Headjack - the base layer of cyberspace

Headjack is a blockchain that links sovereign identities to content at web-scale. Key points:

  • Creation is fundamentally different from transfers and exchange of value - the design space around trust & data availability for media and identity is different from finance.
  • Following the UNIX philosophy - in Headjack identity is simply an identifier (unique number) and anything orthogonal (KYC, profiles, privacy, finance) can be layered on top of it.

  • It solves single sign-on and allows for user experience similar to Web2 through hierarchical authorization management - keypairs are not required by default and even those with keys bound to their accounts may choose to not explicitly sign every interaction.

  • Consensus is reached on the absolute bare minimum - the history of authorizations, names, keys & off-chain content anchors (merkle roots) - the simplest mental model for developers.

  • Headjack can support billions of accounts and link unlimited amounts of off-chain activity to them. The entire web can be rebuilt on top of it - a claim that is easily provable.

  • Content addressing is with persistent & human-readable URIs (instead of hashes) - the link between identity and data is cryptographically provable even if keys & names have changed.

  • It doesn't deal with off-chain data storage and retrievability - those are separate problems and Headjack simply lets entities point to ways for others to retrieve addressable content.


The talk "Decentralized identity & content addressing at web-scale" at code::dive 2022 is a good high-level overview of the project and covers the most important aspects:

Book structure

  • What is Headjack - How the protocol technically works and how things like applications, services, DMs, social graphs, preferences, etc. could be implemented - the building blocks necessary to recreate anything from Web2 and beyond.
  • Why Headjack - What's broken with the web and a blueprint for what is possible - services, business models, infrastructure, algorithms, markets, metaverse, etc.

  • Implementation of Headjack - A detailed specification of the implementation.

What is Headjack

  1. Guiding principles & design goals
  2. Identity & authorization
  3. Content addressing
    1. Host vs data-centric
    2. Blobs & persistent URIs
    3. Names, paths, & more
  4. Messages
  5. IDMs, preferences & social graphs
  6. Storage & retrievability of data
  7. Blocks, state & proofs, oh my!
  8. Throughput numbers (scaling)
  9. Headjack vs the competition

Named after the data port at the back of the head of synthetically-grown humans in the Matrix.