How Aragon approaches identity and the Ethereum Keybase Resolver

Jorge Izquierdo Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 2, 2017

Identity is one of the most important parts when developing decentralized applications. This is specially true for Aragon, where identity is needed to know who are you doing business with or who are the people that will manage the money you are investing.

Core values

When building identity into Aragon we settled for the following principles and we intend to maintain them in the future, no matter the scale of the project:

Identity is opt-in . Entities are free to transact anonymously (without their Ethereum address tied to any identity). For Aragon, this means our system needs to support the case where anonymous entities are creating and managing organizations.

. Entities are free to transact anonymously (without their Ethereum address tied to any identity). For Aragon, this means our system needs to support the case where anonymous entities are creating and managing organizations. Entities are free to choose how they want to identify themselves, and what identity providers do they consider valid to identify others. For us this means our identity system needs to be modular and extendible to adapt to different identity mechanisms.

how they want to identify themselves, and what do they consider valid to identify others. For us this means our identity system needs to be modular and extendible to adapt to different identity mechanisms. Identity belongs to the individual (or organization). Not Google, not Facebook, and not even their government. This means the only entity that can provide the ultimate truth about their identity is themselves or entities they personally appoint for this (through cryptographic proofs).

Even though the premise of doing anonymous business if you want to seems cool, we know it is idealistic and there will be cases in which people will be socially required to prove their identity before some things can happen.

For example, an investor might require the founders to identify themselves before investing in a company or a payment provider might require to do traditional KYC before providing their service to the company.

Keybase

For Aragon we have built an integration with Keybase as our first identity provider.

As we have seen deciding on an identity system is matter of tradeoffs. Keybase has the downside of being a centralized service, and they could stop the service at any time and the integration would break.

But at the same time it is important that they are not the definitive source of truth, and everything they provide can be cryptographically checked and see that the user indeed provided that proof.

Anyone wanting to check that my Keybase identity is the same than my Twitter profile can do so by checking my proof.

And the other important factor towards choosing Keybase as our first provider is that it is a somewhat mature solution with a good UX that can be used today. It also has some adoption in the broader tech and crypto community, so the barrier to entry is lower.