Please describe your proposed solution.
ADA Handle launched its public sale in March 2022 and since then has sold over 120k Handles, with 45k wallets holding at least one Handle. We would now like to go a step further and offer personalization tools that Handle owners can opt into in order to create a customized cross-platform user experience.
Presently, when visitors connect to a DEX or use a wallet, they can only partially personalize their UI experience by choosing a specific Handle or setting the environment to dark or light mode. For example, when visitors connect to SundaeSwap's Exchange (<https://exchange.sundaeswap.finance>) these are the two available options:
At ADA Handle we believe that as more DApps, games and platforms launch on the Cardano blockchain, there will be an opportunity to augment the Handle Standard to enable Handle owners to choose personalization features, from an array of options, that platforms can then directly parse from the Handle Personalization Standard.
Multiple gaming platforms that we have spoken to have agreed that a personalization feature would increase visitor engagement and improve cross-platform interaction because Handle personalizations and customizations will be made available to all platforms. In other words, the chosen personalizations associated with any given Handle can be simultaneously parsed by any and all platforms. Additionally, when players start interacting with each other on these platforms, certain personalization features, such as profile pictures and social-media accounts, could be used to build rapport between visitors, further improving community engagement with DApps, and consequently with the Cardano blockchain.
A few organizations operating on the Cardano blockchain have also expressed the desire to use Handles to simplify how potential customers find more information about them given that, presently, users have to navigate to off-chain social platforms or utilize search engines in order to find details about projects on their respective websites. Thus, navigating away from the Cardano blockchain. Their request was to make it easier for the information to be made available from within the blockchain.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
We believe that The Handle Personalization Standard is the solution to this problem as it will allow Handle owners to associate personalization data onto their Handles. Each Handle owner will have this optional personalization feature that Cardano DApps, wallets, platforms and portals can then read data from in order to deliver a customized and personalized user experience to visitors, in addition to enabling visitors to have a homogenous cross-platform experience.
To achieve this, each Handle will be associated with a unique Smart Contract via a pointer record. These Smart Contracts will contain datasets for the Handles that they govern personalization for. DApps, wallets, gaming platforms, portals, etc. will subsequently only need to detect these pointer records and from these records, parse any or all available personalization information for the Handles. These data sets will be IPFS-hosted and JSON-based making it flexible for Handle owners to add, edit, remove information in a decentralized manner. For the IPFS-hosted and JSON-based datasets, ADA Handle has partnered with a prominent community project that will deliver enterprise-class IPFS and CDN endpoints, that we will make available to all portals, wallets, etc. This will be optional, being that IPFS is decentralized but they will provide a fast and cost-free solution for any interested party. These IPFS and CDN endpoints have global presence utilizing a global-accelerator technology to deliver sub-10ms latency (on average), leveraging on multiple edge data centers, spread across all continents.
As data is associated with Handles, portals such as <https://pool.pm> and <https://cexplorer.io> will have the option to detect, index and elect to use some or all datasets, in whichever manner that suits them best. Gaming platforms could, for example, pick up the chosen Profile Picture and display that as feedback to the Handle owner but also display the same Profile Picture to all other players within the platform, improving rapport and engagement. We believe that this feature will allow players to quickly identify and connect with other players. Additionally, as the same Profile Pictures are displayed across multiple gaming apps, players won't need to apply the same setting on every platform that they interact with. However, should they want to have a different Profile Picture for different platforms, they will have options to do so. Either by choosing a different Handle to interact with different games or by adding multiple profile pictures to their personalization Smart Contract, assigning one to gaming apps and another to gambling portals, for example. In other words, the personalization feature is being developed to be flexible and future-proof, allowing us to upgrade the Standard as needed.
Furthermore, certain portals such as Cardano Cube (<https://www.cardanocube.io/>) could allow organizations to authenticate ownership of a Handle and from that point onwards ingest datasets that they deem important, such as website URLs, email addresses, social-media accounts, project descriptions and summaries. All of this information will be collected directly from the Handle Personalization Standard. We believe that this solution will give project administrators a flexible cross-platform mechanism that will enable them to, from a single reference point, edit their business contents across the entire ecosystem. These datasets could, subsequently, also be used by Cardano-based search engines to index blockchain data.
Wallets will also benefit from this new Personalization Standard as they will have the option to, for example, display recipients' profile pictures as feedback to wallet users who are submitting funds, delivering to senders a higher degree of assurance that they are submitting funds to the correct parties.
As the Personalization Standard evolves, we also plan on allowing customers to store confidential information in an encrypted format. This will allow Handle owners to share the keys to these encrypted datasets with selected platforms. These platforms could then, for example, use this data to produce tax reports for transactions done over a specific timeframe, and outputting a ready-to-file PDF report that would include Social Security Numbers. All of this done without Personally Identifiable Information (PII) ever being stored on-chain.
As part the Personalization Standard, we will enable Handle owners to customize an actual Handle image with their profile pictures, background image, color scheme and contact information. Although this alternative image will not replace the main Handle image (for branding and security reasons), projects can optionally display them instead of the main Handle image. These are a couple of layout examples but the sky will be the limit for what users will be able to craft from this new Standard:
Last but not least, this same personalization technology will enable Handle owners to include payment addresses for Cardano sidechains, such as Mamba and Milkomeda, allowing wallets and other platforms to utilize the information for cross-chain bridge payments utilizing the community-trusted Handle Standard.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
We believe that the greater risk will be with the adoption curve for the Personalization Standard. Handle owners will need to have enough incentive to use the standard, to add profile pictures, social-media accounts, background images, color schemes, etc. so that platforms also have enough incentive to parse, display and index the information. We believe that if there is adoption for the Standard, then all the other risks listed below are secondary and more easily mitigated.
Another risk that we have assessed is the possibility that users will exploit the Personalization Standard by adding profile pictures that could cause conflict within the community, such as profane or obscene images. For example, if a game player were to join a gaming platform with a profile picture that others consider morally repulsive, there could be community backlash against the Personalization Standard.
A potential solution for this risk will be to only allow profile pictures from (s)elected Policy IDs, from partner NFT collections, and only if the NFT itself were present within the wallet of the Handle owner requesting the personalization. This would limit the attack surface and would prevent profane or obscene images from being used, while also building engagement within the NFT community.
Furthermore, when transferring funds, if profile pictures are being used as feedback on wallets, then these profile pictures could be used on look-alike phishing attacks. For example, someone could purchase the $acme_ Handle, add to it the same profile picture that $acme had assigned, and use this for potential phishing attacks. There will also be solutions for this. For brands and users that elect to go through a verification process with ADA Handle, we will include a "Verified" status on the Personalization Standard, allowing wallets to detect and deliver this "Verified" status feedback to its users.
Finally, this Handle Personalization Standard will also create a directory structure for organizations building on Cardano, on sidechains and on forks, as platforms will be able to, for example, create a Rolodex-like solution, displaying corporate information as business cards to its visitors.