On-chain credentials
Tired of verifying your email and other social media on every website and also share your personal details all the time? On-chain credentials can solve this problem.
Blockchains have given a lot of interesting applications such as decentralized finance, decentralized identity, self-custody wallets, etc.
One of the interesting things about decentralized identity is the on-chain verification of credentials. For example, right now the way email verification works is that you have to verify your email every time you sign in to a new application. It’s very similar to other social media like Twitter, Instagram, etc. You can also bring it to the physical world, for example - you need to show your ID at every bar to show that you are eligible for drinking and that exposes your birthday.
Now let’s think of this scenario: What if you could just sign in with your wallet and verify your association with Twitter, Instagram, email, and company once then you just need to sign in with your wallet on any application to verify all of the above. That way you could log in to any software application and verify your identity. What if you can use your phone to prove that you are over 21 years old without exposing your details like your birthday?
What are the benefits of this approach?
You don’t have to share your login data every time with any application.
Less UX overhead
It can act as your on-chain reputation
Think credit score, number of followers
Credentials verification
AWS Certified
CrytoZombies certified
You don’t have to share personal details that you don’t want to.
Zero Knowledge Proof can help here:
Do you belong to an organization X? (Yes/No)
Is your credit score below 780? (Yes/No)
Is your age below 21 (Yes/No)
What are some of the problems?
Re-verification - What if you do not associate with a company anymore? How would the invalidation process happen?
Is there a way to steal your identity if I steal your phone?
Today at ETH Denver, I saw a demo of Outdid.io which showed me that they can tap your passport (which already has an NFC chip with your details) and take a photo of your identity page and then generate a ZK proof to prove something like your age is greater than a given number.
I am quite excited about where this technology could go and how can it help promote data privacy.
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