When you are young, you have the space to play dress-up with identity. You instantiate fantastical realities in your mind, crafting new narratives of the self that metamorphosize daily. You slip on the shoes of your favorite fictional protagonists, peek mischievously through the eyes of their villains, or mime the motions of their world-builder.

The dynamism of youth empowers a low-commitment exploration of independent identity and the freedom to dance along the furthest edges of possibility. But as you navigate through a growing set of self-defining decisions, you take on the task of defining your role in a group. As an agent in a system, your identity path carries relational weight. Identity plotted against time establishes a set of historical data points that allow us to allocate trust and responsibility to individuals with the highest probability of acting the way we expect. The allure of building one’s reputation over time is the promise of increased behavioral autonomy, but it comes at the cost of an increasingly entrenched behavioral path. 

Time further permits a deepening of social identity that allows us to construct a more distinct image of self in both the eyes of others and our own. There is some drive, I believe equal parts consequent of existential and social demand, to carve out one’s unique place in reality. The more definite one’s state of being, the easier it becomes to establish an in-group and derive a sense of individual worth. 

With age, we seem to undergo a consequent decrease in narrative flexibility, picking from an increasingly smaller subset of identity-shaping traits to claim as our own. Faced with novelty, we hear a growing number of “that’s just not my thing” and “maybe in another life” responses. The sunk cost of accrued social reputation bears much heavier on assessments of possibility. Left unchecked, this collapse of possible narratives will inevitably kill one’s inner child. 

Burdened by a time-accrued set of biases and bounds with overstated social importance, it becomes difficult to entertain improbable manifestations of reality. While the maintenance of reputation is critical to vocational and relational success, an overemphasis on its growth will inevitably atrophy an individual’s imaginative agency. The preservation of the inner child depends on the ability to actively engage states of mind that are unfettered by the self-inflicted bounds of a fixed identity. 

There is a reason so much of the media we consume in childhood is wildly fantastical but much less so in adulthood: engaging deeply with a fantasy world demands the suspension of preconceptions. That is far easier to do when one’s set of preconceptions is quite small.

As an adult with a complex set of learned fears and beliefs, the ability to act in a truly open manner can ironically demand a lot of intentional practice. In the small sample of life progressions I’ve observed, there is no magic trick beyond frequent, intentional exposure to novelty. Curiosity requires vulnerability: it is no more than permitting yourself to engage with the knowledge gradients that surround you. In this way, childlike curiosity is an incredibly antifragile state of mind. 

It can be tempting to believe that those with a strong inner child must have never faced the real world. But in practice, they are often the most battle-tested. Equipped with a strong internal locus of control, they are able to consciously quiet the narrative that defers to the weight of social perception. Indeed, acts of the inner child are among the most powerful assertions of agency.   

The use of your inner child is a conscious reaffirmation that the world is far more malleable than you think. My observed, practiced, and firmly held conclusion is to treat everything as an experiment. Create and learn in ways that make you uncomfortable. Push the bounds of expectation by engaging deeply with even the mundane. Treat life as an opportunity to explore what could be rather than trying to navigate around what can’t. 

Having said that, an intriguing question popped into mind that I couldn’t seem to shake. I posed it to my friends, asking “What is the maximum number of time zones a determined caveman could realistically traverse in his lifetime, assuming his only methods of transit are walking or swimming?”

Brainstorming a Path

I immediately recalled the alleged longest walkable distance which journeys from the furthest tip of Russia to the southernmost tip of South Africa. This is a good starting point for distance optimization, but unfortunately this is not an ideal route as a large portion is predominantly vertical and not too many time zones are represented in the African leg of the traversal.

I thought it wise to hang on to the Russian leg, though. A caveman looking to optimize time zone exposure would be well served to traverse the widest (see: most longitudinally diverse) landscape possible. Russia alone is home to 11 different time zones. Because Russia is immediately connected to Western Europe, I figure the caveman’s travels could feasibly extend as far as Portugal, although there are much fewer represented time zones between Russia and Portugal (Western Europe is mostly standardized to UTC +1). That said, more time zones are represented between those two than between Russia and South Africa, so I opted for this as his potential next move.

My next lightbulb came from a familiarity I had with the Diomede islands, a set of islands about equidistant from the easternmost point of mainland Russia and the westernmost point of mainland US (Alaska). The Diomede islands are under 3 miles apart, but are each controlled by a different nation (Russia and the US). One of the most interesting things about them is that the two islands fall directly across the international date line, and are 21 hours apart in time.

Transit across these islands interested me as a potential path extension, as I knew the land masses would be close enough that our caveman could feasibly swim (ignoring the inhospitable temperatures of the bearing strait!). The distance from Alaska to Little Diomede I knew hovered around 16 miles, from Little Diomede to Big Diomede around 3 miles, and from Big Diomede to Russia around 16 miles as well. The benefit of this route was not only one additional timezone, but the unlock of a major path extension with 7 new potential time zones via a transversal of North America.

Assuming our path was now extended to Alaska, I figured that a trek could be made across mainland Canada from the Yukon down to British Columbia and then all the way out to Labrador. By this point, I had pulled up a time zone map to make sure I accounted for all the quirky time zone borders and pockets along the way.

Scouring the map, I noticed two additional time zones in our North America region that seemed too close not to try and cover. These time zones are UTC +3 and UTC +3 1/2, represented by the French island of St. Pierre and the Island of Newfoundland, respectively.

Checking the distance, I came to determine that the closest swimmable distance between St. Pierre and the Newfoundland was around 12 miles. Then, between Newfoundland and Labrador (mainland Canada), I arrived at a swimmable distance of approximately 10 miles across the strait of Belle Isle. Interestingly enough, this route our caveman will be swimming has actually been proposed as a tunnel route to manage food access issues in Newfoundland.

So, I’ve now arrived at a point where our caveman is covering around 20 time zones between St. Pierre and Portugal. But I think we can do better.

Inspection of the time zone map informs me that there is a uniquely chaotic set of fractional time zones ripe for traversal in Southeast Asia. My initial thought is to have our caveman complete his trek to Portugal, then turn around and wander through the middle east and across the key time zone landmarks of Southeast Asia. I constructed the following path:

Upon reflection and some constructive feedback from an admirably patient and more well-rested friend, I realized my 2am attempt at a solution map was effective but not maximally efficient. For the sake of our poor caveman’s legs, I figured it wise to make the path as efficient as possible.

To accomplish this, I first acknowledged that a doubling back across Europe was both redundant and not actually necessary. With some clever longitudinal movements between Russia and China and then across the Middle Eastern countries, I could hit every time zone I hit with the Russia and Southeast Asia legs in one shot.

The Finalized Path and Our Caveman’s Journey

At last, I arrived at what is presently my best model for our time-traveling caveman’s journey:

Our caveman begins his journey on the Island of St. Pierre (UTC -3), swimming to Newfoundland (UTC -3.5) and then to Labrador (UTC -4), traversing Canada and arriving at the westernmost tip of Alaska (UTC -5, -6, -7, -8, and -9). From this tip, he makes a frigid hop-skip-and-a-jump to the easternmost tip of Russia (UTC +12). Once in Russia, he moves horizontally for a bit to make sure he hits UTC +11, +10, and +9 before plunging south towards Beijing, China (UTC +8). He will then journey to the south of China and cross into Vietnam and Laos (UTC +7). From Laos he will head through Myanmar (UTC +6.5) to India (UTC +5.5) to Nepal (UTC +5.75), back through India and then to Pakistan (UTC +5). He will make a quick jump up through Tajikistan to reach the south of Kyrgyzstan (UTC +6). Next, he’ll head back through Tajikistan into Afghanistan (UTC +4.5) and then to Iran (UTC +3.5). From here, things get easier. He will cross into Turkey (UTC +3) into Bulgaria (UTC +2), making his way into the Balkans. From the Balkans to western Spain, our caveman will remain in UTC +1. Upon crossing into Portugal, he will finally reach UTC 0 and his journey will be complete.

The entirety of this journey is approximately 17,893 miles, no more than 60 miles of which are by water. Our caveman will get to experience 26 different time zones along the way across 25 different countries. Assuming an average nonstop walking speed of 2.5mph and no environmental factors or physical limitations - our caveman is pretty resilient ;) - he can accomplish this journey in approximately 9.8 months.

Below I’ve drawn some rough time zone designations along the caveman’s path of travel so you can follow along visually:

Disclaimer

This was the best path that my smooth late night brain could come up with, and there are many assumptions being made in order for this to be possible. It was mostly just a fun thought experiment, but I thought i’d share it for my fellow map nerds!

Have corrections, optimizations, or alternative paths to suggest? Please tweet at me or DM me @dommydoteth :)

https://twitter.com/dommydoteth/status/1522567865811017730?s=20&t=vAa09cZmknyXRR_mpRJUOQ

I will now do my best to return the favor - let’s dive into web3 identity.

What is Identity?

I will define identity broadly as the set of traits or properties that uniquely define an autonomous agent. Our construction of our more granular definitions will build upon this, and the distinctions will depend heavily on what information we are looking to draw from the system.

Modern psychoanalytic theory delineates between contextual identities by their scope and behavioral qualities. These delineations typically include personal identity, social or relational identity, and community identity. Each type of identity exhibits distinct characteristics and behavioral patterns.

Identity affects how conscious agents view themselves, especially relative to the group. An individual’s view of themself within a community is affected by their perceived in-group/out-group position, and material symbols such as shared property can establish a clear separation line between members and outsiders, enhancing perceptions of group cohesion.

Acknowledging different levels of identity and the individual’s role in each will put the self-assembling behaviors of decentralized autonomous organizations and the action profiles of identity-bearing agents into better context.

Identity is Not a Conversation Unique to Web3

Many of the active topics of conversation around identity in web3 are topics that were discussed in web2 and even web1. The key difference in web3 is a novel solution set centered around identity ownership and interoperability.

In web2, interoperability was primarily enabled through federated identity management, in which information stored across identity management systems could be linked, and single sign-on systems (SSO). The issue here is that identity data is owned and access controlled by organizations, corporations, and services rather than the individual to whom it belongs.

Web3 identity solutions center around user-centric ownership models. They also prioritize portability, with solutions promising a foundational identity layer that enables inherent information transferability, rather than retroactively fitted portability solutions as in web2.

https://twitter.com/lensprotocol/status/1519647239114739715?s=21

With the introduction of multi-party and algorithmic identity-bearing agents, this concept of user-centric ownership has been further forced to expand under some models. As we explore different views of web3 identity, it will be important to keep this in mind.

Identity Reference Frames

When it comes to recognizing, classifying, and verifying identity on-chain, I see it being approached from two angles:

1. The puppet view: identity-bearing agents are represented by explicit on-chain behavior sets.

2. The puppeteer view: identity-bearing agents are represented by the inferred association of certain on-chain behaviors to off-chain entities.

To make this distinction a bit more visceral, imagine for example that a credit-based lending protocol wants to analyze a user’s behavior prior to distributing a loan. The primary incentive on the protocol’s end is to prove something about the on-chain behavioral history of that agent, especially within the credit establisher’s own ecosystem. The protocol wants to protect its assets and know with some level of certainty that their funds will be returned, so the behavioral and transactional history of the agent may hold more weight than direct KYC.

In contrast, imagine that a protocol managing on-chain health records access receives a request for retrieval of a specific user’s data. In this case, the protocol designers are highly incentivized to establish a system that verifies the legal identity of the wallet owner and to be confident that the actor is who they say they are.

In these instances, we see the lending protocol approaching identity through the puppet view, weighing historical action patterns over explicit identity verification, and the medical records protocol approaching identity through the puppeteer view, weighing IRL identity verification over transactional history. Of course, each will do some due diligence in the other’s scope to protect against fraudulent outlier cases, and the two views are rarely mutually exclusive. Rather, each view is prioritized differently depending on the protocol’s primary perceived risk factors.

Now, when it comes to defining and verifying identity, a few distinct approaches pop up.

Transactional Identity

Elementary Unit: Wallet Address

Relational Pattern: Transaction History

Primary Incentive(s): Risk Mitigation, Network Benefits, Transaction History

Protocols and Services

• Bird - Address-level predictive off-chain analytics powered by machine learning

• Wing - Credit-based cross-chain decentralized lending platform

• Etherscan - Ethereum blockchain explorer

• The Graph - Indexing protocol for decentralized network queries

• iden3 - Self-sovereign identity protocol expanding beyond humanhood, defining identities by contract - empowering algorithmic, group, and individual actors

• RociFi - Multi-chain credit scoring system for under/uncollateralized lending

• Arcx - On-chain history based credit passport (no KYC)

• DeCentr - a decentralized browser with a personal data value scoring system

Personal Identity

Elementary Unit: Personhood

Relational Pattern: Biometric/Legal Verification

Primary Incentive(s): Sybil Resistance, Legal Compliance, Sensitive Data Exchange

Protocols and Services

• Worldcoin - Biometric proof-of-personhood protocol - hardware + software solution

• BrightID - Proof of identity based on social relationships and community membership

• Ontology - L2 focused on decentralized identity and data solutions

• Proof of Humanity - Social proof-of-humanity protocol with user-driven vouching and verification

• Idena - CAPTCHA-based verification, proof-of-personhood chain (1 node = 1 verified “cryptoidentity”)

• iden3 - Self-sovereign identity protocol supporting identity-issued claims of relations to other identities

• Everest - A catchall crypto economy platform with varied forms of ID including chainlink-powered biometric identity verification

https://twitter.com/DigitalBridgeIO/status/1426181842248605702?s=20&t=N7xOpSEdcIkrguHwV8OyZQ

Collateralized Identity

Elementary Unit: Assets

Relational Pattern: Ownership

Primary Incentive(s): Skin-in-the-Game, Community Membership

Protocols and Services

• Unlock Protocol - NFT memberships, token-gated channels, ticketing

• Lit Protocol - Ownership-based encryption and access control (gating layer)

• tokenproof - Configurable NFT token-gating solution

• GET Protocol - NFT ticketing protocol

• MintGate - NFT memberships, ticketing, rewards, unlockable utilities, custom domain gating

• CollabLand - Discord and Telegram token-gating

• Guild - Tokenized Discord member management

• Creator Cabin Passports - NFT membership creation and management tool

Social Identity

Elementary Unit: Persona

Relational Pattern: Social Behaviors

Primary Incentive(s): Community Engagement, Vibe Curation

Protocols and Services

• Gallery - Curated collection profiles

• Ethereum Name Service - Decentralized naming service

• Unstoppable Domains - NFT domain names

• Lens Protocol - Composable, user-curated social graphs

• Backdrop - Tokenized community membership explorer and profiles

• UniPass - Wallet or email-linked interoperable profile and reputation passport

Reputational Identity

Elementary Unit: Reputation

Relational Pattern: Accomplishment Track Record

Primary Incentive(s): Contributor Quality, Experiential History Verification

Protocols and Services

• Mazury - Badge and referral reputation platform

• Disco - reputation-based profiles

• MintKudos - Peer-verified non-transferrable reputation-based tokens

• POAP - Proof-of-attendance NFT badges

• Orange - DID associated portable reputation protocol with an ecosystem of model providers and data providers enabling custom reputation implementations

• SISMO - ZK badges for reputation aggregation and privacy-preserving access control

• Buildspace - NFT-rewarded lessons and projects in web3 development

• SpringRole - On-chain professional profile and skill verification

• Project Galaxy - A collaborative web3 credentialing structure

• Superlocal - A social network with crypto and NFT rewards when you go places

Data Identity

Elementary Unit: Decentralized ID

Relational Pattern: On-chain Key to Off-Chain Storage Mapping

Primary Incentive(s): Data Ownership, Data Access Management

Protocols and Services

• Ceramic - Composable data layer

• Lit Protocol - Decentralized token, NFT, and DID-based access control for private data and applications

• hopr - Privacy-focused data transport layer

• genomes DAO - Genome sequencing data access and ownership

• SpruceID - Cross-chain user data ownership protocol

• Flux - Trustless cross-chain data layer

• Fleming - Health data ownership

Credentialing Services

Along with defining identity, the web3 ecosystem is home to several services that build upon one or multiple of these identity definitions to facilitate access. The two service types i’d like to highlight under this umbrella are privacy and authentication services.

Privacy

One component heavily integral to the conversation of identity preservation and identification is privacy. Enabling and facilitating user, data, and transactional privacy is critical for users to maintain ownership and control over their selected forms of representative identity. Thus, part of facilitating full identity ownership in a decentralized space is the enabling of anonymity, pseudo-anonymity, and selective access. These are concepts we’ve already seen play out in the data identity layers discussed earlier.

A cryptographic technique offering promise in the privacy space is Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). ZKPs have an important place in scaling solutions and are more broadly being adopted as an infrastructural tool to preserve user privacy and enable services to operate without compromising sensitive information. A ZKP enables parties to prove a statement is true without disclosing any other data associated with it.

Several protocols, services, and currencies are developing privacy-first practices employing ZKPs and other tools that enable varied levels of transactional and personal anonymity. These include:

• Orchid - A decentralized VPN allowing users to purchase bandwidth from a global pool of service providers

• Tornado Cash - A decentralized private transactions protocol built on Ethereum

• Zcash - A privacy preserving cryptocurrency with transaction verification enabled with zk-SNARKs

• Semaphore - A zero-knowledge gadget for creating anonymous proof-of-membership on Ethereum

• Zeko - A zero-knowledge based NFT airdrop system enabling web2 contributors to redeem airdrops with their wallets without exposing a linkage between their web2 and web3 identities

• Secret Network - A chain built to enable customizable privacy with privacy by default and data protection from both users and network nodes

• Espresso Systems - An EVM-compatible chain with customizable data and transactional privacy configurations

• DECO - A ZK-powered privacy preserving oracle protocol enabling attestations of off-chain data verifiability without direct disclosure

Authentication

Another major service tied to identity is authentication. Depending on your selected definition of identity, a service provider’s methods of authentication may look different. Here are some examples of web3 authentication providers operating on a variety of identity standards:

• Krebit - Ceramic-based verifiable off-chain claim credentialing

• Sign-In with Ethereum - Sign into applications using a wallet address or ENS as verification

• Magic - Web2-native passwordless login-methods that generate web3 wallet credentials

• web3auth - Self-custodial auth interface for Web3 apps and wallets

Refugee Resettlement

I want to acknowledge the bias that westernized (particularly US-centric) technology can have, so I think it is important to include in my analysis some application spaces of identity tech that address basic human rights and needs. One of the most interesting lines of work recently brought to my attention is refugee identity management.

Some of us may have the privilege to never worry about having access to verifiable legal credentialing. However, standardized legal identification is not a universal practice, and it is also something that is frequently lost or never received by refugees. Being uprooted from your home country and transported into a new place with no verifiable reputational identity can make getting a job, finding housing, and functioning autonomously incredibly difficult. You may no longer have the ability to prove your degree status, your nationality, your birth date, etc.

Several blockchain-powered initiatives have begun popping up worldwide to support refugee resettlement by providing portable on-chain reputation systems and access to otherwise inaccessible financial services. Establishing provable identity metrics is a way to ensure global, uncompromised access to critical identity information. I have linked a few resources below for further reading.

Fraud Prevention

Constructing Sybil-Resistant Systems

A topic that often comes up in the discussion of identity in distributed systems is sybil-resistance. Put simply, a sybil attack is one in which a dishonest operator subverts a network’s reputation system by controlling several nodes under false identities. In vote or majority weighted systems, this can compromise the integrity of a vote and disrupt or falsify network consensus.

In the construction of a blockchain, establishing a consensus mechanism that defends against sybil attacks is critical. To accomplish this, networks rely on mechanisms of consensus that increase the friction to operating dishonest nodes and incentivize honest network participation. These consensus mechanisms tend to operate as “proof-of-X” systems, in which nodes need to prove something about themselves that, when proven, significantly decreases the likelihood of them being malicious. The most popular forms of consensus currently are proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. In proof-of-work, nodes are tasked with resource-intensive computational challenges. In proof-of-stake, nodes are required to maintain ownership of an asset in order to participate in the network. Other examples of blockchain consensus mechanisms include proof of history, proof-of-spacetime, and proof-of-activity.

Chain consensus is not the only place where sybil-resistance pops up in the decentralized ecosystem. As new and innovative identity layers emerge, it is becoming increasingly important to establish sybil-resistant practices which ensure that malicious actors do not take advantage of social networks or community governance systems. Worldcoin is a particularly interesting initiative operating in this space, aiming to develop a new, biometrically-linked proof-of-personhood primitive to power plug-and-play sybil-resistance at the application level.

https://twitter.com/worldcoin/status/1517575642140667904?s=20&t=9MjUy1IhAmMpHP_-LcoTfQ

Data Availability and Scaling Practices

The Data Availability Problem

For those of you unfamiliar with the data availability problem, it is the question of how “peers in a blockchain network [ensure] that all the data of a newly proposed block is actually available.” [The Data Availability Problem] While at first glance it may not seem like a problem of identity at all, the motivations behind it and the approaches to resolution reveal important questions around fraud prevention and trustworthy node identity. Critical to accurate network performance, as discussed above, is maintaining a majority of honestly acting nodes. Without full access to all block data, a block producer may be hiding malicious transaction data and/or compromising network security.

To ensure data availability, chains will construct artificial limits on block size to prevent resource-constraints that would price out many full node operators and thus risk network security and decentralization. These constraints, however, seriously hamper the ability for a network to scale effectively.

https://twitter.com/ChainLinkGod/status/1462544971802628105?s=20&t=IFr0vWgsAGAbuSi0AsENlg

Two of the most popular scaling solutions right now include sharding and rollups (which are not mutually exclusive).

Scaling Solutions

Sharding is the practice of splitting the chain into several “shard” chains which have their own block producers. Sharding lightens the load on individual block producers by splitting the processing power across shards. A full-node in a sharded chain will only run a full-node for some shards, and will run a light client for the remainder. This structure, however, may increase the risk of fraudulent or malicious node behavior, as shards have fewer block producers meaning an easier to gain majority. Fraud proofing and reliable data availability at the shard level thus remain important to this scaling technique.

Rollups are another scaling solution that employ either fraud or validity proofs (optimistic and zk rollups, respectively) to prove a block is valid. Rollups post blocks on Ethereum and thus circumvent management of data availability by using Ethereum as their data availability layer. Validity proofs are interesting because they don’t inherently require data availability, but the rollup itself still requires it in order to ensure users know the state of the chain and can interact with it.

Returning to the comment on the reliance on Ethereum as a rollup’s data availability layer, the Ethereum core protocol has a proposed sharding roadmap that would gradually expunge nodes of responsibility for historical block data storage (see: EIP-4444). Detaching data availability from the main chain poses interesting questions as to who owns transaction history data and how it is stored. Just as explored in many user data identity models, having reliable access to historical chain data is a critical component of ensuring an open and democratized system. For more reading on this matter, check out Vitalik’s notes here.

Scaling, Data Availability, and Identity

Scaling has been a problem at top of mind for many infrastructural developers, and conversations around protecting block verifiability to prevent malicious behavior continue to matter a lot. Actors on higher order systems and applications may be more commonly associated with “identity”, but at the end of the day the issues faced in scaling come back to the fundamental problem of protecting the network from vulnerability and deception. Fraud protection in decentralized networks is a pivotal component of identity establishment, whether at the individual network node or individual DAO contributor level.

Exploring Relational and Community Identity

Characterizing Contractual Identity

Contractual identity is something not often discussed but is an incredibly interesting and uniquely web3 facet of identity representation. As alluded to briefly before, identity-bearing agents are not, by necessity, humans or even groups of humans. As we explored in our discussion of transactional identities, in several cases all transaction-handling addresses are viewed and honored as distinct identities. The interesting thing here is that smart contracts themselves have addresses and the ability to respond to and initiate transactions. Through this lens, contracts can be seen as transactional agents with whom both individuals and other contracts may interact. Figuring out how to establish contractual identity and where it falls on the spectrum of verification, validation, and contributor status will only become increasingly important as contractual autonomy and complexity increase in size and scale. Contractual identity is also a topic of discussion that may eventually come up in conversations around sybil-resistance. Some questions that I have had in this regard:

• Where do we draw the line between human and algorithmic intermediaries? How important is doing so?

• Could viewing a contract as an independent, valid identity pose enhanced security risks to a system?

• Imagine, for instance, that a poorly-written contract is accepted as an identity in a voting system. What happens when a human actor takes advantage of the contract and exploits it, with intentions of subverting the vote?

• Is ensuring contractual integrity, whose behaviors are bound and predictable, easier than ensuring the integrity of a volatile human actor?

I think there is a compelling argument to be made for establishing a contractual reputation system, which powers a credit score of sorts for contracts that goes beyond just auditing and takes into account transactional volume, transactor turnover, contract lifespan, etc.

Governance and Tooling

DAO Governance

One cannot discuss identity within web3, especially layered identity, without also discussing the role of DAOs and novel social dynamics. DAOs are built around the premise of decentralized systems of collaboration, contribution, and decision management.

The use of treasury funds, the proposal of new projects and initiatives, and any other critical organizational decisions are typically made via governance proposals. With governance acting as the core organizational and executional layer of DAO management, it is critical that contributor votes are accurate and properly represented. Some teams currently working on sybil-resistant governance mechanisms include Snapshot x OrangeDAO’s combined effort to instantiate reputation and identity-based voting powers, and Finnovant x GovernorDAO’s biometric proof-of-existence approach to enforcing unique, verified account ownership.

DAO Tooling

DAO tooling is a hot topic right now, but perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind when discussing web3 identity. The reason I bring it up is that DAOs introduce novel identity structures that require custom management tailored to their relational needs.

You may be familiar with the increasingly popular subDAO, team, working group, guild, and autonomous entity structures employed by larger DAOs. These are methods of delegating tasks, projects, and governance to smaller groups within the larger ecosystem to enable faster iteration, more effective communication, and better informed decision making. Calling back to our initial conversation around composable identity units - individual identity, social identity, and community identity - within well-delegated DAOs we can start to see examples of these identity units and how their unique behavioral and incentive models play out in real time.

https://twitter.com/JonathanHillis/status/1521519002777964544?s=20&t=Z2wQsMsD3KID_-kynsl6dA

One interesting example of this is the governance model for Yearn Finance’s yTeams. The majority of decision making power is held by individual yTeams, which are defined by yearn to be “small, autonomous groups of yearn contributors empowered by YFI holders to act independently in the best interest of yearn within a constrained domain of action and with enumerated, discrete decision-making powers.” Decision making is done at the yTeam level within the team’s respective domain of action, to be executed or vetoed for further review by operators of the multisig.

What we see starting to emerge in the DAO ecosystem is a landscape of contributors that doesn’t just map one contributor to one physical individual. As DAOs scale, identities become tied to subgroup affiliation and corresponding execution power. A DAO subgroup (or even a DAO itself) may have independent, character-distinguishing identity traits, the ability to make and act on decisions as a unit, and the ability to communicate and engage with other DAOs. DAO-to-DAO collaboration and intra-DAO team collaboration are excellent examples of the web3 realization of relational identity as it applies to unified groups. Exploring the underlying mechanisms and behavioral traits of these interactions will be critical in the development of effective DAO communication systems.

https://twitter.com/optimismPBC/status/1519001576677036032?s=20&t=-j25hkod9p43bT_svqkh8Q

Author’s Note

I am continuously learning, and doing my best to aggregate the most accurate and insightful information in the process, but there may be errors or inaccuracies in my work. I want this to be as reliable of a resource as possible for those interested, so please DM me @dommydoteth on twitter with feedback, suggestions, or corrections!

Read More - Resources + Recommendations

So much of this content was made possible by protocol whitepapers, articles, tweets, and publicly available meta-analyses. If decentralized identity is a topic as interesting to you as it is to me, check out some of the resources I used below for further reading:

Dive Deeper

• The Psychological Basis of Identity

  • Social Identity, Group Behavior, and Teams

  • Group-Identity Completion and the Symbolic Value of Property

  • Who Is This "We"? Levels of Collective Identity and Self Representations

• Sybil Resistance

  • Who Watches the Watchmen? A Review of Subjective Approaches for Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols

  • Rechained: Sybil-Resistant Distributed Identities for the Internet of Things and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

  • Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms Beyond PoW and PoS

  • Privacy-Preserving Proof-of-Personhood Protocol

  • Worldcoin Community QA

  • Everest Will Integrate Chainlink Price Feeds and Launch a Chainlink Node for ID Services

• Zero-Knowledge Proofs

  • What is a Zero-Knowledge Proof?

  • zk-STARKs vs. zk-SNARKs

  • zk-STARKs vs. zk-SNARKs - pseudotheos

  • Hardware Acceleration of Zero-Knowledge Proofs

  • ZK-Rollups 101

  • ZK-Identity: Why and How

    • Part I & Part II

  • Introducing Polygon ID, Zero-Knowledge Identity for Web3

  • ZK-Essentials Thread

• DAO Governance

  • Building and Running a DAO: Why Governance Matters

  • Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul

  • The Optimism Collective

  • Moving Beyond Coin-Voting Governance

  • How to Think About Decentralized Governance

  • Web3 Governance Blueprint Research Report

• Data Rails

  • Ceramic Developer’s Guide

  • User-Centric Data on Web3

  • Web3 Enables a New Data Economy

• Data Availability and Scaling

  • The Data Availability Problem

  • What is Data Availability?

  • Ethereum Data Sharding Roadmap

  • Understanding Blockchain Fundamentals, Part 1: Byzantine Fault Tolerance

  • Sharding Explained

  • Denial-of-Service Vulnerability of Hash-based Transaction Sharding: Attacks and Countermeasures

• Credit-Based Lending

  • Wing Finance

    • Docs

    • Whitepaper

  • Arcx Sapphire

• Refugee Resettlement

  • Inside the Jordan Refugee Camp that Runs on Blockchain

  • Kotani Pay partners with RIO & Impact Market to enable UBI Payments to Refugees in Africa

  • How Finland is Using the Blockchain to Revolutionise Financial Services for Refugees

• Decentralized Identity

  • ENS as DIDs

  • Soulbound

  • What is Decentralized Identity and Why Should You Care?

  • Decentralized Identity: Passport to Web3

  • On-Chain Identity Landscape

  • Digital Identity on the Blockchain

• Anonymity

  • The Anonymity Trilemma

  • Creator Identity

  • Doxxed vs. Undoxxed: Anonymous Teams in Web3

  • Real Names Weren’t Built for the Internet

• Reputation

  • A Novel Framework For Reputation Based Systems

  • Decentralized Identity: Your Reputation Travels With You

  • The Off-Chain Internet: Decentralized Identity and Verifiable Reputation

• NFT Membership

  • Membership NFTs

  • Are NFTs the Future of Subscriptions?