From ZK-first to AT Protocol: The Origin of DDS

The Decentralized Deliberation Standard (DDS) didn’t start here. It grew out of work on Agora Citizen Network, where early exploration focused on building secure, censorship-resistant public deliberation.

The effort started with zero-knowledge proofs. Racine was built as a meta-protocol for verifiable provenance designed to be transport-agnostic. Technically sound, but users wanted to sign up with their email — not scan passports or manage cryptographic keys.

AT Protocol solved the infrastructure problems that kept surfacing: portable identity via did:plc, composable architecture, schema enforcement via Lexicons, a complete data stream via the Firehose, and an existing social graph.

DDS is now its own project, maintained by the DDS Working Group. The protocol is vendor-neutral, designed so that any team can build deliberation tools that interoperate permissionlessly via shared lexicons on AT Protocol. Contributions are open to anyone.

Read the full origin story on WhiteWind: From ZK-first to AT Protocol

Read the DDS specification for the full protocol design.