I’ve been thinking about the future of online identity for a little while now. ~1.5 years ago, I co-founded Personae Inc. to investigate what felt like a looming sea change.
This is how we phrased it back then.
Today, I’d say that all of those predictions have only become more obvious:
as lower-cost gas regimes (L2s, L3s) are becoming the norm, more and more internet activity is stored on blockchains (think abt $DEGEN tipping)
we’ve made ridiculous strides in mobile zk-proving
more and more humans I interact with are multi-chain and multi-address
^ The bets we were making in late 2022 were pretty non-consensus. Today they’re considerably more obvious, but still non-consensus enough to be interesting.
Our thinking has culminated in creddd.
In light of our recent launch of creddd score, this is a short note on what creddd is and what creddd could be.
Today, creddd is a mechanism for attaching arbitrary blockchain reputation to your farcaster profile (specifically, to your fid). We index a limited, but rapidly growing set of reputation.
We’re Eth (and Eth L2s) focused right now, but have a path to be arbitrarily multi-chain in the future.
We use zkps to be multi-address. You don’t need to reveal your addresses to anyone to link your reputation.
As our reputations become more fragmented across more chains and we interact in more social venues, the number of degrees of freedom we have for representing ourselves in those different social venues relative to our reputation increases.
That’s a mouthful, but another way to think about this is that you’ll have more ways to remix yourself and create social handles are blockchain reputation becomes more ubiqitous and fragmented.
Our ambition is for creddd to be the ultimate protocol for remixing yourself.
As the tools for remixing one’s identity improve, the rate of new identity creation will also improve.
It’s already the case that most identity in the cryptoeconomy is pseudonymous.
At Personae we ask: why not all of it?