We are excited to answer Blue Sky’s call for submissions to the Satellite Contest. We were challenged to demonstrate ownership of multiple public identifiers, and created a series of bi-directional, verifiable linking proofs. You can view a video walkthrough of our solution here.

We used a self-hosted instance of Serto Agent to generate a DID using the WEB:DID method. This DID represents the Serto team.

We signed several verifiable credentials with our DID keys, each written about the location where the messages should appear. We created the W3C standards-compliant verifiable credential schemas using Serto Schemas. We published these signed VCs in publicly searchable places related to our social profiles and website, and have also used the DID’s associated Ethereum keys to mint an NFT. We created verifiable, bi-directional links between our DID and other public identifiers.

We optimized this solution to bidirectionally link many identifiers with approachable UX, offer clarity for all audiences, and incorporate flexibility for any social identifiers and ownership of content. We also ensured that these bi-directional links between identifiers could be independently verified unlike Linkdrop, ENS, 3Box Profiles, etc.

Serto Search gives anyone the ability to verify credentials, learn about DIDs, VCs or NFTs, or even build a competing front-end that performs credential verification. Similar credentials can be created by anyone using a DID Agent or app, like Serto Agent.

To verify ownership of agent.serto.id, we placed Serto’s DID configuration document in the .Wellknown resource of the DNS, in accordance with the DIF Specification (although any encryption key-pair can be attached to this DID config file). This document contains a self-attested, W3C-compliant verifiable credential signed by our DID, affiliating it with the website, and another DID associated with an Ethereum address — DIDs can be linked to other DIDs!). This credential is searchable and verifiable with Serto Search. Anyone can use search.serto.id to interrogate the credential by pasting the JSON Web Token (JWT) into the search bar, which will check the cryptography to ensure it hasn’t been tampered with, and display the signature and taxonomy of the credential.

We’ve posted similarly self-attested verifiable credentials from our LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Medium accounts to prove ownership with the same DID keys. Serto’s DID keys also minted this NFT.

We used W3C-compliant verifiable credentials to link identifiers, which increases potential cross-chain interoperability and global legibility. We’ve pioneered the combined use of these standards with the .Wellknown Configuration, with the first product experience for this technical configuration. Though this exercise inherits the security risks of centralized infrastructure like DNS (as hilariously illustrated by Facebook recently), we have created a decentralized way to link together these centralized infrastructures and therefore such risks are native to the task.

VCs are off-chain, private by default, gas-free, non-transferable and revocable, and interoperable across protocols with W3C standard compliance. There is no limit to the types of identifiers you can link together using VCs, even if tooling isn’t explicitly engineered to enable a link to that specific platform. VCs combined with Serto Search solves the discovery problem — allowing anyone to start with any identifier, and follow its credentials to discover how it is related to other identifiers.

On-chain links between identifiers sacrifice privacy, incur on-chain costs, and risks agency and control. On-chain identifiers like ENS lack dedicated keys which introduces a critical risk of losing your identifier with no formal recourse. Your ENS address can expire while still bearing the text records of your contact information, though the ENS has been claimed and is now controlled by another party. Additionally, ENS does not require that you prove ownership of a text record (e.g. Twitter Account) linked to your ENS address. ENS stores these self-asserted text records on-chain, which defaults to public and globally available to archive nodes — not a best practice for personal data.

Serto Search is a centralized interface for interrogating decentralized data assets and the atomic links between them. With no Serto account, download or registration required to validate the VC signatures, there is no single point of failure. Serto Search uses open source code and implements the DIF .Wellknown Configuration Specification, so anyone could build their own verifying interface if desired.

If any other solution lacks a discovery and search element, it falls short of a global utility. We have linked identifiers so anyone can verify without arduous prerequisite expertise. Our simple UX enables global accessibility; people can only verify what they can understand, and verification and trust are subjective experiential concepts. We believe simple interfaces maximize global accessibility over the technical validation of cryptographic proofs alone.

To learn more about Serto Suite and decentralized identity technology, visit us at Serto.id.

____

I’m linking this account to my Decentralized Identifier (DID)

My credential 👉 https://search.serto.id/vc-validator?vc=eyJhbGciOiJFUzI1NksiLCJ0eXAiOiJKV1QifQ.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.KP_G-7oXTXAOzz-u3LSJoZmatGP6LUFFQXveTP5BsUyqGYq_DOUXfHDtkOjsy2TQZy9YvoxbyYLXWReL6-E38A

A DAO or decentralized autonomous organization is an enterprise-like operation directed by voting through tokenized governance. If you want to join a DAO, purchasing certain tokens on the open market is often the only qualification. Because tokens are required for membership and individuals with more token holdings frequently beget more membership influence, DAOs often concentrate decision-making abilities among their largest token-holders.

This means that the more governance-allocating tokens you hold, the more dramatic the influence you can have on the direction of the DAO. Being richer can give you more ability to steer the ship, even in instances where weighting influence toward the most subject-matter-qualified individuals might inform better decision-making. One might call this situation the DAO Plutocracy Problem.

A plutocracy is an elite ruling class whose power is derived from their wealth. DAOs that allocate voting rights based on proportional tokenholdings are by definition plutocratic, even moreso when those tokens are purchased (e.g. as opposed to earned). Allocating decision-making power based upon assets owned, as opposed to expertise, will cause DAOs to remain plutocratic unless qualifying data about members becomes more contextual. Even Vitalik Buterin has recently acknowledged the inflexible shortcomings of coin voting governance, which can be unduly influenced by inequality and incentive misalignment, and even outright attacks through vote-buying. Web3 won’t excel by practicing design according to committees of the richest, but right now DAOs lack flexible tools to document reputation and qualifications in a self-sovereign, decentralized way. Adding another layer — reputation — to this system could create more room for qualified participants and a more equitable approach to governance.

We don’t want to swap the plutocratic leadership of traditional finance for similarly centralized overlords of crypto. Today’s DAOs are glorified techno-plutocracies. This reality is far from the vision and mission of web3; if we want to work toward meritocracy, we can’t rely upon roles assigned by wealth. And if we don’t handle this problem now, it will only grow more entrenched and difficult to amend. There’s one way to solve this problem: adding a layer of reputation that gives weight to contributions and capabilities beyond wealth. Such personal data needs to be off-chain, dynamic and verifiable to create a decentralized reputation.

DAO Members Can Build Equity and Reputation (sort of)

DAOs rose to prominence as smart contracts established a model for self-executing business and financial transactions. Though early DAO models struggled with security, their flexible operations and recent governmental acceptance in Wyoming bodes promisingly for their role in the task-based project economy.

DAOs do not inherently require contributors to have a formal employee arrangement, but rather enable them to work at-will on projects while receiving rewards in exchange for work contributions. DAOs offer a flexible business framework, like a code-driven co-op, that offers numerous low-risk, compensated opportunities to gain experience in the web3 ecosystem. Contributors don’t have to be hired to any project full time, can work remotely, and can receive compensation from numerous projects in exchange for useful contributions. DAOs offer a project structure where individual contributors own a stake in the outcome. Voluntary, emergent, even ephemeral work can all be recognized when user-friendly tools make it easy for contributors to share in the outcome. As Cooper Turley stated recently during a panel about DAOs on the Bankless podcast, “DAOs…are fluid. There’s no team and user dynamic; team and community are one and the same. That allows people to come in, in a much more free-flowing manner. With a DAO, you don’t need an HR process and multi-year contract with a vesting schedule. You can come in and start contributing today.”

Gitcoin’s DAO is a standout example of tokenizing community contributions and thoughtfully distributing initial tokens and governance rights to exceptionally active contributing members. However, because the metric for influence (Gitcoin tokens) is transferable and semi-fungible (not contextual), the DAO Plutocracy Problem still looms in the distance even for such “fAirDrop” token distribution strategies. Gitcoin’s broad selection of meritocratically distributed NFTs are subject to the same concern: they are tradeable and on-chain, both of which make them poor candidates for persistent identity and reputation in the long term. Furthermore, a Gitcoin DAO top contributor holds no merit in other ecosystems for being a prolific participant in the web3 space. Is that truly fair and decentralized? Fortunately, the Gitcoin team has signaled interest in pursuing a more decentralized future for identity.

Some teams have used the basic economic traits of tokens to imply reputation, such as token lockup periods and weighting voting rights based on how long tokens have been held. For example, Popsicle Finance creatively allocates voting power according to several qualifying wallet/token traits, including a multiplier based on the duration of tokenholdings. Such capabilities signal value in differentiating the tenure of DAO participants.

Without decentralized identity and reputation, each DAO must independently verify the identity of each member. If membership is based on skills and reputation, then each DAO must separately and centrally verify that individual’s identity. DAOs often reach for bad centralized proxies, like Twitter. But what happens if the user is locked out of their account, or is shadow banned? Or if someone’s trusted Twitter identity is performed by a scammer on another platform (such as Discord), unwitting users can get scammed.

DAOs may have plans for progressive decentralization, but a plan without contextual identity and reputation is, at its heart, just repeating the history of Web 2.0. Relying upon social media accounts and centralized identity proxies as a workaround doesn’t address the root problem.

DAOs aren’t Decentralized or Autonomous, so Equity is Precarious

DAOs are meant to be a lightweight mechanism for coordination without the overhead of a formal business structure. Few, if any DAOs achieve this outcome efficiently outside of venture capital-esque investment DAOs that pool funds from members for collective investments. At the ethCC conference, NEAR Protocol Co-founder Illia Polosukhin described the so-called DAO landscape as “Facebook groups with bank accounts” — a far cry from the self-sovereign hiveminds implied by the name DAO. Even more sophisticated DAOs frequently amount to token-gated Discord channels populated by overlapping groups of web3 enthusiasts. DAO-bestowed Discord role labels serve as a siloed proxy for decentralized reputation, and on-chain transaction history provides a narrow view of individual capabilities.

Among investment DAOs, the primary activity is determining the use of capital. Members’ capital contributions to the DAO allow them to vote on how those funds are deployed. Identity in such DAOs is defined by how much capital you have contributed, which is the extent of a DAO member’s relevant user profile for such pursuits. Using wealth or token holdings as a proxy for reputation works when the users all have identities capable of communicating about their wealth (e.g. Ethereum Addresses). This approach works best in an ETH-maxi future. Given the movement toward a robust cross-chain ecosystem, this system is likely not the most equitable. This is also why DAOs focused on the allocation of wealth seem to be the most technically integrated; the required membership qualifications, and the day-to-day financial participation activities, are uniform for most members.

On-Chain Reputation is Limiting and Dangerous

In 2017, ERC-735 surfaced a proposal for on-chain credential documentation, including data in the smart contract layers. ERC-735 would be inappropriate for personally identifiable information (PII), and therefore is limited to only identities of entities without sensitive data. Such a proposal was swiftly axed, as PII on-chain does not allow for consensual selective disclosure and self-sovereign identity. Similar proposals are resurfacing, such as the Ethereum Attestation Service, which leverages on-chain transactions that default to public and immutable. However, the Serto team has not been able to verify where the attestations are stored or what interfaces exist for users to manage the consent around their disclosure.

Personally identifiable information (PII) doesn’t belong on the blockchain. Privacy cannot be flexible, consensual and continuously evolving if it is public and immutable. Putting PII on-chain publicizes data to an even broader audience than the web2.0 ecosystem of surveillance capitalism in which we live right now. On-chain PII often ties reputational data to a single address, limiting the extent to which you can easily rotate your keys or utilize a different address tied to a different facet of your life. Laws like GDPR and CCPA are vehemently at odds with public, immutable documentation of personal data on behalf of users; programmatic publication of PII on-chain is unlawful under these regulations. For these reasons, Ethereum addresses on their own are a poor basis for flexible, contextual identity (though a good way to signal wealth).

NFTs are also a flawed proxy for reputation, because they are on-chain, public, immutable and can be purchased or traded. This highlights a shortcomings in the beloved POAP token — these NFTs aren’t proof that *you* attended an event. They are proof that *someone* attended, as POAPs can easily be gifted, purchased or traded (like all NFTs except non-transferrable ones). This same shortcoming holds true for NFT-based identity projects and role-based access controls that use NFTs.

Non-transferable NFTs for reputation introduce even further complexity and opportunity for disaster. Locked to a single address, even the most earnest non-transferable NFTs lack flexibility. Fortunately, non-transferable NFTs are pretty rare, because if your wallet receives a non-transferable NFT with illegal content, it will be irrevocably associated with your wallet address. Having immobile illegal content associated with your address may require you to migrate to a new address, and start with a clean slate, leaving behind any of the past wallet transaction history that you had accrued to that point.

Transferable NFTs with illegal content can also pose a dangerous threat to users, who must pay a gas fee to get rid of them by burning the tokens (sending them to the 0x0 address). Sending many illegal NFTs to an unwitting recipient would require them to spend commensurate gas fees to burn the tokens, or to abandon their wallet and on-chain reputation starting fresh with a new address. The choice is stark: unless you send money into the abyss or give up your transaction history, you have to suffer public reputational harm and live with non-consensual illegality tied to your address.

The challenges of using NFTs for on-chain reputation illuminate superior DAO primitives: trustless off-chain reputation with decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs).

DIDs & VCs are the Future of Reputation

A Decentralized identifier (DID) is a string of numbers and letters controlled by a key pair that can be rotated. Verifiable credentials (VCs) are attestations made by one identifier about another, or about some other fact or object. These attestations are cryptographically signed by their attestor, revocable, off-chain, private, selectively disclosable and can be set to expire.

DIDs offer a flexible, straightforward way to sign off-chain attestations, and can be the subject of verifiable credentials. You can also easily connect multiple social identifiers with a DID such as a Twitter account, website, Discord, Github — as pioneered by 3Box Profiles. With 90+ DID methods generally legible with a universal resolver, DIDs are a chain-agnostic solution for managing contextual data. DIDs can turn any blockchain’s public address (or and any other type of public identifier) into a system-agnostic identifier that can manage data about itself.

Verifiable credentials are the tangible units of signed data issued by DIDs. VCs can be stored locally, and can even be validated without internet access in some instances. VCs are growing in popularity, as the preferred tamper-proof standard for Apple’s Medical Records and IBM’s COVID-19 credentials.

Portable Identity & Reputation between DAOs

Multi-Sig Verifiable Presentations

No single person should be able to call the shots in a DAO, so no single person should be able to issue reputation on behalf of a DAO. DAO-bestowed credentials should require approval from multiple parties too (e.g. proof of DAO membership or proof of design contributions should be signed by multiple parties in the DAO). A DAO could define which credentials and whose signatures, taken together, can generate a unit of verifiable reputation.

Verifiable presentations are one way to achieve such a proof of reputation with multiple signatures. These proofs require that a group of credentials be presented together in order to achieve verification. For example, a DAO membership badge might take the form of a verifiable presentation, where multiple VCs from DAO members all attest to your membership (e.g. Alice is a member in good standing). If a quorum of designated parties (e.g. 5 members of BanklessDAO) attest to the same piece of data (e.g. Alice is a member in good standing of BanklessDAO), then Alice can share her DAO membership verifiable presentation like a proof of membership to other DAOs or people, who can independently verify it.

Because the verifiable presentation features signatures from multiple parties, it might be referred to as a “multi-sig” verifiable presentation, similar to how a wallet that requires approval from multiple parties to approve a given transaction, similar multiple-approver functionality for off-chain data could be described as a verifiable presentation using the W3C standard alongside a subset (m of n) or even a complete set (n of n) of signers. Multi-sig verifiable presentations would allow DAOs to participate in collective reputation-making and to issue verifiable presentations from the DAO itself. Like multi-sig wallets allocating capital from DAOs, multi-sig verifiable presentations could similarly allocate reputation from DAOs. A logical extension of DAO-issued credentials might be the ability for DAOs to recognize verifiable credentials and verifiable presentations from one another.

The daunting task of proving yourself at a new company keeps many individuals in unsatisfying jobs, deterred by the prospect of rebuilding reputation in a new context. This oppressive switching cost creates massive inefficiency in the labor market, and prevents easy movement between roles. The cost of switching jobs must plummet in order to provide efficient infrastructure for the free market. We can create more efficient markets when the switching costs are zero for employees who want to leave their roles for different work.

Such interoperability could save a lot of time for users joining new DAOs with this portable reputation generated in one context and validated in another. Today, DAO members have to start with a clean slate each time they join a new DAO, regardless of the skills they have demonstrated elsewhere. A more automated DAO admissions process could allow holders of certain credentials to be admitted automatically. This future DAO might allow members to present reputation from other DAOs, web3 contexts or ecosystems to apply for membership (like code contributions to Radicle, participation in Gitcoin, subgraph additions and metadata to The Graph Network, attendance at Devcon etc.).

A verification process for VP-based DAO admissions could:

• check the DAO smart contract to identify the canonical signers (e.g. 5 signers on the Gnosis Safe contract)
• check whether the given verifiable presentation includes verifiable credentials signed by a sufficient subset (e.g. 3 of 5) of signers from that DAO’s contract
• and if verifiably presented, then allow the individual to participate in the DAO

New members could be assigned roles, opportunities, responsibilities inside of a new DAO on day 0 without needing to perform the labor of social ladder-climbing and demonstrating value to a Discord channel. The future of work doesn’t look like an inefficient labor market where people need to prove themselves in each new context, but this is the reality of joining new DAOs at present. Portable proofs of work can eliminate the need to build credibility from scratch in each new context or DAO.

Upon joining, individuals will be able to earn reputation credentials by positively contributing to the DAO, and then will be able to bring that reputation over to another DAO where they work on other projects and add even more credentials. Cross-DAO reputation facilitated by portability, and free-flowing data might open the opportunity for more parties to interact with that data (therefore underscoring the need for privacy, security and consent). In a more self-sovereign future where data subject consent and privacy are priorities, it will be imperative to move data verifiably off-chain with DIDs and VCs. The alternative is putting reputation on-chain, which as described above can have many dangerous consequences (and be terribly expensive!).

Bringing credentials from one DAO to qualify for capabilities in another mirrors the kind of reputation portability we already enjoy with centralized proofs of identity and reputation. Because VCs can attest to all kinds of personal data, including the data required for various levels of KYC (Know Your Customer — the process and data related to identifying an individual customer, common in traditional finance), we can use VCs to enable portable KYC and avoid duplicate copies of sensitive personal data. The Alastria project in the EU Regulatory Sandbox paved the way for such reputational portability. In a more traditional context, proofs of identity like a credit card and utility bill amount to proof of residency when applying for a library card. Organizations like the Public Library have decided that credit card statements and utility bills qualify as a valid proof of identity, so they delegate trust anchors of a given reputational asset to another body (e.g. the utility and credit card companies) and just point to those as proxies for residency.

The Ceiling on DAO Decentralization

We aspire to DAOs that can solve complex coordination problems, like creating products and bringing them to market. Unlike capital allocation, shipping products requires a variety of different roles with different expertises that must be coordinated. Also unlike treasury DAOs, the people and roles required for shipping products are not as fungible.

For a DAO trying to accomplish a complex coordination task, member skills and experience are critical for assigning responsibilities. Truly complex coordination among different roles relies upon a reputation system. As discussed above, decentralized DAO tooling is optimized for capital allocation, so the only companies that can be really DAO-ified with wallet-based reputation alone are treasuries.

The less similar a DAO is to a treasury allocating capital, the less decentralized that DAO can become, because it must rely upon centralized tools to deliver reputation signals. This obvious ceiling caps the growth and decentralization of DAOs hoping to become more than treasuries. DAOs that want to do more than capital allocation are doomed to rely on centralized tools and on-chain identity until they embrace decentralized identity and reputation.

DAOs of the Future

Imagine StyleDAO, a wearable design DAO that is optimized to create products and aspires to be as decentralized as possible.

Lest we forget, money cannot buy taste or talent, so StyleDAO must rely upon more data than wallet contents and transaction history as proxies for taste and talent. The StyleDAO governance mechanism votes on decisions like which user-submitted designs to produce. Verifiable credentials presented by designers alongside their entries differentiate expert submissions from those of bots and amateurs. These credentials are a proxy for reputation, as well as an anti-sybil mechanism.

StyleDAO members can’t sift through millions of design submissions, so categorizing desirable qualified entries provides efficiency and utility. StyleDAO can designate a variety of acceptable qualifying credentials for entries from a diversity of sources. For example, the submitter’s employment credentials from other clothing lines (e.g. Chanel), social graph credentials from other people with certain qualifications (e.g. fashion designer Virgil Abloh), attendance credentials for relevant events (e.g. Met Gala Red Carpet) etc. Verifiable presentations from other DAOs like FWB can signal participation in fashion and art-related channels or excellence in product design.

StyleDAO token holders can vote on designs based on similar qualifying credentials amounting to a proof of taste. Some qualifications may overlap with those listed above, or invoke web2 trust anchors — such as proof that a token-holder has 1M instagram followers or occupies the top spot in the Crypto Best Dressed TCR. Any qualified token holder can cast a vote without needing to manually on-board and curry favor through a Discord channel. Verifiable credentials can augment the tokenomics of DAOs with off-chain data, weighing votes according to qualifications — for example, your votes weigh 3x if you have a reputational credential from Chanel.

StyleDAO token holders submit their votes alongside their qualifying VCs, wherein execution is decentralized and the smart contract doesn’t need to store those VCs. Rather, the smart contract emits an event — this address supplied these tokens, and these credential schemas from these approved issuers, and a 3x multiplier was added in a verifiable way.

Major Key Alert

Activities beyond pooling money and voting with your stake requires more data than on-chain transactions. Because DAOs are intended to coordinate the development of products, collaborative work or other non-purchasing activities, capital contributions do not provide sufficient qualifying data about members’ fitness to excel in these kinds of activities. When you rely on wealth as a proxy, individuals can buy their way into influence even when they know very little about the subject matter. If you want to have a DAO manage the actual development of complex business processes, you need a contextual system of reputation to determine who’s qualified to do what and hold people accountable for those commitments.

This contextual system of reputation is uniquely well-suited to DIDs and VCs. Adoption of DIDs and VCs will transform the DAO ecosystem, and an early signal of this possibility will be when web3 wallets can sign and hold VCs.

Get Started

To easily create a DID, define VC schemas, issue VCs and more:

Begin with Serto Agent, the free AWS Marketplace App where you can easily create W3C-compliant decentralized identifiers, and issue verifiable credentials.

Our docs guide through about 5 minutes of setup. We then recommend publicizing DIDs in the DNS record of your website (easily done from Serto Agent; the technical spec is described here in greater detail).

List your domain on Serto Search — a cross-chain search engine for DIDs, VCs, NFTs and more.

Serto Schemas helps anyone easily create new verifiable credential schemas, so they can issue custom credentials anytime.

Visit us at serto.id or @serto_id on Twitter.

Serto helps artists and creators of all kinds claim their identities in web3 space. By asserting their identities, and using them to create NFT works, artists and creators can use Serto to get started on their journey making lasting NFTs.

The Identity Problem with NFTs that No One Likes Talking About

Many NFT platforms that allow creators to mint NFTs (NFT marketplaces or issuance platforms such as Nifty Gateway or Rarible) do so in a way that cryptographically links the NFT works to the identity of the platform, but not necessarily to the identity of the artistic creator.

In the future, if that platform disappears, so too might the centralized identity data about its creator.

In fact generally, all of the centrally stored, human-readable information about an NFT artwork (i.e. title, description of work) would disappear if the issuance platform disappeared. As we observed in the 2000’s tech bubble and the 2017 ICO bubble, sometimes all tech platforms in crowded markets do not last forever. Contingency plans for supposedly immutable assets need to be part of any realistic NFT maker.

In the future, if that platform disappears, so too might the centralized identity data about its creator.

Such NFTs in the future might hold pointers that direct to dead links that once lead to images, and lack contextual authorship information to even figure out the name of the artist who created the visual artwork originally presented with the NFT. Depending upon the storage solution of any off-chain companion content, the future of poorly constructed NFTs may contain a looming provenance nightmare.

This becomes additionally complex when we consider cross-chain bridges and how assets might maintain (or lose!) contextual data as they travel across platforms as web3 promises. It’s not not cause for concern.

Serto’s Approach

The exciting upside of the current landscape is that the technical composition of NFTs can get a lot better.

If NFT creators want to make sure their identity is inextricably linked with their blockchain-based artworks, they must take this task into their own hands instead of relying upon the centralized identity systems of current NFT issuance platforms.

With Serto Agent, NFT creators can generate their own decentralized identifier (DID), and start using it to represent themselves in web3 space. By anchoring this identifier back to their social identity — such as their website or their Twitter handle — it becomes interwoven with that social identity, a web3 address as recognizably associated with them as their name.

Empowering atomic identities for individual creators introduces a new challenge: discoverability. How does everyone find each other in this decentralized world? How do we break free from the centralized platforms with new spaces to explore information about the decentralized world?

That’s why we created Serto Search, a Search Engine for NFTs, DIDs and web3 that helps anyone easily find more information modeled after the experience of traditional search engines.

With Serto Agent, NFT creators can generate their own decentralized identifier (DID), and start using it to represent themselves in web3 space.

When a creator has their DID in place, and then makes NFTs, those NFTs carry with them a link back to their author, at their cryptographic core. These NFTs could readily be traced back to the social identity of the creator, their website, their real identity — not just some string of letters and numbers. Tools like Serto Search make it easier to learn more about NFTs like this that you might find in the wild.

We are excited to debut this exciting technology for use in the arts with Clarence Greenwood, better known as Citizen Cope. Read about our historic NFT collaboration here. View Citizen Cope’s Verifiable Genesis NFT on Opensea, and verify with Citizen Cope’s results on Serto Search.

Interested in collaborating with Serto? Contact us.

In March 2021, Clarence Greenwood and Serto Co-founder Evin McMullen teamed up after she spoke on Clubhouse about the looming challenges of centralized identity and the global NFT market. Evin had explained that many, if not most, audiovisual NFT artworks do not bear a verifiable, cryptographic signature from their author at the protocol layer, but rather rely upon the centralized app selling the work to assign it authorship and provide contextual information about the work. Her concerns struck a chord, as Clarence was preparing to expand his creative practice into the world of NFTs, in conjunction with an upcoming Citizen Cope album. Clarence is an independent artist exploring the edge of culture, and so crossing paths with the Serto team at this moment presented a natural opportunity to bring greater artistic independence and long-lasting power to this work and the NFT ecosystem.

The Verifiable Genesis is a first-of-its-kind NFT experience, created by Citizen Cope in partnership with Serto and ConsenSys. It is an exploration of future authorship and interactive music experience using decentralized technology. This NFT will take one crypto-savvy superfan on a journey through New York City, web2 and web3.

The winner of this NFT will present the Verifiable Genesis in their web3 wallet, such as Metamask, and access a VIP front row experience at City Winery in New York City. This exclusive experience for four guests will grant the lucky token holder an evening to remember. New York City is quietly re-awakening in a creative renaissance, and live music is still extremely rare compared to years past, making this NFT an extra-hot ticket.

This NFT will take one crypto-savvy superfan on a journey through New York City, web2 and web3.

The winner will present their NFT for access control and rewards in real life, and that magic continues into digital space as well. Citizen Cope has mastered an exclusive remix of Something to Believe In, mixed at the Village Recording Studios in Los Angeles, CA on March 20, 2021. This track offers a glimpse into Clarence Greenwood’s artistic process. This specific remix will never be released publicly, or shared with any other audience beyond the token holder. The simplicity of this experience with the secret track demonstrates a new paradigm of interaction — experiences that can be unlocked by presenting an NFT, or spaces that can only be accessed by presenting an NFT. The understated nature of this activation is deliberately subtle. It is critical to first demonstrate the art of the possible, to meet the users where they are, and to build a journey into new experiences alongside them.

This NFT carries its own provenance and has a robust verifiable authorship, giving it lasting identity across platforms and beyond the exchange. Because Citizen Cope has claimed their decentralized identity in web3, and shared that public address, all future NFTs created using that public address will be clearly linked back to Citizen Cope’s identity — the website, the name, and even more in the future. Including this one.

Citizen Cope’s website carries its own DID (displayed according to the .Wellknown Configuration set forth by the DIF). View Citizen Cope’s Serto Search result here, and see the DID in action.

Because most of today’s NFTs rely upon their platform of issuance for identity, these NFT works can’t travel to another platform or context without losing ready access to human-readable information about their provenance. If one of these NFT issuance platforms employing centralized storage goes bankrupt and disappears, so too may the visual art and contextual data of the contained works. Fortunately, this outcome can never befall the Verifiable Genesis NFT. No matter where it goes, collectors and fans will be able to trace the work back to Citizen Cope’s identity.

Clarence Greenwood is a continuously evolving artist, whose independent voice and creative tendencies lead him to explore new planes of emergent culture. In broadening his artistic practice to include web3, Clarence wanted to do more than the average NFT drop. View Citizen Cope’s historic Verifiable Genesis NFT here.

No matter where it goes, collectors and fans will be able to trace the work back to Citizen Cope’s identity.

Together with Serto and ConsenSys, Citizen Cope is pushing the boundaries of possibility in the future of fan experiences and web3. Stay tuned for more collaborations and surprises from the Serto team here.

Special thanks to our Meshians TJ Chmielewski & Brian Chamberlain for their generous collaboration and outstanding expertise to build this activation.

Interested in collaborating with Serto? Contact us.

To illustrate the concept, this very article is an NFT. You can verify its authorship cryptographically. Check it out below.

Last week, an NFT art creator with the OpenSea handle Pest Supply made nearly a million dollars selling Banksy-style-looking works. Emotional mayhem ensued because bidders felt dismayed at the unclear authorship of the works, which reads a lot like cranky Twitter backlash. Pest Supply never purported to be Banksy (indeed, quite the opposite), but because there is not yet a standard practice around intellectual property assertions and derivative creative works in this new medium, spectators quickly cried forgery and rejoiced at having something else on the internet to complain about.

In the days since, a number of dubiously “original” NFT works have publicly highlighted the need for better authorship standards. For example, artist Rosa Menkham didn’t consent to participate in any NFT projects, yet she found her name and creative work being sold as such. Additionally, imagery from the Larvalabs Cryptopunks collection of early NFTs has also recently been replicated on the centralized Binance Smart Chain. Although Larvalabs decried the so-called unauthorized copying of their original content, those BSC Cryptopunks have commanded $2.2 million in BNB. A BSC copycat of our Treum colleagues’ Euler Beats project (celebrated by Mark Cuban and NFT buyers alike) is now shutting down after a few days in the sun.

NFT art objects bearing pre-existing works of known creators without their participation can be categorized as “remix” or “plagiarism” depending upon the perspective and occasion, but the NFT standard itself doesn’t offer much ability to discern between the two.

The technical specifications of NFTs do not natively allow their contracts to resolve back to the identity information of human beings /creators. This means you can’t necessarily assume that if you find an NFT in the wild, you can easily sort out whether it was made by Beeple himself.

In the case of Christie’s first NFT sale, the following information is being publicly displayed on their website:

In the data shared about this NFT, Christie’s includes the wallet address containing the work, and the smart contract address of the NFT’s minting. Including such information is very leading-edge for an auction house, and Christie’s has rightly received global attention for their forward-thinking choice to sell this work. However, these addresses aren’t especially human-readable. Critically, neither address can be cryptographically resolved back to the identity of the artist known as “Beeple.”

In order to determine authorship of an NFT today, we either have to trust the centralized identity system of platforms that sell NFTs (in this case, Christie’s), or we have to take that wallet address and contract address and do some additional sleuthing.

When assessing authorship of an NFT found in the wild (or conversely, if you’re a seller trying to hunt down the identity of a buyer), you either have to accept the purported identity communicated by the platform (not very cryptopunk/very centralized), or you might have to launch a multiple-browser-window multi-platform investigation into old Twitter posts or blockchain transactions for some more intel (not very user-friendly/very manual). When it comes to Christie’s, we can probably trust Noah Davis and the Contemporary Art Team to keep it 100 on their first NFT sale under the watchful eye of the global digital asset market. But what about the uncurated user-generated content NFT marketplaces where creators regularly publish intellectual property taken from other artists without permission for republication or derivative works?

Buyer anguish and seller puzzlement is on the rise as a result of this lack of verifiable authorship standard, based on recent conversations with stressed out NFT creators and concerned NFT marketplaces looking for a simpler way to authenticate works. It seems obvious that we should be using cryptographic verification of a cryptographically verifiable work’s traits (a rigorous accompaniment to writing “This work is unique” on a website, as seen above).

Decentralized identifiers offer the start of a fairly simple fix.

Creators need web3 identities that are not tied to any platform. They can use these identities to produce NFT works that cryptographically resolve into human-readable information. Decentralized identity can offer a missing trust layer of verifiable authorship for the $150 million NFT art market.

If we’re going to embrace the power of blockchain and decentralization, we’re going to need a real, usable ecosystem of client-side credentials to feed into a future world of stateless services. This means we need decentralized tools to help us verify the cryptographic signatures that give those credentials gravity.

This also means that we can have cryptographically verifiable authorship of NFTs.

Creators can use an Ethereum address attached to their decentralized identifier (DID) to issue NFTs. By using a DID for this process, the NFTs can be traced back to their author’s DID — and even the author’s human-readable name. When it comes to mass adoption, we must take a pragmatic approach and prioritize product user experience and ease of use as much as possible. Recognizing Ethereum addresses at a glance isn’t going to catch on, but a search engine to verify NFT authorship just might.

How do we get verifiable authorship for NFTs?

1. NFT creators already use Ethereum addresses to mint NFTs. Now, they can easily use a DID to anchor their Ethereum address back to part of their identity expressed out in the world (through their website, their Twitter handle, and other facets of their social identity). This allows the artist to link their decentralized digital identity with their social identity, in a way that is not exclusively entrenched a single platform or service (like Facebook or Google), but rather represents them as a standalone individual within the web3 ecosystem.
2. Creators can choose to have their DIDs, plus some affiliated human-readable information (such as a website, a twitter handle, etc.) show up in a public search engine when anyone searches for that name, NFT address they’ve created, or other credential related to that DID. These search results can also show all kinds of other identifiers from other blockchains, as well as service endpoints. Imagine a decentralized Google to help you search for NFTs, DIDs and other decentralized stuff.
3. Creators can issue NFTs using the Ethereum addresses associated with these DIDs.
4. Platforms selling NFTs can integrate a decentralized search API, so collectors can easily verify the authorship of the works they’re about to buy.

To make this new process as easy as possible to adopt, the Serto team is building:

• No-code tools for anyone, including NFT creators, to get started with verifiable authorship easily
• A search engine where users can find more about their NFT’s creator and beyond. We are creating an API to allow others to integrate this verification capability into their apps or marketplaces easily.

We weren’t planning to open up public access to our work so quickly, but given the amount of community requests we have received on this topic we have a surprise for you all.

We are now exposing an early version of Serto Search that offers the same robust level of verifiability that our upcoming production offering will provide. This lightweight beta product allows you to use this very article to perform some of the same trust exercises that will launch with Serto in production in Q3 2021. Check it out here.

To illustrate the full concept, we have minted this very article as an NFT.

When queried in Serto Search, the Ethereum address that minted the NFT of this article will resolve to the Ethereum address at our beta site in human-readable language.

This resolution, viewable on Serto search, shows that the owner of verify.serto.id minted the NFT containing this article.

This article’s NFT Contract Address: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/1093475766599[…]815224463371928208160297282581054281833970161393562452578271233

Serto.id Decentralized Identifier (DID): did:ethr:0xf1c088Ff19301e660CE8B63F79675337e28963a4

Don’t just take our word for it. Try it yourself below.

Verify that this DID belongs to Serto.id: https://beta.search.serto.id/domain/verify.serto.id

Search for our DID on Serto Search: http://beta.search.serto.id/

We are doing usability testing for our beta search and would appreciate feedback from NFT users. Please contact us here to participate.

Are you an NFT creator?

Be among the first to create verifiable NFTs.

Do you have an application or NFT issuance/sale platform?

Integrate Serto’s NFT Search API to verify NFTs within your app.

Request more information from evin dot mcmullen at mesh dot xyz

The uPort project set forth at ConsenSys in 2015 to explore a new form of identity where end-users and enterprises could become active stewards of their verifiable data. This initiative evolved into a variety of experiments, enabling end-users to hold their identity credentials in mobile wallets, helping people use those credentials to accomplish real-world actions and impacting communities on a global scale with these new approaches.

uPort’s leading-edge experiments paved the way for the W3C’s decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credential (VC) standards; these primitives offer a new common global approach to identity and reputation.

Today, Serto continues this critical work with a refined set of tools and a focus on usability and enterprise implementation of DIDs and VCs.

We are joined by alumni of Alpine (a crypto-economics team engineering value with new enterprise transactions) and Civil (a blockchain-based platform for trustworthy journalism), among others, and continue to be part of The Mesh.

We have observed that the root problem with nearly every decentralized ecosystem is the absence of a decentralized identity solution, which necessarily leads to a re-centralization — and renders blockchains like Ethereum more superfluous technical complexity than truly enabling infrastructure.

The Serto team envisions a world where identities of any sort can use decentralized standardized identity and verifiable data solutions (starting with DIDs and VCs) to exchange data in a trusted, private and scalable way without unnecessary intermediaries.

Our mission is to catalyze adoption of decentralized technologies by resolving the critical identity blocker — the friction of using decentralized identity technology.

We combat this friction by making it easier for everyone to use DIDs and VCs.

Learn more about our current work and our products at Serto.ID

UPORT LIBRARY SUPPORT

Please be advised that ongoing support for all uPort libraries will be deprecated May 1, 2021. These resources will be available for free, unsupported download until December 30, 2021. Please direct any questions about the uPort libraries to Gregory.Bugyis at mesh dot xyz.