Archon Documentation
Archon is a decentralized identity protocol implementing the W3C-compliant did:cid scheme.
Animated Walkthroughs
Three-minute animated explanations of how Archon works, each viewable in the browser.
- How Archon Works — DID creation, resolution, updates, and registries
- Keys You Can Lose — identity recovery and key rotation: one recovery phrase, wallet backup and restore, rotating keys, stolen old keys, and DID repair
- Proving What You Hold — credential issuance, presentation, the five verification checks, request pairing, and verifying as of a past time
- Sign In With a DID — passwordless sign-in: challenge, wallet response, Herald verification, and OpenID Connect
- A Name for Your DID — Archon addresses: claiming name@domain, resolving and publishing it, Herald’s public pages, and using addresses for Lightning and email
- Shared, Sealed, Counted — groups, vaults and polls: nested membership, per-member vault keys, sealed ballots, and who can see what
- Letters in a Vault — dmail, Archon’s encrypted mail between DIDs: messages sealed in a vault, delivery by expiring notice, wallet folders, replies, Herald’s email bridge, and what stays public or private
- Messages Between DIDs — DIDComm in Archon: keys, envelopes, delivery through the relay and Tor, mediators, and protocols
- Paying a DID — Lightning in Archon: a wallet per DID, zaps to a DID or name@domain, onion endpoints, and pay-per-request L402 API access
- An Identity for Your Agent — Archon for AI agents through the MCP server: a local Keymaster, every command as a tool, an agent’s own DID, credentials that show who stands behind it, context-sized results, and explicit confirmations for secrets and payments
- Anchored in a Block — how operations are registered on blockchains: per-registry queues, batches whose DID commits to their operations, one transaction per batch on Bitcoin, Zcash, Ethereum or Solana, importing on every node, confirmation and timestamps, and orphaned blocks
- Running a Node — what an Archon node is made of and how to run one: required settings, the core services and their implementations, the minimal stack, Compose profiles, Drawbridge as the public front door, dashboards, and what to expose and back up
- One History, Everywhere — how nodes converge on DID history: replay, forks, chain anchors, late evidence, and reorganizations
Protocol
Operations
Lightning
Service Specifications
See services/ for the full index of
language-agnostic contracts that every Archon service must satisfy.
API Reference