Verifiable credentials meet Web3 thanks to Zk | ETHDenver 2023
Web3 will not reach mass adoption without an identity layer. Use cases such as digital democracy, personal DeFi, and portable reputation require a mechanism for identities that are richer than Ethereum addresses. To address this need, there are three main approaches: Verifiable Credentials, NFTs (SBT), and naming services (i.e ENS). While NFTs and ENS are easier to adopt and understand by the Web3 community, they do not offer the privacy and interoperability of the Verifiable Credentials approach - a standard defined by W3C and adopted by governments and organizations worldwide.
Adopting Verifiable Credentials and DID as the identity layer for Web3 has the potential to bridge the gap between Web2 and enterprise applications and bring mass adoption to Ethereum. The challenge, however, is to provide tools that streamline the adoption and implementation of these standards by the Web3 community. These tools should abstract the complexity and provide the necessary privacy and security features required to use these identities on-chain. This is where PolygonID comes in.
In this presentation, we will introduce the Polygon ID toolset provided to the Web3 community and go through some of the innovations that allow for the use of off-chain credentials in on-chain transactions.
We will also analyze the use cases and possibilities created for existing Web3 applications, such as DAOs, DeFi, and games.
TLDR: Verifiable Credentials are being brought to blockchain to address the need for identity verification in Web3, with support from all chain verifications for free fire credentials and Polygon ID moving towards standards.
00:00 🔍 Verifiable credentials are being brought to blockchain to address the growing need for identity verification due to the increasing use of generative AI and automation.
01:34 🔑 Web3's use cases such as democracy, high value transactions, portable reputation, and a single global identity require trust, which is hindered by the lack of trust in users, and now that scalability has been solved, the next step is to address this trust issue.
02:30 🔑 Decentralized identity in blockchain has two approaches, one being the use of NFTs to express attributes, but this limits the amount of information and richness of identities, especially for private information like biometrics and reputational scores.
04:09 🔍 Verifiable Credentials can now be verified on chain, providing flexibility and privacy for high value transactions, with support from all chain verifications for free fire credentials and Polygon ID moving towards standards.
06:24 📈 Polygon is creating Polygon ID to achieve liquidity of credentials and improve user experience in Web3.
08:18 👥 Adoption and ecosystem building are key to solving the identity layer problem, and the speaker's team is making their advanced did method open source to encourage adoption and unlock real-world use cases.
09:33 🚀 A product update with strong technology is not enough to solve the identity game on the blockchain, as it requires an ecosystem, and Polygon ID aims to attract people to their trusted infrastructure provider with massive adoption in the serum ecosystem.
11:06 📱 An open-source wallet SDK has been released, allowing for passwordless login and self-hosted nodes through Verifiable Credentials that can be checked with the verifier SDK and a JavaScript SDK available for issuing and verifying credentials on various platforms.