You don't own your Twitter username. The company does. If the platform shuts down tomorrow, that identity is gone — you can recreate it somewhere else, but it's not the same. Your followers, your history, your reputation — tied to a string that a corporation controls.

This is a common but mostly ignored problem. And it applies to more than social media. Your GitHub account, your email, your developer identity — all of it lives on servers you don't control, owned by companies that can revoke access, change the rules, or simply disappear.

DIDs — Decentralized Identifiers — fix this by giving you a cryptographic identifier that you control. No company in the middle. No account to get banned. Just a keypair that's yours.

What is a DID?

A DID is just a string. Three parts: the scheme ( did ), the method ( example , hedera , key ), and a unique identifier. Like this:

The method tells you where this DID lives and how to look it up. did:hedera:mainnet:abc123 lives on Hedera.…