Why Long-Term DID Persistence is a Governance Time Bomb

DID documents require a permanent, mutable pointer to a public key. Who governs the key rotation logic for a 50-year-old DID when the original signer is deceased? This isn't key recovery; it's inheritance-as-a-service enforced at the protocol layer.\n- Key Revocation becomes a legal, not cryptographic, problem.\n- Protocols like ION or Sidetree bake in assumptions about active key management.

DIDs anchored to immutable smart contracts (e.g., on Ethereum) become governance fossils. A DID linked to a DAO treasury with $1B+ TVL cannot have its verification method updated if the controlling contract is non-upgradable. The identity becomes a single point of failure for the entire organization's assets.\n- Creates permanent coupling between identity and application logic.\n- Forces a choice: compromise sovereignty for upgradability or accept brittle persistence.

Without a formal 'death' or sunset mechanism, the namespace becomes polluted with millions of abandoned DIDs. This isn't just bloat; it's an attack surface. Sybil resistance systems (like Gitcoin Passport) must filter noise from decades-old, unmaintained identities, diluting their security model.\n- Inflation of trust degrades all reputation systems.\n- Revocation registries (like W3C's) become critical but centralized choke points.

Users lose keys. A protocol with permanent DID binding inherits a growing liability of 'zombie accounts'—unrecoverable yet protocol-owned assets and voting power. This creates systemic risk and governance decay.

• Key Risk: Over 10 years, >20% of accounts may become inaccessible.
• Governance Impact: Dead weight distorts DAO votes and treasury allocations.
• Protocol Bloat: Inactive accounts pollute state, increasing costs for all active users.

Frameworks like EIP-4337 social recovery or Lit Protocol MPC introduce a centralization vector. The recovery mechanism becomes the ultimate governance authority, contradicting DID's self-sovereign premise.

• Architectural Flaw: Recovery logic is a mutable smart contract, a governance target.
• Regulatory Target: Recovery custodians (e.g., friend networks, institutions) become regulated entities.
• Solution Path: Design for epoch-based identity expiration or programmable sunset clauses to prune state.

Binding long-term DIDs to off-chain VCs (e.g., proofs of humanity, KYC) creates a synchronization nightmare. Revoked or expired credentials leave protocols with stale, non-compliant user states.

• Data Integrity Gap: Protocol logic cannot natively verify real-time VC status without trusted oracles.
• Compliance Risk: Holding data for users whose credentials are invalid exposes the protocol to liability.
• Mitigation: Treat VCs as ephemeral session keys, not permanent identity anchors. Leverage zkProofs for state updates without data retention.

Adopting a DID standard (e.g., W3C DID, ENS) for cross-protocol composability forces your system into another ecosystem's governance and upgrade cycle. You are now politically bound to their decisions.

• Vendor Lock-in: Your user identity layer depends on an external DAO's priorities.
• Upgrade Risk: Breaking changes in the DID standard can fork your user base or require costly migrations.
• Strategic Move: Implement a dual-layer identity system: a lightweight, internal ID for core logic, with optional, abstracted bridges to external DID standards.

Fully private, persistent DIDs (e.g., using zkProofs) prevent sybil attacks but also enable unattributable governance attacks. A malicious actor can persistently exploit the system without reputation consequence.

• Governance Failure: Plural voting and proposal manipulation become costless over long time horizons.
• Dilemma: Increasing privacy reduces accountability, breaking PoS and DAO security models.
• Design Imperative: Intentional identity decay or reputation bonding is required to align long-term identity with long-term protocol health.

Permanent DIDs have zero marginal cost of persistence, but impose real marginal costs on the protocol (storage, computation). This misalignment guarantees economic unsustainability without a rent or state fee mechanism.

• Hidden Subsidy: Active users subsidize the storage of infinite zombie accounts.
• L1/L2 Impact: On L1 Ethereum, this contributes to state bloat (~50GB+). On L2s, it increases calldata costs and future migration overhead.
• Mandatory Feature: Architect economic finality for identity—require staking, periodic fees, or activity proofs to maintain state.