Decentralized Persistent Identifer Design: a basic model for immutable handlers

Abstract

Persistent Identifier (PID) Systems have evolved in the last decade to mitigate the problem of link rot and provide unique and resolvable identifiers for digital objects. However, they still depend on services that may become unavailable or cease to behave as expected. Decentralized technologies may serve as the infrastructure of a trustless PID system. Here we discuss their design and provide an example test deployment using a combination of IPFS and smart contract transactions over a public blockchain.