Ecosystem Update — April 2026

Welcome to the May 2026 edition of Ecosystem Update. This month marks a turning point for the public interest internet: decentralized identity standards have reached broad adoption across major platforms, and authenticated transfer protocols are now live in production environments. Here's what our research teams have been tracking.

Decentralized Identity Hits Critical Mass

Our latest network topology analysis shows that decentralized identity (DID) resolution has crossed the 50% adoption threshold among the top 200 internet services. This isn't just a technical milestone — it represents a fundamental shift in how people interact with digital identity online.

Key findings from our research:

DID resolution latency has dropped to under 200ms for 90th percentile requests, making it competitive with traditional OAuth flows.

Cross-platform identity portability is now functional between 14 major services, up from 3 at the start of the year.

Consumer brand perception research shows a 23% increase in user trust when services display verified DID credentials.

Authenticated Transfer Enters Production

The authenticated transfer protocol (ATP) has officially moved from pilot to production. Three major financial institutions and two cooperative networks are now processing live transactions using ATP, with combined daily volumes exceeding $2.4 million.

Our professional association research team has been documenting the transition. The biggest surprise? The technology wasn't the hard part — it was the governance frameworks. Cooperatives that invested early in clear decision-making protocols for authenticated transfers saw 3x faster adoption than those that treated it as purely a technical upgrade.

Shared Touchpoints: New Research

Our user experience of shared touchpoints study has completed its first phase. Shared touchpoints — the places where different cooperative networks intersect and users must navigate between them — have been an under-researched area. Our preliminary findings suggest that the quality of these intersection points is the single strongest predictor of whether users stay engaged with cooperative tools or abandon them.

We'll be publishing the full report in June. In the meantime, here are the top-line recommendations for teams building cooperative infrastructure:

Invest in transition moments between networks — these are where users feel most lost.

Provide contextual identity information at every shared touchpoint, not just at login.

Design for legibility over completeness — users need to understand what's happening, not see every data point.

Ecosystem Brand Strategy Update

Our ecosystem brand strategy research has identified a growing gap between how cooperative networks describe themselves and how everyday people understand them. The technical vocabulary of the ecosystem — "decentralized," "authenticated," "cooperative" — carries different connotations for developers than for the people these systems are meant to serve.

We're working with three cooperative networks on a shared language guide — a practical reference for communicating about cooperative technology in ways that are accurate without being alienating. Early testing shows a 40% improvement in comprehension scores when materials use the guide's recommendations.

Looking Ahead: June and Beyond

Next month we'll publish the full shared touchpoints report, launch the second phase of our consumer brand perception study, and host our first public "Cooperative Action Office Hours" — a monthly open session where anyone building on cooperative infrastructure can get research-informed guidance. Details and registration coming in the next update.

As always, if you're working on something in this space, we'd love to hear from you. Reply to this email or reach out through the Raft Foundation.

— The Ecosystem Action Research team