On February 13, 2019, Microsoft officially announced that it would become the first large-scale technology company to launch a decentralized infrastructure directly built on blockchain and released an open source project named Ion. The project will develop basic identity mechanism for how users communicate with each other in the network.
 
According to Microsoft, they will provide blockchain (www.macblock.io) and distributed account book to securely store encrypted identities and personal data in Identity Hubs, but the systems they built are not efficient enough to host a global system. After Ion network protocol is developed, this will no longer be the bottleneck.
 

 
How does Microsoft DID system work?
Microsoft DID system is like a private key that a node uses to sign a transaction to the Bitcoin network. Users use the private key to prove their ownership of identity and data. All ION nodes on the network will be responsible for tracking these DIDs and timestamping them to the Bitcoin blockchain for reference and verification.
 
 
In order to create an ID, users can package the public key into a DID creation document on the ION network, sign this input with its private key and send it to a node on the network. The ION node then archives the metadata (but do not access the data) as a DID document so that other nodes can access that.
 
In order to set the ownership of DID, the node will package all the reference values of the DID it receives into an OP_RETURN transaction and anchor them into the Bitcoin blockchain.
 
In fact, Yorke Rhodes, head of Microsoft's blockchain engineering team, said in an interview that the Microsoft team has developed key signature and verification software for a year. The software is built on public networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but the throughput of its system exceeds that of the underlying chain. As a small gear in the whole system, DID will have profound influence.
 
After DID becomes the infrastructure of the Internet, if it is associated with smart contracts and supports cross-chain applications, users will easily use the decentralized network to contact a shared car in the same city and the shared driver can also check the DID credit information to decide whether to accept the order. After that, all the settlement will be done automatically without the need for a centralized organization to coordinate. Since blockchain can not be tampered, it naturally forms the credit history of a user.
 
Yorke Rhodes, the head of Microsoft DID decentralized system, plays an important leadership role in the development team of Microsoft DID. When talking about the future development of DID, he said that cross-chain and DID will become a hot topic of the next generation of blockchain technology and that DID will be an important beginning to promote the transformation from information Internet to value Internet. As what is mentioned in Microsoft DID white paper, the future of DID decentralized digital identity has come.