This is a short questionnaire to find common ground across different DAO identity + credentialing tools. Very short answers (plus links to documentation) to the following questions will suffice.

  1. What is the service that your project or tool provides? (short description)
    1. kycDAO: composable verifications.
    2. Spruce:
    3. Lit Protocol: decentralized access control for granting decryption keys to blockchain users based on any set of on-chain credentials, such as owning an NFT or being a member of a DAO.
    4. Sismo: Sismo is building a privacy-focused attestation system for Web3. Sismo enables you to create granular attestations from the historical data and reputation of your aggregated Ethereum accounts to carfeully curate what you reveal about yourself. Those attestation can be packaged as ZK badges (NT-NFTs) to be used for privacy-preserving access control to gated services or simple reputation signalling.
    5. Deep Skills: aggregates multiple reputation systems, recording data in decentralized network around shared identity (DID). This way, professional identity data becomes reusable, portable and accessible by any application as long as user gives such permissions.
    6. Metagov Gateway: not (yet) a tool intended for DAOs, but Gateway is a bunch of pre-built integrations that pulls data from typical social platforms (Slack, Discord, Reddit, Open Collective, etc.) and exports that data for consumption by governance tools like PolicyKit; technically it’s a reverse proxy for those social APIs.
    7. Station: Decentralized hiring stack for accepting inbound interest for contribution, onboarding contributors with an NFT with evolving metadata (role, guilds, projects, reputation scores).
    8. Wonderverse - Helping DAOs optimize their workflows and manage/pay their contributors for their work. Apart from making it easy for leaders to operate, we provide social context for contributors via task feeds and help contributors build up their web3 resume.
  2. What does your project refer to when it talks about “identity”? E.g. qualities, beliefs, personality traits, appearance, and/or expressions represented by credentials, proofs, identifiers or other means? If your tooling has more features please consider shortly describing them.
    1. kycDAO: “identity’ for us is mostly referred to as the government-issued identity of a person. We issue an on-chain “identifier” as a non-transferable NFT, but this identifier does not contain any personal data, only the proof of verification of the identity.
    2. Sismo: We see identities as a set of inventories of curated credentials and facts about one self.
    3. Lit Protocol: Hoping to support the consent framework for web3 users who want to grant access to private data to other users and apps. What google calls ‘Scopes’ in the context of their API and Sign in With Google, but using a fully dweb stack.
    4. Spruce: Identity is a “ridiculously-wide problem”. It’s different things to different groups, and ended putting up a lot more into the authentication and authorization side, e.g. Sign In With Ethereum (i.e. how do you use an identifier to authenticate). Once you add context, you can say this identifier for this context, this identifier for something else, etc. Core We’re less opinionated about credentialing dpeending on context. DAO reputation is.
    5. Deep Skills: Decentralized identifier and attributes (credentials, data points, attestations, badges)
    6. Metagov Gateway: right now, there’s a manual process where we integrate user ids across multiple platforms (similar to what Sourcecred does actually). With tighter integrations we just use OAuth.
    7. Station: The relationship between a person and an organization and documenting the relationship over time (e.g. roles, project involvement, contribution history).
    8. Wonderverse: The different pieces of contributions an individual has made to organizations they are part of and the skills they are building while working in DAOs.
  3. How does your tool, framework, or DAO implement your version of “identity” (or expect identity to be implemented)? Please be clear whether any given part is on-chain or off-chain.
    1. kycDAO: We verify the identity and safelist the wallet to mint a non-transferable NFT as an identifier.
    2. Sismo: Our protocol allows users to curate and develop their identities by building them up with both onchain badges and offchain attestations. For adoption and technical reasons, we first consider any EVM address as a proxy for an identity but will probably move to crosschain DID later on.
    3. Lit Protocol: Apps and users can use decentralized access control to provision symmetric de-encryption keys to users and apps, based on on-chain credentials.
    4. Spruce:
    5. Deep Skills: Cross-chain DID, data storage (Ceramic), schema management, issuer trust registry, scoring models marketplace
    6. Metagov Gateway: we don’t expect identity to be implemented in any particular way; it’s just an entity resolution / entity merge problem for us.
    7. Station: One off-chain account per wallet, one ****NFTs per organization involvement, also looking into DIDs/VCs to be issued by Station or the DAOs themselves. NFTs provide a central point to access metadata and can also serve as their own DID. NFT transferability is DAO-permissioned.
    8. Wonderverse: Users are able to build their web3 resume by showcasing what DAOs they’re part of, what teams they’ve worked in and the piece of work they’ve done. Currently this is off-chain, but pursuing being able publish tasks on chain according to a standard.
  4. What are your tooling’s main use-cases? I.e. how does a DAO benefit from using your tooling? What problems can DAOs can solve with it? Just a couple of words, e.g. reputation, credentialing, permissions, etc. Think tags.
    1. kycDAO: offer to solve the on-chain KYC problem
    2. Sismo: Privacy-preserving attestation generation for building pseudonymous personas to participate in governance while still leveraging your reputation/history. Can be used for Sybil-resistance, improved whitelisting, proof of participation-based governance, etc...
    3. Lit Protocol: decentralized identity based encryption service
    4. Spruce:
    5. Deep Skills: professional reputation and capabilities of DAO contributors
    6. Metagov Gateway: it isn’t really designed for DAOs at the moment, but eventually the idea is to make it easy for online communities to deploy and manage a bunch of governance apps by helping communities publish the data needed for governance workflows
    7. Station: Onboarding new contributors onto teams. Access management via token-gating on contributor NFTs and their metadata. Producing reputation signal and aggregating others.
    8. Wonderverse: Helping DAOs operate more efficiently via granular permissions on a work board, paying contributors in their token of choice, creating social contexts around tasks/work through feeds and helping contributors build their profile.

Once we have a bit of data, we’ll organize the information into a table.

How Identity Works

Things we all do:

It’s valuable to build this stack ourselves, but there is a lot of redundancy. I think moving forward there will be more specialization. But right now you either build teh full-stack or it doesn’t work.

Use-cases we want to support