Oct 4, 2022

Internet has been a great enabler of our time. We are the internet generation. We work here, we relax here, we socialise here. We started Shovel Company, with a vision of improving infrastructure for internet. Being builders ourselves, we understand that powerful tools can unlock a new realm of possibilities, and usher us toward new frontiers.

Internet is a set of protocols which allows new nodes to join the network and share information. These protocols are an ever expanding and evolving set.

Early development of Internet infrastructure focused on improving our capabilities around “How we share data” and “how much data we can share”. This unlocked the building of ever rich applications. Today, the largest companies in the world have built such applications. As a result, majority of us are now online.

Population explosion brought its own problems. “Who is sharing data” became increasingly important to solve for, not just “How”. However the Internet protocol set was improving to solve for urgent needs like establishing a trusted website for end users with HTTPS etc. The realm of managing the end users was left to application layer.

Last couple of decades have seen development of several application layer protocols (OpenID etc.). They unlocked the interoperability between applications, allowing user data sharing across applications, enabling apps to be increasingly user-centric. This created an interconnected web of dependencies within the application layer. Establishing a few applications as identity provider on users behalf. But the problem of trust and user-centric control is much broader and demands complete data ownership by users. This pushes us towards a redesign of the underlying infrastructure protocols.

Today, we stand at the frontier of how identity is defined on internet.

We are headed towards a world where each user manages their data through their cryptographic keys. They will use these keys to sign information to establish a verifiable trust. Frontier protocols as “Decentralised Identifiers” and “Verifiable Credentials” are under development at W3C to realise this future.

Such fundamental shift in the design of internet will create massive changes in how users control their data and relationships. Shovel Company is committed to realising that future.