Blockchain Commons is proudly a "not-for-profit" social benefit corporation committed to open source & open development. We advocate for the creation of open, interoperable, secure & compassionate digital infrastructure to enable people to control their own digital destiny and to maintain their human dignity online. We do this by encouraging responsible key management and self-sovereign control of digital assets, focused on our four Gordian principles: independence, privacy, resilience, and openness.

We demonstrate these principles through architectures, specifications, reference applications, and documentation. This work is done in conjunction with a group of wallet developers who are helping us to ensure that these new principles for digital-asset management are widely used and interoperable.

Our work is funded entirely by donations and collaborative partnerships with people like you. Every contribution will be spent on building open tools, technologies, and techniques that sustain and advance blockchain and internet security infrastructure and promote an open web.

For our most recent advances, please see our quarterly reports.

Some of our biggest categories of work include:

• Gordian — The Gordian architecture and principles are the linchpin of our work. Reference apps, hardware kits, and internet services demonstrate their usage.
• Crypto Commons — The Gordian principles are enabled by specifications such as Lifehash, SSKR (Sharded Secret Key Reconstruction), and UR (Uniform Resources). The Crypto Commons provides libraries for integrating these specifications into your programs, as well as CLI tools that exercise these libraries and demonstrate their usage.
• Non-partisan Advocacy — We advocate for technology & digital civil rights to ensure secure & compassionate digital infrastructure.

In late 2022/early 2023, some of our biggest projects are:

• Gordian Envelope — a specification for the architecture of a privacy-preserving “smart document” supporting the storage, backup, encryption, authentication, and transmission of data.
• CSR — a system to automate the recovery of seeds and other sensitive digital data.

Reference applications released for Gordian include:

• Gordian Coordinator (iOS) — a multisig Bitcoin coordinator.
• Gordian Seed Tool (iOS) — a crypto-seed vault.
• Gordian Server (macOS) — your own full node.
• Gordian Wallet (iOS) — a mobile wallet meant to link to your Server.

We also are working to educate users and developers alike, with documentation projects such as:

• Crypto-Commons Docs — using SSKR, URs, and more.
• Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line — tutorials on programming with bitcoin-cli, lightning-cli, and RPC.
• #SmartCustody — risk-modeling adversaries for your digital assets.

These are just the beginning! Blockchain Commons is also working on identity wallets, social-recovery techniques, zero-knowledge curve-operation proofs, advanced cryptographic primitives such as Schnorr, MuSig, and scriptless scripts, and in general establishing multi- and cross-blockchain standards.

To financially support further development at Blockchain Commons, please consider becoming a Sponsor here at GitHub. However, you can alternatively support Blockchain Commons and our vision of the open web with Bitcoin via our BTCPay contribution page.

Blockchain Commons was founded by Christopher Allen (GitHub: @ChristopherA & Twitter: @ChristopherA) who acts as Principal Architect & Executive Director. Christopher is also the founder of Rebooting the Web Of Trust a non-profit supporting human rights decentralized identity.