Layer One: Public Utilities

The first two layers of the ToIP stack are designed to provide ​technical trust​ — the assurance that one machine can establish a secure, private connection with another machine. To do this using ​ public key cryptography, you must be able to strongly verify the ​public key​ of the party you are connecting to. The W3C Decentralized Identifier (DID) specification​ solves this problem without using centralized​ certificate authorities by standardizing how you can permanently identify and verify a public key stored on a blockchain or other distributed system.
This solution gives rise to public utilities that serve as strong cryptographic roots-of-trust​ for the DIDs and public keys of verifiable credential issuers. ToIP Layer One utilities can be implemented using any technology that can provide the necessary trust assurances, e.g., blockchains (of any kind), distributed ledgers, decentralized file systems, distributed hash tables, and so on.

Although technical trust is machine-to-machine, implementing technical trust still requires humans to design, code, test, and certify these systems. This is the job of Layer One utility governance frameworks​ that specify the policies under which a utility is implemented and operated such that it can be trusted by the higher layers.