Web3 Leader Spotlight: Dan Burnett
This week, we had the privilege of speaking with Dan Burnett, President & CEO of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (ISTO).
Dan's impressive research journey spans from neural networks for speech recognition to pioneering advancements in VoiceXML, WebRTC, Verifiable Credentials, and Decentralized Identifiers. He has also worked with Web3 industry giants like ConsenSys and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, helping Ethereum realize its full potential.
Follow him on X @DanielCBurnett.
With your extensive background in technology development, what drew you to the world of Web3, and can you share your journey into the space?
My PhD was in using Neural Networks for Speech Recognition, but I've spent most of my career driving the creation of more than a dozen Web and Internet standards, including WebRTC, Verifiable Credentials, and Decentralized Identifiers. In 2017 I decided to go back to my technical roots.
I figured that the two computer science technologies with the greatest potential to impact the lives of everyday people, for good or ill, were Blockchain and Machine Learning, so I caught myself up on the status of Machine Learning and Neural Networks and read up on Bitcoin and Ethereum. I couldn't decide between the two, so I decided to take whichever employment option arrived first. That was at ConsenSys, in the Ethereum space. After two years there I took on the role of Executive Director of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance because I believed (and still do) that mass adoption of the technology will happen through widespread business adoption.
How do you envision Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) transforming identity management in the near future? What are the most compelling use cases you see for their adoption?
Personally I'm more excited by Verifiable Credentials, which came first and created the initial need for Decentralized Identifiers. Loosely speaking, W3C Verifiable Credentials are an ecosystem of Issuers, Holders, and Verifiers of digital credentials in the form of claims/assertions by an issuer ID about one or more subject IDs that is signed (or zk-proven) by the issuer ID. This framework is steadily being deployed, for driver's licenses, US green cards, and various other uses.
With regard to DIDs, we were concerned about the use of traditional digital IDs such as email addresses, OpenId, etc., because they all came from centralized issuers who could delete or, worse, change who the identifier is associated with, without the approval of the individual whose identifier it was originally supposed to be. Thus were born Decentralized Identifiers - identifiers not issued or controllable by any central authority, only the holders of the keys. Smart contracts on blockchain networks were the obvious candidates for implementation (and the inspiration), but we did not want to pick a favorite. It was around 2017, and various networks were launching, so we created a standard and an extensible URI scheme with the format "did::". There are already hundreds of DID methods, because we purposely did not establish a centralized authority. Ultimately, because the VC/DID approach allows everyone to make their own decisions about what the root of trust should be for their own use cases, I believe that not only is this technology essential for provenance tracking of AI-generated materials and AI training sources, this use case is in fact the "killer use case" for the underlying blockchain tech. Digital agents require digital identity.
What is a common misconception about the crypto space that you've encountered, and how do you think it can be corrected?
After several years working both with those who are moving the space forward and, more importantly, businesses in the "outside world" that could benefit from adopting web3 tech, along with a focused 13 country tour last fall to interview potential adopters, it became clear that there is a widespread, and widely believed, narrative that "blockchain == crypto == scam". This narrative is so entrenched, in business, in legislative bodies, and in regulatory bodies around the world, that the narrative itself has become a serious impediment to progress.
I believe the most effective way to address this is to have selective, curated, business-focused events where the excesses of the blockchain and crypto spaces, speculation in particular, are toned way down. While you and I can do just fine with unicorns, narwhals, nap rooms, lambos, and "decentralize all the things", they aren't the best at conveying real, mature deployment success (and not just PoCs) to the entities with the deep and strong connections to consumers. Adoption is happening, but it would happen faster with more stable reach outs that take the time to explain the concrete benefits of adding decentralization into existing business processes.
Terms such as "resilience against bad actors" may be more useful here than, for example, "credible neutrality". If we want this technology to achieve its initial promises of a better world, we have to gently guide the traditional business community into using only the safest, the most decentralized, and the most ethically run of the many Web3 protocols and projects out there, because that is what will give them the long-term resilience that they prefer and that retail consumers are increasingly demanding.
