Social Identity
Whereas most existing identity concepts are either centralized (with a small number of large, institutional credential providers), or individualistic (with self-authentication), Social Identity solutions are aimed at expanding the scope of possible credential verifiers to include a wider variety of authenticators. To that end it can use non-transferable markers of affiliations, memberships, or credentials, such as Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) — which are a bit like NFTs, except that they are not bought, sold, or traded; or Verifiable Credentials (VCs), a tamper-evident credential using cryptography to authenticate its authorship. In doing so, Social Identity better embodies human identities’ social, and multi-dimensional characteristics.
Social Identity solutions are new and the possibilities are still emerging. But they are likely to become an important tool for establishing digital identity and defining community, unlocking important new governance structures. To name a few:
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establishing the reliability of information sources in an era of deep fakes
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permissioning access to communities’ shared assets, including data
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making DAOs less plutocratic by anchoring governance power in community participation
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improving plural funding by serving as a privacy-preserving, hard-to-fake evidence of group membership
These are still early days for XIDs, and we are excited to help steer them in a productive direction.
Further Reading
Compressed to 0: The Silent Strings of Proof of Personhood - Puja Ohlhaver, Mikhail Nikulin, Paula Berman
Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul - E. Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, Vitalik Buterin
How Soulbound Tokens Can Make Gitcoin Grants More Pluralistic - Leon Erichsen
Intersectional Social Data - Lucas Geier, Kaliya Young, E. Glen Weyl
Motivating the Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part One - E. Glen Weyl, Lucas Geiger, Kaliya Young
Motivating The Case for Decentralized Social Identity. Part Two - E. Glen Weyl, Lucas Geiger, Kaliya Young
Motivating the Case for Decentralized Social Identity: Part Three - E. Glen Weyl, Lucas Geiger, Kaliya Young
Plural Funding - E. Glen Weyl, Leon Erichsen
Soulbound - Vitalik Buterin
Verifying Identity as a Social Intersection - Nicole Immorlica, Matthew O. Jackson, E. Glen Weyl
Who Watches the Watchmen? A Review of Subjective Approaches for Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols - Divya Siddarth, Sergey Ivliev, Santiago Siri, Paula Berman
Tools
BrightID - BrightID is a social identity network that allows people to prove to applications that they aren’t using multiple accounts. It solves the unique identity problem through the creation and analysis of a social graph.
Equality Protocol / Democracy Earth - Equality Protocol is a probabilistic score for human identity on Ethereum. The score results from a subjective (deliberative process) and an objective (Gini coefficients) input. Certain scores give you the right to participate in e.g. universal basic incomes or elections.
Goldfinch - Goldfinch is a decentralized credit protocol with a mission to expand access to capital and foster financial inclusion. The protocol makes crypto loans without crypto collateral.
Idena - Idena is a proof-of-person blockchain that proves the humanness and uniqueness of its participants by running AI-hard Turing tests around the globe at the same time. Every node in the network is linked to one cryptoidentity, one single person, and has equal voting power.
Optimism - The Optimism Collective is a new model for properly rewarding those who create or sustain public goods.
Sismo - Sismo issues ZK badges for reputation aggregation and privacy preserving access control.
Relation - With the awakening of data sovereignty, Relation is reconfiguring the social relations of individuals in a decentralized way. We make it possible for every Soul to mint readable, understandable, programmable SBTs to represent proofs of their friendships, affiliations, membership certificate qualifications, commitments, etc., on the chain.