Why identity

Cracking the “Decentralized Identity” problem is one of the most important hurdles that blockchain technology must clear in order to fulfill some of its future potential. Blockchain is famous for its users’ ability to operate anonymously – but some things we’d like to do with blockchain will require identity.

Consider some of the big dreams for the future of blockchain - making it the secure, decentralized, corruption-free trust layer for education credentials, deeds of ownership, and real-world financial tools like getting a mortgage. A PhD doesn’t have a lot of meaning unless there is a verified human attached to it; identity is important for a lot of things.

In Project Catalyst Fund 10, the Cardano community spoke to this need with the “Atala Prism: Launch Ecosystem” campaign. The objective of this campaign was to fund projects relating to blockchain identity elements, based on the Atala Prism identity protocol that was being developed at that time. Lido Nation was funded under this campaign to launch a second run of our “Swahili Learn to Earn” program, adding in an identity layer. Our first run of this program was a successful experiment which found that an incentivized learning curriculum was a very effective way to onboard new Cardano users in Africa. The biggest challenge of that first project was that we had to manage identity verification manually, which was neither effective nor scalable. It was a perfect use case for the Atala Prism campaign, because we knew we had a large audience of motivated participants who would provide a pool of users and de facto “testers” so that we could learn more about Decentralized Identity solutions.

What we built, and how it worked:

First, we designed a new Cardano education curriculum consisting of 40 lessons, with two related quiz questions for each lesson. Our translation team in Kenya translated everything into Swahili. We updated the signup flow to incorporate identity verification using ProofSpace. Users would sign up for the program, verify their identity via email and twitter, and then they could log in once per day to take a lesson. When they completed a quiz correctly, they would be rewarded with 1 ada and 200,000 hosky tokens per day, up to a total of 40 ada and 8M hosky. We also incorporated a “referral” program, which allowed participant to earn up to 10 additional ada for successful referrals. Upon program completion, learners would receive an NFT marking their achievement. (Round one of the program debuted “Curious Meerkat”, “Clever Giraffe” and “Wise Elephant” NFTs. Keeping with the theme, this time we had a “Thoughtful Water Buffalo” NFT, featured at the top of this article.)

Program Results

Through this program we onboarded more than 1000 unique Cardano users. Based on website traffic, we can see the great majority of users are logging in from Kenya and Congo. Hundreds of users logged in every day during the course of the program to take their daily quiz and earn 1 ada. Feedback from program participants was largely positive. Here are a few quotes from users:

“I plan to start participating more actively in the Cardano ecosystem, whether by staking ADA, exploring decentralized applications or even contributing to the development of new blockchain-based solutions.

“I’m definitely registering for proposal assessment in fund 13 and then God willing I get paid well mint my own nft collection!”

“I plan to use the knowledge from this program to make informed decisions in personal finance, explore career opportunities in blockchain, and educate others about the potential of decentralized technologies like Cardano.”

What I love about these responses is that they demonstrate a depth of understanding about real opportunities and utility of blockchain, as well as personal interest in continuing their involvement!

Challenges and Learning

Complexity

If I had to highlight one issue with blockchain adoption in general, it would be the complexity involved in setting up and using any wallet. The 24 words, the external ledgers, the spending password, the receiving address – learning how to do this and setting it all up takes a brand new person hours, with the disadvantage that there is no friendly bank teller anywhere to help you over the humps.

When you add in Identity verification, the complexity just goes up. It certainly went up for the Lido Nation developers who had to set it all up, but the issue I’m really thinking of is the end users who had to figure it out in order to participate. From our data, we can see that more than 1000 potential users who started to join the program never completed the ProofSpace verification. We can also see in our ProofSpace dashboard that there have been 999 failed interactions there. We know that SOME of this number are actually “Duplicated Users” who were attempting to register and earn ada multiple times – and this fraudulent use was successfully stopped by the Identity layer (yay!). But we know that unfortunately some of the gaps were legitimate users who could not clear the complexity hurdle.

Web3 meets Mobile-first

This project highlighted another issue that I think is key to our dreams of future mass adoption. Today’s web3 users are highly over-represented in rich countries where people have money to invest in risky assets, and among computer nerds who are always the first adopters of new tech, and who are definitely sitting in front of a desktop computer. Global mass-adoption, however, means reaching users whose internet connectivity may be exclusively through a mobile device. Many current web3 tools are not mobile-ready:

• Dapps cant connect to hot wallets through a mobile browser Most mobile wallets don’t have a web-browser to allow connecting website DApps. (Flint does, but it has been discontinued. Vespr does. Those are the only two Cardano mobile wallets with built-in browser connections that I know of at this time.)
• Identity apps like ProofSpace are trying to stay mobile-ready, but it can be difficult to stay on top of all the devices and all the operating systems and all of the versioning all the time! The Lido Nation project team faces all the facets of this challenge as we worked through this project because indeed - our audience WAS in fact a group of people in the developing world whose access to the internet is mostly through a mobile device.

If we agree that MASS ADOPTION is the next frontier in the Cardano journey, I think mobile-first tools needs to be a serious consideration for everything we build next!

Conclusion

You can read our full project report HERE.

You can watch our project close video HERE (I had some fun with the “Identity” theme!):

Your comments and question are welcome below ⬇️