Web3 expands, it’s inevitable: new possibilities attract new minds. More and more of them; ones who build, who purchase, who create, who write or design. And as expanding is inevitable, legalization of our actions is too.
The problem of representing a person on the blockchain had been around for a while. To make a crypto adoption happen, there needs to be instruments that allow us to know that exact person had made an exact transaction. This legalization is an essential step for further market growth.
To differentiate “legal” from “illegal” essentially we should find out how to make “identities” really happen. It’s a key part of judicial integration, as the validness concept is built on verification.
We could think that soulbound tokens eliminate this problem and the whole discourse because they are locked to a single wallet, so transfer isn’t possible. Identity in a pocket, eternal belonging. Only until the loss or theft of the private key. There is simply no developed technology for further social recovery.
Contract wallets in general can’t be a decision because access to a one is also built on keys. The only difference is the amount of them.
It turns out that your identity ultimately is knitted to the security phrase, and losing it means that you stop existing in the on-chain ecosystem. It’s unsustainable, not to mention custodial wallets like Coinbase where an account can be blocked easily and without notification.
So, there is still a next big thing to lead crypto to governance visibility through identity consolidation. SBT could be one of the solutions, but Vitalik himself hasn't found the solution of private-key-loss problem. Thinking that it will appear in the foreseeable future is at least naive. The market needs it right now, and here is one of the possible ways out.
Looking at where we are today, theoretical solution lies between two modules: custodial and noncustodial. So, we choose between them in hope of blowing over. I see the decision in the middle.
There is an option to link identity not to an object (in the described case it’s a wallet), but to a particular transaction. In this instance, identity happens only in case of action.
I’ve come up with a concept that approaches this problem from a quite different angle. The results of this approach seemed to solve these core issues of SBTs mentioned above.
So, basically it breaks down into two main points
To use a mix of both custodial and non-custodial wallets combined within a multi-signature smart-contract wallet. Important to notice that, it should be possible to configure this wallet in the way so that custodial signers would no control over it.
To associate an identity with a single transaction. So that link between a real person and a blockchain record is defined exactly for the moment authorized transaction takes place. Unlike linking to a static object defined within a smart-contract state that, like ERC721 mapping record.
From a user perspective it may look like
To open a wallet app and sign transaction using self-custody account. At this point, the transaction is ready to be executed.
Additionally log-in to on of the identity provider’s web UI and perform KYC check or type in an authenticator code to get one more signature.
interface IIdentityProvider is IERC721 {
struct Identifier {
address issuer;
uint256 serial;
}
function verify(
Oh, wait
That’s not ready yet..
That’s it for now,comments and feedback are strongly appreciated → telegram → farcaster