets, and Blockchain Commons hosts research papers to chart the future of this technology.
* Digital Asset Recovery: This sub-project of the Collaborative Seed Recovery effort focuses on recovery mechanisms to support users in recovering their digital assets, particularly multisig Bitcoin accounts, in the event of hardware failures or other emergencies. It uses a combination of physical and cryptographic techniques to enable users to recover their seeds, keys, descriptors, and metadata without exposing them to potential attacks.
* Airgapped Signing: This sub-project of the Airgapped Wallet Community explores the use of airgapped devices for the creation and signing of multisig transactions, as well as the authentication and authorization of data without risking transaction keys. It is designed for interoperability between many different wallets and cryptographic assets.
* LetheKit: This is a DIY platform that demonstrates Blockchain Commons' airgap technologies. It performs sensitive cryptographic operations on an offline airgapped device, using no WiFi or Bluetooth to avoid potentially leaking information. It also contains no local storage, and when the device is turned off, it forgets any sensitive data stored in RAM. This makes it ideal for creation storing and recovery of offline cryptographic seeds, as well as for creating and signing transactions.
* TorGap: This is a security and privacy approach that leverages the Tor protocol to create gaps between connected apps and microservices. It aims to support privacy, service anonymity, identity pseudonymity, non-correlation, censorship-resistance, and separation-of-interests while reducing single-points-of-failure. Blockchain Commons hosts research and specifications, including QuickConnect, for use by the Airgapped Wallet community.
* QuickConnect 2: This is a protocol that enables wallet apps and services to securely create a TorGap between each other using the Tor network. It supports a variety of different authentication methods, including single-signature, multisignature, and PSBT-based authentication, and allows for the creation of complex workflows and interactions between different parties.
* Spotbit: This is an easy-to-install server that leverages a TorGap to offer a webservice and API for cryptocurrency price data and candles. This allows users to access price feeds in a customizable way that preserves their privacy and reduces reliance on a single source of data. Spotbit can aggregate data from multiple exchanges and serve it from a single URL or using Tor as an onion hidden service. Users can configure the base currencies and exchanges they want to use for price data, or store historical information.
* torgap-sig (Rust library). A fork of rust-minisig cli app with support for Tor onion v3, testbedding did:onion, which enables DID and VCs lookups via a Torgap.
* DID-Onion: a specification for the a Decentralized Identifier method, which allows for the use of Tor Onion Services as a DID.
* Torgap-demo: A demonstration of how torgap-sig-cli-rust can be used to verify a signature using an onion service, and offer simple onion-based W3C DID (Decentralized Identifier) Document Linode Stackscript, and Linode installer script to automate installation of your own demo server and DID document using your own torgap keys.
* Coordinator (iOS/mac): This is a multisig Bitcoin transaction coordinator for iOS. It demonstrates the use of cryptographic request and response QR/UR specs, and Gordian Envelopes to communicate to create multisig transactions between multiple parties in a way that is both resilient and easy to use.
* Collaborative Key Management (CKM): This is the successor to the Collaborative Seed Recovery (CSR) project, that leverages emerging cryptographic technologies, such as multisignatures, multi-party cryptography (MPC), zk-proofs, and homomorphic computation technologies to further protect digital assets and identity against compromise.

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Blockchain Commons researches and hosts a number of specifications to advance the Gordian Architecture:

* Research Papers - These papers detail and describe the use of interoperable specifications for blockchain and Bitcoin.
* Envelope Specification - This specification provides tools for implementing encryption, signing, sharding of messages, and representation of knowledge graphs using the CBOR and UR formats. The core of this specification is the Envelope, which is a smart-document structure for storing, backing up, encrypting, and authenticating data, with explicit support for Merkle-based selective disclosure.
* Lifehash - This specification is a method of hash visualization based on Conway's Game of Life that creates unique, deterministic icons from input data. Blockchain Commons uses LifeHash to create visual representations of seeds and keys that can be easily recognized.
* SSKR - This specification is an implementation of Sharded Secret Key Reconstruction (SSKR) for use in Blockchain Commons software projects. It currently implements Shamir's Secret Sharing, allowing for sharding and reconstruction of keys to improve resilience.
* Uniform Resource (UR) - This specification is a method for encoding structured binary data in plain-text strings that are also well-formed URIs. It allows for the reliable, typed transfer of data and is designed to support the transmission of crypto-seeds, crypto-keys, PSBTs, and other cryptocurrency-related data. UR is well-suited for use with QR codes and allows for the creation of animated QR codes containing more information than a single QR code could hold.

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Blockchain Commons has several educational resources aimed at teaching programmers and end users about decentralized technologies. These resources include:
* Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line - This is a twenty-chapter course that teaches system administrators, developers, and engineers who are familiar with the UNIX command line interface how to work with Bitcoin. It covers the fundamentals of Bitcoin, from RPC communications to how transactions and scripts work, and focuses on the bitcoin-cli command. Translations are available in Portuguese and Spanish.
* #SmartCustody - This book (186 pages) is intended to help users improve the security of their digital assets. It provides a risk-modeling system and discusses cold-storage scenarios for managing self-custody and detailed lists of potential adversaries. A v2.0 of the book is planned to improve accessibility and support additional hardware tools and multi-signature scenarios.

Both of these resources are available on GitHub.

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Blockchain Commons hosts several events to bring together different parties, educate and create consensus on the future development of their technologies and specifications. These events include:

* Silicon Salon - This event is a forum for semiconductor manufacturers interested in creating silicon solutions for cryptography to meet with wallet creators and other cryptographic principals. It includes presentations and discussions on the topic.
* Rebooting the Web of Trust - This is a semi-annual design workshop focused on the future development of the web of trust. Blockchain Commons attends and supports these workshops.

In addition to these events, Blockchain Commons also hosts online meetings to support the airgapped wallet community and the collaborative seed recovery project. These meetings provide an opportunity for members of the community to discuss and learn about airgapped wallets and related technologies.

Many recording from these meetings are available on youtube.

Blockchain Commons hosts several decentralized infrastructure resources that are available for use by the internet community. These resources include:

* Esplora Server - This is a Blockchain Commons Esplora server that provides access to Bitcoin blockchain data. It is available for public use on the web and via a Tor onion hidded service.
* Spotbit Server - This is an instance of Blockchain Commons' Spotbit Bitcoin price-aggregation server. It is available for public use on the web and via a Tor onion hidded service.
* Testnet Public Node - Blockchain Commons maintains a public Bitcoin testnet node for use with Bitcoin for with experimental wallets using QuickConnect. It is only available via a Tor onion hidded service.
* Tor Exit Node - Blockchain Commons supports the open infrastructure of Tor by running its own exit node.