Keyoxide

Keyoxide is free, open-source software for building and verifying decentralized online identities. A Keyoxide profile is a collection of identity claims — each a link to an account you control on some third-party service: a code forge, a social account, a domain, a Nostr key — bundled into a cryptographically signed document. Anyone can verify those claims against your signing key and confirm that the same person controls all of the linked accounts, without trusting Keyoxide itself, any server, or any central registry. It is identity as proof rather than identity as an entry in someone else's database.

How verification works

Each claim follows the same bidirectional pattern. Your signed profile asserts "I control this account," and the account itself carries a small reciprocal proof — a fingerprint in a bio, a signed note, a DNS record on a domain — pointing back at your key. A verifier (the Keyoxide web app, a self-hosted instance, or a command-line client) fetches both sides and checks that they agree. Because the cryptography does the vouching, the verifier software is interchangeable: if you do not trust keyoxide.org, run your own instance or verify by hand. Nothing about the identity lives on Keyoxide's servers; the profile travels with the key.

In daily use a profile is just a URL or QR code built from your key's fingerprint. Put it in a forum signature or conference slide, and anyone can pull up the full claim list and watch each proof verify live — a stronger introduction than any platform badge, because the checkmarks are computed by the verifier's own machine rather than granted by a company. Adding a new claim is a five-minute loop: post the reciprocal proof on the service, add the claim to your profile, re-verify.

Its limits are the honest kind. A verified claim proves control at the time of checking, so verification is live rather than archival; claims against centralized platforms still depend on those platforms continuing to serve the reciprocal proof; and the keypair is the single root of it all — lose it and the identity must be rebuilt, leak it and someone else can wear your name. Key hygiene, as ever, is the price of key sovereignty.

The self-hostable successor to Keybase

Keyoxide is widely adopted as the no-lock-in alternative to Keybase, which popularized cross-platform identity proofs before being acquired by Zoom in 2020 — after which development effectively stalled and users were left holding identities anchored to a company's roadmap. That episode is the whole argument in miniature: proofs that live on a corporate server can be bought, shut down, or quietly changed; proofs signed by your own key and published in places you control cannot. For the sovereign Bitcoiner the parallel is exact — the same reasoning that says hold your own keys rather than trust an exchange says anchor your identity to a keypair rather than a platform account.

The Ariadne specification

Keyoxide is one implementation of the open Ariadne Spec, a community-governed standard for these identity claims that no single vendor controls — meaning compatible tools can verify the same profiles independently. Profiles were originally anchored to an OpenPGP key, making PGP/GPG the signing layer; the newer Ariadne Signature Profile uses JSON Web Signatures instead, lowering the barrier for people who would rather not manage PGP keys directly. Either way the trust root is a key you generated and hold.

In practice, Keyoxide answers a question that comes up constantly in pseudonymous, decentralized communities: is the person on this forge the same person behind that Nostr key and that domain? Answering it with signatures instead of a blue checkmark is one more layer moved from institutional trust to self-custody — this time for your name rather than your coins. It complements the broader program of self-sovereign identity: start with the keys, and let everything else be a verifiable claim.