MicroStrategy, the Nasdaq-listed software company that made headlines for the first multi-million dollar purchase of bitcoin on a corporate balance sheet, is getting more involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem. 

In a presentation at the MicroStrategy World conference in Las Vegas, Michael Saylor, the firm’s co-founder and executive chairman, unveiled the firm’s plans to launch a decentralized Identity protocol built on Bitcoin, dubbed MicroStrategy Orange

“Why would we use Bitcoin? Well, it is fault tolerance, it is censorship resistance, it does use the most advanced cryptography, it’s a lot better than most people’s taskwork managers and this federated system.” Saylor said.

MicroStrategy vice president of engineering Cezary Raczko talked the audience through the product, and the case for decentralized identity and decentralized identifiers (DIDs).

“He [Michael Saylor] made an even more compelling case why it makes sense to anchor digital identity into the Bitcoin blockchain, protected by the strength and the security of the Bitcoin network,” said Raczko.

MicroStrategy Orange would be an enterprise-grade platform that implements Bitcoin-based DIDs across organizations.

MicroStrategy also published an unofficial draft of the MicroStrategy Orange technical specifications to Github, outlining its approach for storing data in similar fashion to Bitcoin Ordinals and inscriptions.

Unlike Ordinals, MicroStrategy Orange would store only DID-related data and updates, allowing for DID documents to be created and updated with few restrictions on size and content, but at the same time, taking advantage of the SegWit discount. 

SegWit transactions place all data necessary to satisfy the spending conditions for the inputs in the witness, rather than the inputs, at a fraction of the rate that other transaction data is weighted at, making the storage option significantly cheaper. 

The user’s DID and public key would be inscribed on the Bitcoin network, and organizations can send out invitations to their personnel to create their own digital identity. These DIDs would allow pseudonymity in the same way that real-world identities are not tied to Bitcoin addresses and transactions.

According to Saylor, MicroStrategy Orange would be able to process 10,000 decentralized identifiers in a single Bitcoin transaction.