Sovrin Shut Down. Skiff Was Killed. Bloom Left. Why Trust a New One?
You should not trust us yet, and this page is not going to argue otherwise. We are the earliest-stage project mentioned on it, weaker on every axis than the ones that died.
What actually happened, with dates
- Sovrin, MainNet shut down 31 March 2025; the Foundation dissolved 21 May 2025. A read-only archive is stewarded by a third party. The recorded cause was commercial, not technical. What that did to identifiers anchored on it.
- Skiff, acquired, then shut down in August 2024. Our own brief calls it the third high-profile death of that cycle.
- Bloom, self-sovereign identity plus portable credit from 2017, now a token wallet. Our brief says the early Bloom thesis "overlaps the Solidus thesis almost exactly on paper."
That last sentence is in our own competitor notes, written by us, about us. It is the most useful line on this page and we are not going to bury it.
The pattern, and it is not a technology pattern
None of the three failed because the cryptography did not work.
- Sovrin: no aligned commercial model sustained the parties running the network.
- Skiff: acquired by a company with different priorities. The technology was fine; the owner changed.
- Bloom: the thesis did not convert into a business, and the team went where one existed.
Three different endings, one shared cause: nobody found a way to pay for it that survived contact with reality. The specifications outlived every one of these organisations, which is the field's consolation and its warning at the same time.
And a fact that should unsettle anyone reading a vendor's standards claims
did:sov is still listed in the W3C DID Method Registry today, with "status": "registered",
for a network that stopped running in March 2025. Verified this session.
A registry entry outlives the network it names. The full unpacking. Our entry would outlive us identically, so treat any listing, ours included, as evidence that a name was claimed, and as evidence of nothing else.
Where we sit, honestly, against projects that failed
| Sovrin at its peak | Solidus today | |
|---|---|---|
| Mainnet | yes | no |
| Independent node operators | many stewards | one, us |
| Institutional backing | years of it | none comparable |
| Ecosystem | real | none |
| Paying customers | some | none |
Sovrin had more of everything than we have, and it ended. Bloom had a nearly identical thesis and left.
So the correct inference is not that we will succeed where they failed. It is that the conditions that killed them are still present, and we have fewer resources to survive them. Anyone telling you otherwise about any project in this field, including us, is guessing.
What we would say for ourselves, at its accurate size
Two things, neither of which is a survival argument:
- The credential format is open, so what we issue stays readable if we disappear: a conformant verifier needs the issuer's public key and nothing of ours. That is a real answer to one specific failure mode, and it is the same answer we gave when writing about Sovrin's shutdown.
- The verification path is demonstrable today, end to end, by a stranger, which is worth more than a roadmap and much less than a customer.
Neither addresses the commercial question that actually killed these projects, and the cold-start problem is where that is argued, unflatteringly.
What would actually justify trusting a new one
Not vision, and not a standards listing. These, in order:
- Somebody unaffiliated using it in production. We have zero.
- A published external security audit. None.
- A node operated by someone who is not the company. None.
- Revenue that pays for the network's operation. None.
We have none of the four, and item 4 is the one that ended Sovrin. Our answer to it is a thesis, not evidence, and we have said the same thing on every page where it came up.
The question to ask us in a year
Not "are you still here." Ask: has any of the four above changed? A project can persist for years without acquiring one of them, and persistence is not the same as progress. If none of them has moved, the honest reading is that we are the fourth entry on a list like this one, not the exception to it.