Show HN: We visualized all of Decentralized Identity. 10k+ nodes in forcegraph | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We visualized all of Decentralized Identity. 10k+ nodes in forcegraph

weboftrust.org

13 pointslrock7 comments

I was in charge of the visual design on this project. It's the largest and most complete effort to map the decentralized identity space and its continued growth. Would appreciate to get some feedback in the UI/UX!

Tech: sveltekit, vasturianos force-graph (D3), postgres

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Some key insights we gained:

- The w3c DID/VC stack is dominating the space which sounds great for interop but there are major interoperability problems due to 200+ different DID methods for key discovery.

- We indexed them all and show who uses what. 1181 government entities in 105 countries endorse decentralized identity projects. Often by funding.

- The US, Canada and Germany have the most active startups and projects in numbers.

- Switzerland and South Korea have some of the highest ratio of active projects per capita, indicating there is a big push towards decentralized ID in these regions.

- 63% of Identity Projects which call themselves decentralized use Blockchain

- The most used Ledger is Ethereum, followed by Sovrin, EBSI Network, Polygon, 140 ledgers are being used in total

First of all, really cool project.

But are these projects truly decentralized, or are they just government-led initiatives wrapped in decentralization rhetoric? lol. What percentage of these efforts genuinely aim for SSI rather than state-controlled digital IDs?

Its a sliding scale: there are definitely a number of projects out there claiming to be self sovereign identity solutions while pretty much creating new centralized future honeypots for potential breaches. Since the map also has information about tech stacks used by each project, the users can form their own opinions on a case by case basis.

Since this data will be released under CC BY 4.0 after the current public beta quality assurance, perhaps in the future the dataset will serve as a starting point for the SSI community to explore exactly those questions.

(I was also working on this project with lrock.)

Pretty incredible datavis effort here, I can't imagine the man hours it took. Did you use any agentic scraping methods for collection?

The absolute majority of it was collected manually, once we had a base of manually collected data we used AI for a select few datapoints, such as industry classifications, or detecting use of did:methods in projects documentation. Any AI colected data was then manually checked & approved. you can read about the data collection process in the pdf linked on https://www.weboftrust.org/about

Is the data live? Or is it more like snapshot of what the space looks like now?

How did you obtain that data? Did you use AI to generate it?

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