Yesterday, the founder and President of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, announced the news of a new platform based on Bitcoin, called Orange.
MicroStrategy has been dedicating itself not only to investments in BTC for some time now, but also to the development of software based on the Bitcoin protocol.
Summary
Bitcoin news: the MicroStrategy Orange protocol
MicroStrategy Orange is a new protocol developed by MicroStrategy and based on the Bitcoin protocol.
Indeed, Bitcoin before being a financial asset (BTC) is a decentralized and open source P2P computer protocol, which can therefore be used by anyone as a basis for developing protocols based on it.
Furthermore, the name itself, Orange, is a clear reference to the color orange, which is commonly associated with Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy Orange is a decentralized identity (ID) platform built on the Bitcoin network. Its presentation yesterday took place during the MicroStrategy World event: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024, so it is mainly aimed at large companies.
The company’s executive vice president, Cezary Raczko, presented Orange as a business platform developed by MicroStrategy for creating applications based on decentralized identities on the Bitcoin blockchain.
This is an IT platform composed of three fundamental parts, at the center of which there is a cloud-hosted service that allows issuing identifiers to its users and organization.
Thanks to this innovation, pre-packaged applications that work on the same MicroStrategy Orange platform and address specific challenges related to digital identity can be distributed.
The idea seems to be to be able to incorporate the ability to create a digital identity within Bitcoin wallets, to identify people in a certain and unique way. It could be used, for example, to ensure that the sender of a text message or an email is actually who they claim to be.
MicroStrategy wants to become the world’s first Bitcoin development company.
Why Bitcoin?
The reason why the Bitcoin protocol was chosen as the basis on which to develop this platform is the robust security features and immutability of its blockchain.
MicroStrategy started investing in BTC in 2020, and now it owns more than 214,000 BTC.
Facing a total investment of over 7.5 billion dollars, now there is a capital in Bitcoin worth over 12 billion dollars, with an unrealized gain of over 60%.
Since the company, which is listed on the stock exchange with the ticker MSTR, has a market capitalization of just under 17.5 billion dollars, the bulk of its value comes from the BTC it owns.
It is therefore not a coincidence that in recent years she has also started working on the Bitcoin protocol.
After all, even though it was founded in 1989, twenty years before the launch of the Bitcoin blockchain, it is an innovative company that operates in the field of business intelligence, but also in mobile software and cloud-based services.
So if on one hand it has chosen to invest in BTC at a financial level, now it is also working to invest in Bitcoin at an economic and productive level, with the development of new software based on the decentralized Bitcoin protocol.
However, it is worth noting that yesterday the price of its shares on the stock market did not move significantly after Orange’s announcement.
The usefulness of Orange
Yesterday Raczko stated that integrating digital identity based on Bitcoin with a broader ecosystem of verifiable credentials opens up a large number of very interesting use cases.
He mentioned, for example, the verification of academic qualifications, or the certification of participation in courses, and even medical records.
The fact is that the Bitcoin blockchain is anonymous, or at least pseudo-anonymous, even though it is public, but the Bitcoin protocol is based on public digital signatures verifiable by anyone.
The difference for this type of use is precisely the fact that the correctness of the signatures can be publicly verified with absolute certainty on the Bitcoin blockchain, despite it being anonymous.
So associating a digital identity to those signatures makes it possible to use a public and verifiable system with certainty by everyone to associate a specific identity to a specific transaction, or to a document, so that anyone can personally verify without any doubt.
Furthermore, the identity will not be published on the blockchain, which will remain anonymous, but thanks to platforms like Orange it can be verified by those who use it.
Many companies could benefit from a system that allows to have absolute certainty not only of digital signatures, but also of the identity to which they are associated, without having to rely on third-party custodians who could always, at least in theory, be unreliable.
