UCAN web site is live

[Alan Karp]

https://ucan.xyz/

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Alan Karp

[Tom Van Cutsem]

Thanks for sharing Alan.

What's the origin story behind UCAN? I don't recognize any familiar names from this group in their github repo, but they clearly cite a lot of documents authored by the friam/cap-talk community (eg MarkM's thesis).

Also, is there a link with zcaps-ld? Did that spec influence UCAN, or are they completely independent?

Thanks,

Tom

Op di 2 dec 2025 om 18:52 schreef Alan Karp <alan...@gmail.com>:

https://ucan.xyz/

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Alan Karp

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[Alan Karp]

I don't know, so I asked.  I'll let you know if I hear back.

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Alan Karp

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[Alan Karp]

Answers to your questions:

What nice questions!

What's the origin story behind UCAN?

The short version is that many years ago I ran a startup called Fission that was doing early local-first software on top of IPFS, and that ecosystem didn’t have an existing good auth solution. We prototyped a couple things that we quickly discovered looked pretty close to SPKI/SDSI (once we discovered the keywords to search for), and quickly fell down the capabilities rabbit hole, read much of Mark’s work, and over the years connected with many other projects in the space. Many of us at Fission had Elixir and Erlang backgrounds, so in many ways capabilities felt very natural. We also took early inspiration from Macaroons and Capt'n Proto, though the system has changed a lot since then in response to how our adopters (mainly in the IPFS world) were using the system in practice.

We were using it as part of our own stack at Fission, until other teams in the IPFS ecosystem started picking it up, using it themselves and using it for interop. In particular, Brendan O’Brien (at a different company then, but now the CEO at number zero who make the excellent P2P networking project Iroh) did a lot of early work building the first golang package and championing certificate capabilities as a good fit for the IPFS ecosystem. Irakli Gozalishvili (now a UCAN coauthor) and his team at what was then web3storage also made wide use of UCAN which spread it in that ecosystem.

is there a link with zcaps-ld?

There wasn’t at first — the projects started around the same time, and developed separately. Since they’re similar, several people introduced me to Christine Lemmer-Webber (one of the zcap authors) who’s now one of my closest friends. We became aware of zcap-ld after UCAN was already well underway. Of course after that point we’ve talked extensively with Christine (and others) about the UCAN design, so there’s certainly been cross pollination along the way.

I hope that’s helpful and/or interesting!

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Alan Karp

On Wed, Dec 3, 2025 at 4:22 AM Tom Van Cutsem <tomv...@gmail.com> wrote:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/friam/CAKDfNj9azvPBAnf1yJmiDkH%3D5ned%3DnBZUVnRo3vGqYfMnT-1dw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Tom Van Cutsem]

Thanks Alan for relaying my question and their answer.

Can you reveal the identity of who wrote the response?

It's great to hear certificate capabilities are making inroads in the IPFS ecosystem. I also see a lot of similarities with MetaMask's Delegation Framework for managing delegatable access to smart contracts (if anyone here is familiar with that and cares to comment on the origins of that framework, I'd love to hear it).

In case you're wondering why I'm interested at all in UCAN, zcaps-ld and the above: I'm currently involved in a research project where we want to explore the use of certificate capabilities to manage delegatable access to smart contracts on DFINITY's Internet Computer (IC). Some folks here may know about Motoko, an actor language designed specifically for writing apps on the IC.

Thanks again,

Tom

Op ma 8 dec 2025 om 02:35 schreef Alan Karp <alan...@gmail.com>:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/friam/CANpA1Z14s1Pre6ssZgDP7q3k9Or%3DxbF1UounL-Y36RB3ESZwvA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Alan Karp]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2025 at 1:38 AM Tom Van Cutsem <tomv...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Alan for relaying my question and their answer.

Can you reveal the identity of who wrote the response?

Brooklyn Zelenka provided the reply.

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Alan Karp

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