Detailed explanation of DID status and future development direction: Web3 enters the next stage of middleware

Original author: Taihe researcher Calvin

Original title: Ti Capital Insights｜DID——Web3 enters the next stage of middleware  

In 1807, after the defeat of the Danish navy in Copenhagen, 90,000 oak trees were planted in order to rebuild the navy and supplement the losses. In 2007, the Danish Nature Agency, the successor to the Royal Forestry Service, informed the Danish Ministry of Defense that 90,000 oak trees were ready to rebuild the navy. The world is always changing faster than we expect.

During the last round of Defi summer, with the upsurge of speculation in liquidity mining, Defi was very hot. An influx of millions of users?"

In hindsight, the question is simplistic and naive. The fundamental reason is that finance always belongs to the underlying facilities, and those who really care about and participate in it belong to a small number of people in the world, perhaps only tens of thousands of people.

This problem has been verified in the last round of Defi summer. Most of the participants are "encrypted natives". For funds and giants, it is not a common C-end user.

In general, Defi belongs to infrastructure, even if speculative factors are taken into account, the number of people interested in it is by no means the majority, which means , with Defi as the ecological core to expand the blockchain boundary, one day it will reach the limit.

DeFi still has a threshold, and it will not be directly oriented to users in the future, because our on-chain activities are still completely dependent on "enthusiasts" since 2018. But ordinary users are more likely to interact with DeFi through mobile wallets as infrastructure in the future rather than directly.

Defi will continue to shine, but it will be used as an infrastructure, as the "root" of this big tree, and it will depend on Applications, relying on social networking and entertainment, expand Web3 players and conquer the world.

Under the assumption of this conjecture, DID, as an essential component of social and entertainment, will also become a middleware for large-scale applications, a bit like the previous stage Chainlink to Defi.

This article only talks about two things, the current status of DID development and the guesswork for future development.

1. Current status of DID (original short ID)

The concept of macro DID is very Wide: Including the explicit tags formed by the collection of all chains, and in the future, it will even include off-chain identity verification on-chain, forming on-chain identities, etc.

1.1

Currently we shrink the long public key to a human readable address The name is also the most superficial thing of DID, but it carries the things of DID entrance; the threshold is very low but the ecological card position is very important:

ETH ecology has ENS, The registration volume is about 2 million; the Solana ecology has Bonfida with a registration volume of about 200,000; Avalanche has Avvy Domains with a registration volume of about 10,000; Polkadot has Polkadot Name System (PNS) with a registration volume of about 15,000; ICP has ICNS and IC Naming; BSC has SPACE ID; FLOW has flows; Cosmos has EVNS, and cosmos public chains may all use this domain name system.

The cross-chain DID domain name project also has .bit, which supports polygon, TRON, BSC, etc. in addition to ETH; Unipass, the project update is obviously very old, and it is still on the way to support Terra. The homogeneity of this type of project is very serious. It is essentially a ledger system between short domain names and public keys. There is no technical content but the ecological card position is very important.

1.2 SpruceID

Expansion of auxiliary domain names, such as helping web3 users directly use on-chain identities Log in to the SpruceID of the web2 website. This project was led by a16z. At that time, ENS and the ETH Foundation made a tender to unify the ENS address to log in to the web2 website, and set a protocol standard, that is, Spruce won the bid. It has a good relationship with ENS. Draft the ETH DID protocol.

1.3 Ceramic

DID There is also a key component called the data layer.

We have talked about web3 before, one of the most important characteristics is that the protocol layer does not own data, the data is collected and fused here by the user, DID can even be said It is an information bridge between various protocol layers.

From the Defi composability brought about by the BTC assets themselves, we can understand the "data composability brought about when the data is owned by itself". Compared with traditional finance, Defi does not require permission and has no entry threshold. Assets can be transferred between multiple platforms at the same time. The platform does not touch user assets. User assets can be transferred between different platforms. pledge. A fat asset layer and a thin platform layer are formed, and the network effects can be combined with each other between the platform layers.

Then the adhesive of the network effect formed by DID here needs to have a place to carry it, which is Ceramic, where the data from each application is standardized. So Ceramic can be said to be a data protocol specially designed for DID.

There are already many DID and Web3 social platform projects developed on Ceramic, such as CyberConnect, Web3.0 Twitter's Orbis, instant messaging platform The Convo Space, etc.

1.4 Tabbed DID

What Project Galaxy (now renamed GALXE) wants to do is to use the user's information on the chain as an information anchor. For example, if AAVE borrows more than a certain amount, it will issue a "badge", or label it; A "badge" will be issued for a certain transaction amount and labeled.

The advantage of going this way is that this person is covered by labels, and it is easy to portray the image, so that other applications will give users a thick line, and the airdrop is at least more accurate than it is now.

1.5

We can see that different infrastructures solve users from all directions For the problem of identity portrait, the data represented by GRT is crawled (coarse), and then the curator is asked to make a data set, and then used for the application, but it is obviously unrealistic to hand over everyone’s data to the curator.

Represented by Ceramic, the data of each application is classified and modularized, and there is program automation (because the data model is unified) to make user data portraits, which is convenient for different between applications.

Galxe is a representative application that uses NFT to label users and draw a thick line so that users can be easily classified and roughly screened.

2. DID's future development imagination - development history

2.1 

From the author's review of various DID projects or self-proclaimed DID track projects, DID is still in the exploratory stage, and is still in the early stages of development, even in the form of web3 Whether the lower DID is the surface entrance or the underlying infrastructure, each company is different in terms of construction logic.

But one thing has become clearer in the research, DID is very likely to be used as the entry component of Web3, referring to the history of Internet development, it is a bubble that occurs again The game that survives after being squeezed out must be the last survivor after each cycle, and the market will naturally concentrate the traffic.

Like a search engine in the Web2 era, DID will become an entry-level application in Web3.

In the future, everyone will have a DID, which can pass through the entire Web3, even with the development of DID There will be regionalized DIDs in development, such as game DIDs for games and social DIDs for social interactions.

In the future, there will be a much more powerful application on the DID track than the current wallet to manage your own identity, activities, and even assets on the chain. The application will be connected with all the infrastructure on the chain, and even become a bridge from web2 to Web3, a bit like Chainlink to Defi.

2.2

Let’s take a look at Chainlink first, what he does is just an oracle , but based on the continuous extension of basic services, it touches multiple sectors of the current blockchain application. As of now, Chainlink has provided services for a total of 1,213 projects, including 578 DeFi projects, 143 game projects, and 91 public chain projects.

Chainlink's initial service is only to help data that cannot be obtained on the chain, although smart The contract allows credible transactions without a third party, and realizes the traceability and irreversibility of the transaction, but it cannot have direct contact with the data outside the blockchain (such as the acquisition and call of external data, etc.), so an external A Turing machine writes data into a blockchain or distributed ledger.

It plays the role of a bridge between the data source API interface, so as to realize the connection between the block chain interface and the external data API interface, and this Turing machine It is the oracle machine (Oracle).

With the expansion and prosperity of this blockchain application, Chainlink has developed multiple services from the original oracle service, such as generating Random numbers; provide quotations for NFT floor prices; off-chain calculations, fair sorting, and even cross-chain services.

As a large number of smart contract use cases require access to oracles, deploying Chainlink to the new blockchain environment will provide developers on the chain with the ability to develop applications critical infrastructure required.

In 2021, the blockchain has also experienced the spillover effect of ETH, and multiple public chains have begun to develop their own ecology. At this time, an infrastructure that can provide secure data sources on the chain is needed to attract mature Defi protocols, such as Aave\xDollar, etc. were deployed on it, and Chainlink relied on its position as the leading oracle machine to be even more sought after during this period. The requirements for the safety and reliability of the oracle machine made Chainlink's "Matthew Effect" growing.

Chainlink has access to many top L1 blockchains and L2 expansion solutions, including Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Ethereum, Fantom, Harmony, Heco, Moonriver, Optimism, Polygon, Starkware, and xDai.

2.3

Will DID, which is closely related to data, replicate the old way of Chainlink? It seems that the two are very similar, both are simple but basic on-chain data services, with high requirements for security and reliability, and traffic tends to gather at the head.

Although DID is also a data service, the path it solves is completely different from that of Chainlink. Currently, the on-chain data of the blockchain cannot be tampered with based on the blockchain attributes, the data on the chain is trust without certificates, for example, to prove that wallet address A has indeed transferred money to wallet address B, you only need to check the corresponding information on the chain, and do not need a certain application or institution to issue a certificate .

However, this kind of credential-free trust data has limitations for identity information. "Wenpin" trust relies on institutions that issue academic certificates.

DID is based on the management and transmission of user identity information. It is a necessary component for users to handle their own activities on the chain. It can be divided into DID user information collection and DID user identity distribution.

Since DID controls the key for users to enter each section, it is very easy to form an ecological hub The popularity of super applications, AA technology and L2 technology means that the evolution direction of the blockchain has shifted from focusing on "infrastructure" to looking for "super applications".

The "super application" bundled due to previous technical limitations is likely to explode in the next stage. The application will inherit multiple identity management protocols and the Defi foundation Protocols, etc., users can implement high-frequency on-chain operations within this application, trade tokens, trade NFTs, publish news updates, display relationship maps and user portraits, etc.

DID is very likely to become the entrance of web 3 in the form of "smart contract account". Currently, we regard Metamask as the entrance of web3 in terms of demand. Not enough, after the influx of low-threshold masses, an "entry" as comprehensive as possible is needed, which is similar to Google in the web2 era.

However, there are still many problems in DID that need to be solved urgently. There will be no large-scale data leakage and threats; at present, there is no uniformity in the identities issued by various protocols, and there is no uniformity in the behavior on the chain, so it is difficult to achieve large-scale identity management; the current social entertainment and other applications on the chain are constantly weakening. The loss of personnel represents the disappearance of the soil of DID's constant trial and error.

Although DID is in the early stage of development, after Defi, there is a strong demand for blockchain applications to go out of the circle, social entertainment has become a breakthrough, DID is On the eve of the outbreak.

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