The structural division of Jack Dorsey’s Block company – TBD – introduced the concept of a decentralized open source platform Web5. According to the developers, the project will give users full control over their personal data and digital identities.

“This will probably be our most important contribution to the internet. I am proud of the team,” Dorsey commented on the announcement.

According to TBD, users’ identities and personal data do not currently belong to them as they are “property of third parties”. By the latter it means developers, companies and centralized platforms.

The Web5 vision promoted by the team will change that.

“Web5 brings decentralized identity and data to your applications. This allows developers to focus on creating great user experiences while giving data and identity ownership back to individuals.

According to the presentation published by TBD, the Web5 concept is based on three pillars:

• decentralized identifiers (Decentralized Identifiers, DID) – provide authentication and data routing;
• verified credentials (Verifiable Credentials, VC) – special formats and data models for cryptographic representation and verification of claims;
• decentralized web nodes (DWN) – store data and relay messages exchanged between applications and protocols.

The developers explained that DIDs are created by users and are not stored by central providers or other third parties. ION layer 2 network can be used as protocol for VC.

DWNs allow ecosystem participants to store and transmit encrypted or clear messages and data. TBD believes this will provide an opportunity to build many decentralized applications and protocols based on them.

“The combination of DID and DWN creates a secure messaging network that can replace single-purpose protocols (encrypted messaging, photo sharing, etc.) with universal standards for exchanging semantic data of any kind,” the developers said.

It is assumed that the financial layer of Web5 will provide the bitcoin network.

Earlier, Jack Dorsey criticized Web 3.0’s concept of the Internet. According to him, the decentralization of the network is hindered by the strong influence of venture investors who are not interested in distributed management and data storage.

Following the announcement of the Web5 concept, the Block president repeated his thesis. He stated that the modern decentralized Internet is based on “systems with a single point of failure” such as Ethereum and Solana, and also does not give users control over their data.

As a reminder, Dorsey introduced TBD in August 2021. Initially, the division planned to create a decentralized bitcoin exchange based on payments company Block (formerly Square).