Building Identity and Community on Tezos
Cached copy of an article from Tezos Commons, 2021, served from ramine.net so it stays readable if the original goes offline.
Building Identity and Community on Tezos
A closer look into DNS.xyz and their plans to build web3 profiles on the Tezos blockchain.
At the core, one of the most basic part of the internet runs on people having a presence and identity online. Facebook, Instagram, Square Space, and Linktree all represent some of the most common uses of the internet today.
Under the premise that it’s difficult for people who are not technical to secure or setup their own decentralized domain names, DNS.xyz plans to take care of this process in creating web3 profiles on Tezos. In this post, we’ll discuss what they’re working on and some of their plans for enabling web3 profiles on Tezos.
Why Tezos?
Showtime is essentially the Instagram of NFT’s. One can go to the platform, view timelines and follow and interact with various artists. The platform is essentially an online art gallery for NFT’s. But, DNS.xyz is approaching this from a different angle.
Shokunin, CEO at DNS.xyz shared a few thoughts around the decision making basis behind choosing Tezos.
We actually shared a long thread on this but, there’s a few things. The first one is we started on Ethereum, where the majority of action was happening at the time. But, when we started looking at Tezos it was really nice in that there was no crap or the same culture within Ethereum. The community was mostly filled with creators, artists, early adopters, and thinkers.
We actually got a lot of support from the community as well. So, we started connecting with artists on hic et nunc and they engaged with us and shared lots of pointers about our project. We got more help from people within the Tezos community than people we actually knew within the Ethereum space, which is pretty absurd.
So, we really liked that. If you want to build something, you’re also looking for early adopters of unproven tech and those people are Tezos right now. But, the other big thing for us was the tech. Gas fees are low, the chain is fast, it’s easier to program on, and smart contracts are much more approachable. So, we thought everything that we’ve been wanting from Ethereum is already here.
When all this clicked together, it became pretty obvious where we should focus early on. We’re very much on the anti-hype and pragmatic on the culture of the code does the speaking.
Using already existing standards from the likes of Spruce Systems around identity and decentralized credentials, DNS.xyz plans to essentially act as a personalized identity/website for users. Working alongside Spruce Systems and IDX, they added Tezos support so that when you make a profile through their platform, it goes through Spruce, IDX, and usable by every DApp within the ecosystem.
Essentially, anything that uses Tezos or your crypto profile on the platform can be used similarly like Linktree. One can think of its current implementation as a personalized gallery or reddit intertwined with Patreon.
Why Building Identity and Community Layers is Important
A fully-fledged identity and community layer is currently missing within the blockchain space. We’ve seen a growing interest amongst NFT’s, but rarely do we begin to think where this sector is moving towards and the impact it will have within the metaverse.
I shared a few thoughts a couple of months back of a macro scheme as to where things are beginning to gravitate towards. To the outside and curious observer, we can clearly see a growing trend towards migrating towards the digital world. Various things that exist physically are increasingly gaining traction within digital alternatives.
Whether those things are money, art, collectibles, or more; this shift shouldn’t go unnoticed. That said, something that’s beginning to become more of a reality is simply the rise of the metaverse. A few could argue that this already exists within gaming or merely just owning some crypto or NFT’s, however, the layers of this extend far beyond that.
One could think of the metaverse today as a sort of framework for a highly connected life. It’s beginning to become more of a reality by the passing day as more technologies and new products begin to merge together and bring about a new layer for a truly hyper-connected world.
If railroads were the stake in connecting a vast and nation-wide economy through the advent of allowing goods and services to be transported at greater distances, the metaverse is the land grab of the future. Building on the identity and community layer within the blockchain space will only help speed this process.
Key Insight
Shokunin, CEO at DNS.xyz shared a few more thoughts on a couple of questions I had for him.
Would you say this is more of an implementation on top of existing legwork and benchmarks from the likes of Spruce Systems around DID’s, or is this being built from scratch?
It’s using very similar concepts. There’s another DID provider called IDX which is built by a company called Ceramic which is very big in the IPFS space. They have 60,000 users and we’ve been working with them on their implementation on DID’s. So, we didn’t start from scratch, we’re using the standard of DID’s that IDX has made.
That said, the implementation that Spruce has done is really good and interesting for a few different reasons. So, IDX is really good at being public data whereas Spruce is very good for DApps and in the sense that there’s more control in granular privacy. IDX is more off chain too, whereas Spruce can be on-chain. So, they’re both actually quite complimentary.
A little over a month ago, we started talking to Spruce and IDX in getting our project integrated together and our three teams are aligning fairly regularly on that.
What are your thoughts on the various token standards available within Tezos such as FA2? Has this been a factor in your decision to migrate from Ethereum in any way?
The really nice thing about the FA2 standard is that using and deploying smart contracts is easier. If you’re trying to build the world computer, it would kind of be nice if it was easier to program, right? So, Tezos does that.
The second thing is that FA2 does what ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 do in one thing. So, that’s the crazy thing to me about the Ethereum ecosystem, there’s so much legacy difficulty in making those contracts, screening them, and security as well. Long story short, it’s very difficult.
So, we’re looking at FA2 and it already does all these things today. We wanted to use Ethereum, but it’s so much more involving. Doing NFT’s on Tezos is very flexible and straight forward and we really like that.
This standard is also the basis for what we’re thinking of using in future stuff such as engagement. Thinking about things like how do we reward users for participation? We don’t want to touch on tokenomics just yet, because we have a product to build. But, it’s just so easy to make a form of a token on Tezos whether that be points or karma and reward the community with that for participation.
How to get involved?
The best way to get involved is to join the private discord. There’s a private beta currently being undergone, so if you want to join and test it out be sure to join the discord!
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William McKenzie
Writer at wmckenzie.com, Tezos Commons, student.
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