Thank you Emerson for hosting this AMA and the detailed introduction. My name is Slein, I am the co-founder of Communities ID and BRC-137. Our team has devoted in Decentralized identity and Social-related space for more than two years.
I am very glad to have this opportunity to discuss the current trends in DID space. 2. Could you please introduce a little bit about Communities ID?
OK Great! Communities ID is a DID services provider (or Web3 domain name in more simple term). We developed the “DID as a Service” protocol, and deployed our contracts on multiple EVM-compatible networks. We have provided DID services to more than 70 leading crypto projects and communities, ranging from social-fi, game-fi, NFT communities and even for some DeFi protocols. Recently, our team also expand our reach to Bitcoin Network. We released a new DID protocol on Bitcoin, which is called BRC-137.
And generally, that’s what Communities ID is currently doing. we’re developong DID and domain name related staff, and we’re try to build a decentralized social network based on this DID system.
Thank you for the questions. To be honest, Decentralized Identity, DID is a kind of confusing term. I will try to use the most simple terms to help you understand this concept. So basically, Decentralized identity is everything that help people to recognize what an entity is in a decentralized manner. and this entity could be a person, or could be a company, an organization, or could even be a series of data.
To most of the crypto users. DID always related to Web3 domain name like ENS, where you can mint a .eth domain name to replace your wallet address. That’s correct. But from my perspective, in a more general scope, an NFT like BAYC, could also be a type of DID.
For me, DID will change how we interact with blockchain. it will help us to join the decentralized world in a more user-friendly way. I can see a lot of potential in this field.
Yeah, I fully agree with your Idea. DID is not so popular at this moment. although It was popular for a short period of time. People are trying to buy some valuable ENS domain names, like 3-digit, 4-digit names like 666.eth, 888.eth and so on. However, this trend didn’t last very long.
One crucial reason is that, DID is a type of utility NFT, which has a significant high personal value. Most of the domain names are not expected to be traded after minted. For example, my name is Slein. probably I will mint a slein.eth. It could be expensive, but the value only holds for people who also named Slein. It doesn’t have any significant value to you, Emerson. So, domain names are way more non-fungible than regular PFP NFTs.
And one more thing, all domain names and DIDs have unlimited supply. They’re designed like a service not really a token which you can invest in and hold for potential revenue. Once you mint a name no one would like to buy. you will waste your eth forever. People are not likely to buy a token without profits in terms of money.
Hence, in general the most important issue is the out-dated business model, ignoring the value of token.
Yes, we do made many attempts to improving current DID and domain names structure. frankly speaking, some of the improvements are good and some didn’t work as we expected.
One key improvement we have done is “DID as a Service”. So we allow crypto communities to freely choose which top-level domain they would like to use. They are not subjected to .eth. For example, if BingX would like to create your membership through our DID as a Service protocol, your users can have .bingx top level domain. So Emerson you can have emerson.bingx to replace your wallet address. Furthermore, a project or community owners can modify how his or her DID system works. they can set requirements on who can mint this domain name. decide which token will be paid, not subjected to native tokens like eth. It’s very versatile.
Based on this versatile DID as a service feature, another improvement we have made in BRC-137 is composability. So with composability, we can realize the social connect between people and organization on blockchain. I will also introduce some details about this protocol later in this AMA session.
Thanks Emerson, I am very glad to talk about our protocol-related stuff. First of all, let me just define BRC-137 in a relatively simple and clear manner. Basically, we are a DID protocol with composability on the bitcoin network. We would like to create DID system that can create identities for every bitcoin users with low cost, which is better for mass-adoption. At the same time, we also aim to facilitate the development of a social ecosystem on Bitcoin by being composable.
Okay, Let me explain our differences, For traditional DIDs or Domain names. Most of them take the form of firstname.lsastname. If we use ENS as an example, let’s say, I can register a slein.eth on ENS, whereas under our protocol, as an individual, you can be active on Bitcoin network with a separated Firstname instead of a wallet address, such as Slein. without a suffix.
And, if a person would like not only to have a named wallet address, but also to participate further in the social ecosystem, or to join an organization, play a gamefi. The first name can be combined with multiple suffixes to inscribe a DID in the traditional domain name format. for example, if I wish to further engage with brc137, i can combine my name slein with brc137. so that slein and slein.brc137 can both point to my wallet address.
So, basically, this is how we differ from other DIDs.
Actually, this is a quite complicated question, I will try my best to explain it as simple as possible. Abstracting the social nature of this combination is difficult. Therefore, in our protocol, we have designed three different asset types to help us realize the whole protocol. I will come to describe the role of these three assets one by one.
First, to symbolize each individual. We constructed a BRC20-based DID token with a total supply of 21,000,000. Those who hold BRC20 tokens can inscribe a name according to our protocol, such as slein, on top of the token. ANd this is very intriguing, that means, our DID it is both compatible with BRC20 tokens and can be resolved as a DID by our BRC-137 protocol.
On the other hand, to characterize an organization or group on the bitcoin network. We issue TLDs based on BRC 420. with a total quantity of 21,000. Users can inscribe lastname on top of BRC 420, such as .brc137.
And in our protocol, we also define the binding operation. The firstname slein can be associated with the BRC137 lastname by inscribing the relevant content.
The third type of asset is our Delegator. A Delegator can be thought of as a validator. It can aggregate inscription requests from different DIDs and TLDs and batch them together. This type of operation is very important to reduce the cost of inscription and promote mass-adoption. As gas fee is a very crucial considerations for regular users.
For example, if a user start inscribing a name by him or herself. It will cost more than 10 USD on bitcoin network. While, if they submit the request and leverage our delegator. It will only cost no more than 1 USD. So more than 90% reduction in transaction fees.
To sum up. The entire protocol is achieved and fully based on three types of assets. DID, TLD, and Delegator.
Yes, it's great that you're following the story behind our protocol.
Acutally, A DID protocol can be very boring for users. Generally it doesn't have a story as attractive as PFP-NFTs or Meme token. But we believe that DIDs, identities, and social relationships need people to understand and to carry them. It would be nice to have a compelling story on top of the underlying DID technology.
You may know a very interested Meme on bitcoin is wizard. I am not sure if you have heard of this before. So the entire story is a very magical style. As you can see, our Delegator is named Genesis Rock, and they are something like magic crystals. Our TLD is an inscription book, which is a record of stories, people, social relationships, and so on. And we also symbolizing each individual as soul, which we referred to as Soul Dust.
I really hope you can enjoy our visual design. we have invested a lot of time and money in making these pictures.
Okay, let’s start with our ultimate goal. We’re looking to build a bitcoin socialverse on top of our composable DID protocol. This of course will take a very long time. But we’re promising on this.
For some specific steps, we just released our roadmap recently, you can have a look on our Medium website. Simply speaking, we will release our BRC20 token- soul dust for individuals next month. Following the soul dust, we will release our indexer, SDK, and marketplace step by step. Furthermore, we will also develop and incubate a series of social tools and social dApps on top of our protocol, and promote the use cases of BRC-137 prpotocol.
SO thats what we’re planning to do at this moment. We’re super excited about what we’re going to build.