Can the invariant speed of light be used as the conceptual reference for measuring motion?

I’ve been thinking about a different way to conceptualize velocity in special relativity, and I’m trying to figure out whether this is already a known way of looking at it or whether there is anything useful in the framing.

I don’t have formal physics training, so I may simply be rediscovering something that already has a name.

My starting point is that ordinary velocity depends on the reference frame, but the vacuum speed of light, (c), is invariant. Every inertial observer can disagree about the velocity of a star, planet, spacecraft, etc., while still measuring light locally at the same speed (c).

That made me wonder why we conceptually start with “rest,” or (v=0), as the anchor for motion.

Instead, could we treat the invariant lightlike structure defined by (c) as the anchor and characterize matter by its relationship to that structure?

The picture I have in mind is:

(c) → object → (c)

Rather than measuring an object against another material object that we declare to be at rest, use light on both sides of the measurement. For example, light is emitted, interacts with or is reflected by an object, and light is measured again. With many such measurements from different directions, could the object's motion be described entirely in terms of its relationship to lightlike paths?

I understand that radar ranging, relativistic Doppler measurements, light cones, null coordinates, Bondi (k)-calculus, and four-velocity may already contain much or all of this idea.

What I’m especially interested in is the conceptual reversal.

Instead of thinking:

0 → (v) → (c)

think of (c) as the invariant boundary and ask how the worldline of matter differs from, or sits inside, the lightlike structure defined by (c).

When I tried working through the idea, it seemed that light-based measurements can recover relative velocity and invariant proper-time/spacetime intervals, but they still do not select a unique absolute velocity because Lorentz transformations preserve the entire light cone.

So my questions are:

Is this simply a different intuitive way of arriving at standard special relativity?

Is there an established formalism that most closely matches this way of thinking?

And is there anything potentially useful in treating (c), rather than (v=0), as the conceptual starting point for describing motion?

I’m not claiming this is a new theory. I’m mainly interested in whether this perspective has already been explored and, if not, whether someone with stronger mathematical physics knowledge sees a direction worth developing.