Why Your DID is Trapped in a Wall Garden

Your DID is anchored to a specific blockchain or consensus mechanism, making it non-portable. This creates protocol-specific identity silos like those on Ethereum (ENS), Solana (Bonfida), or Bitcoin (ION).

• Lock-in Effect: Switching chains requires re-issuance and re-verification.
• Fragmented Utility: DApps on one chain cannot natively verify credentials issued on another.
• Vendor Risk: Your identity's security and liveness depend on the underlying chain's health.

Trust is centralized to a handful of credential issuers (KYC providers, universities, DAOs). This recreates Web2's gatekeeper problem within a decentralized shell.

• Centralized Trust Roots: You rely on the issuer's continued operation and honesty.
• Non-Fungible Credentials: Credentials from Issuer A are not interoperable with systems built for Issuer B.
• Revocation Bottleneck: The issuer holds the power to unilaterally revoke your verified status.

Applications and smart contracts (the verifiers) are hardcoded to accept specific credential formats and issuers. This creates application-layer lock-in, stifling composability.

• Integration Friction: Each new verifier requires custom integration work, creating a $50k+ development cost barrier.
• Schema Incompatibility: A credential proving "age > 18" in one schema is meaningless to a verifier using a different standard.
• Market Fragmentation: Prevents the emergence of a liquid, cross-application reputation layer.

DIDs are only as useful as the verifiers that accept them. Today, a credential from a DAO on Ethereum is useless for a DeFi app on Solana. This forces users to maintain multiple identities, defeating the purpose of a universal DID.

• Fragmented Reputation: Social graph and on-chain history are trapped per-chain.
• Vendor Capture: Platforms like ENS or SpruceID become de facto gatekeepers.
• No Network Effects: Value accrues to the verifying app, not the user's portable identity.

Protocols like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax create a canonical, chain-agnostic registry for claims. By separating the issuance and storage of credentials from their verification, they enable portable trust.

• Sovereign Proofs: Credentials are stored off-chain (e.g., IPFS) with on-chain proof anchors.
• Universal Verification: Any app on any chain can verify the attestation's validity via a light client or oracle.
• Composable Identity: Credentials from Gitcoin Passport, Worldcoin, and DAOs can be aggregated into a single, portable profile.

Applying UniswapX's intent paradigm to identity. Instead of managing credentials, users express an intent ("prove I'm a accredited investor"). Specialized solvers (Rhinestone, Disco) compete to fulfill it using the most efficient credential mix across chains.

• User Abstraction: No need to know which chain your credential lives on.
• Solver Competition: Drives down cost and latency of proof aggregation.
• Cross-Domain Proofs: Leverages ZK proofs from Polygon ID or Sismo to create minimal, verifiable packets.

The W3C DID standard is chain-agnostic, but implementations are not. ION (Bitcoin) doesn't talk to did:ethr (Ethereum). True interoperability requires a shared resolution layer that treats blockchains as dumb storage, not sovereign kingdoms.

• Standard Fragmentation: did:key, did:web, did:polygonid are all incompatible by default.
• Universal Resolver: Projects like DIF's Universal Resolver aim to be the DNS for DIDs, but lack economic incentives for adoption.
• The Endgame: Interoperability will be won by who provides the cheapest, fastest bridge for verifiable data, not the most ideologically pure spec.