Author: Biteye Core Contributor Crush
Editor: Biteye Core Contributor Crush
Source: @BiteyeCN
As the airdrop army grows stronger, project teams have become increasingly cautious about airdrop distributions, and the popular project Worldcoin is no exception.
Despite major exchanges like OKX and Binance announcing the listing of their token $WLD, as a project that aims to distribute airdrops to all of humanity, Worldcoin faces a heavier task of preventing witchcraft attacks. This has led to much controversy surrounding iris authentication.
In addition, the recently concluded Linea testnet activity also introduced identity verification to counter witchcraft attacks. Users who complete the identity verification process can receive an additional 2,500 points.
Currently, the project teams' attitude towards witchcraft is evident, and completing account authentication has become an essential lesson for everyone involved in the project. Today's article will introduce several popular identity verification and witchcraft prevention projects.
01 World ID
Introduction
Worldcoin is a cryptography project founded by Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, in 2020. The project aims to use blockchain technology to establish an open-source protocol for global financial fairness and inclusivity.
With the popularity of ChatGPT, this project from 2020 has gradually gained recognition. However, in June of the same year, Worldcoin raised $25 million at a valuation of $1 billion. The investment lineup was impressive, including Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, a 16 z, Multicoin Capital, as well as LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
In late March 2021, Worldcoin raised $100 million at a valuation of $3 billion.
Currently, in many countries around the world, there are still many people without legal identity. What Worldcoin wants to do is to provide these people with a unique digital identity.
The purpose is to create a digital economy that anyone can participate in and ultimately benefit from this decentralized collective ownership.
In order to achieve this goal, the first thing is to ensure that its tokens are used by enough people, so token airdrops are essential.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, Worldcoin wants to carry out such a large-scale airdrop, and the anti-sybil task it faces is bound to be more burdensome. Therefore, they directly came up with a hardcore authentication method, directly confirming the real identity of users through their iris information.
Worldcoin consists of three parts: tokens, World ID (DID), and World APP (wallet). World ID is used to verify the unique identity of the user and prevent sybil attacks, and World APP is used to receive airdrops of $WLD.
Currently, there are many methods for real person authentication, such as face recognition, fingerprints, and genes. Worldcoin adopts iris verification, which values its uniqueness and anti-fraud nature. In short, the difficulty of forging iris information is higher.
The promotion and operation of World ID are relatively simple. Worldcoin has launched an iris detection device called Orb. They then recruit local agents in various countries. After assessment and training, Orb is distributed to these agents, and the agents are responsible for iris collection tasks.
The more iris images the agents collect, the more rewards they will receive. In addition, each time a user's iris is collected, they will receive some small gifts and token rewards, so the overall effect of offline promotion is good.
Due to the hardcore nature of identity authentication, it cannot be completed without Orb. In addition, collecting users' biological information is too sensitive. Many countries' laws prohibit institutions from collecting users' biological information without permission and taking it out of the country.
Therefore, the biggest obstacles to iris authentication at present are the availability of Orb devices and compliance restrictions imposed by sovereign states.
Worldcoin plans to increase the number of Orb devices to 1500 in the summer and autumn of this year, and will also launch World ID in more countries and regions, such as the United States, Mexico, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Singapore, and others.
Projects currently using World ID:
Operation
Due to the authentication of World ID requiring cooperation with Orb for iris collection, if your country or region is not supported by Wordcoin, you will not be able to obtain a World ID. Therefore, here we will only discuss the operational aspects and the basic principles of authentication.
First, users need to download their wallet World APP, which is currently available on major app stores.
After the wallet is installed, it will ask you to choose whether to create a new wallet or import an existing one. When creating a new wallet, it will also ask you to verify your phone number, but you can choose to skip that and verify later.
If you choose to verify immediately, you will need to turn off VPN. After verification, you will receive 25 $WLD tokens.
The basic principle of verification is as follows: when creating a new wallet, you will obtain a key pair, including a private key and a public key. The user provides the public key to the iris detector Orb for detection. Using algorithms, Orb calculates an IrisHash unique identifier based on the collected iris image.
When this IrisHash is not found in the database, it means the user is registering for the first time. Only through this verification can the user successfully register a new World ID.
02 Gitcoin passport
Introduction
Gitcoin Passport should be the most well-known identity verification system. Gitcoin is an open-source donation project based on Ethereum, whose main purpose is to help raise funds for open-source projects and build a bridge of communication between projects and users.
Gitcoin was founded in 2017 by American engineer and entrepreneur Kevin Owocki. In April 2021, it received a financing of 11.3 million USD from Paradigm, and in November of the same year, it raised 500,000 USD from the Ethereum Foundation.
As a donation platform, Gitcoin has raised early-stage funding for many excellent projects, and these projects have also distributed airdrops to donating users, such as GTC, ENS, BrightID, and so on.
Due to the ease of obtaining project airdrops through donations, there have been a large number of users who donate solely for the airdrops. Therefore, Gitcoin Passport was born.
Gitcoin Passport is a Web 3 identity verification aggregator designed to prevent Sybil attacks. It can collect verifiable credentials to prove user identity and credibility while protecting user privacy.
In Gitcoin's quadratic funding mechanism, there is a concept of matching donations. When users make donations, Gitcoin's funding pool will also match a portion of funds to the project based on the number of donors.
However, only users with a Gitcoin Passport score of over 21.76 are eligible for matching donations.
With the increasing influence of Gitcoin, its Passport is gradually being accepted by other project parties, such as the previously mentioned new public chain Linea.
In the future, it is highly probable that the operations of some projects will require a Gitcoin Passport score as a threshold. As users, it is necessary for us to complete the corresponding authentication tasks.
Projects adopting Gitcoin Passport:
Actions
https://passport.gitcoin.co
Gitcoin passport operation is relatively simple. Open their official website and see all the tasks clearly.
After completing each task, you will be given corresponding scores, such as binding Google account, Facebook account, and Discord account.
Through the completion of these tasks, Gitcoin gives an overall rating of the user's authenticity. The higher the score, the more trustworthy your wallet address is.
If other projects adopt Gitcoin Passport scores, the higher the score, the lower the probability of being considered as a witch when interacting with this project.
For the specific scores corresponding to each task and how to achieve a score of 20 or more with the lowest cost, you can refer to the mind map and strategy introduced by Biteye earlier.
"A Diagram to Teach You How to Save Money and Improve Gitcoin Passport Score Quickly"
"Gitcoin Passport Latest Verification Guide"
03 Nomis
Introduction
Nomis is a reputation project that suddenly became popular a few days ago. It was launched by Web 3 voucher data network Galxe with the aim of establishing an open Web 3 on-chain data reputation system utilizing the transparency of blockchain.
In airdrop activities, malicious users often profit in various ways, causing great trouble to the project parties and community members.
Although blockchain has its own transparency and can see these malicious users transferring the same amount of tokens between multiple wallets, without appropriate tools, this information is useless.
As such a tool, Nomis uses a custom wallet scoring model to evaluate the eligibility of addresses for airdrops. The score is based on more than 30 parameters and takes into account different types of wallet activities.
Through this model, project parties can customize parameters and weights to calculate users' scores. Once a user's score falls below a specific level, they can be clearly marked as malicious.
Nomis has always believed that even if the owner of the wallet is not malicious, using tools like Nomis can greatly reduce the workload of manual review.
Similarly, although it is impossible to change the minds of malicious users, at least their operations can be rendered ineffective, which is what Nomis aims to do.
The reason why this project became popular is related to the current popular layer 2 public chain zkSync. Just as everyone was interacting with zkSync, the zkSync official suddenly retweeted Nomis' tweet, causing panic and many people started to worry that zkSync would also start cracking down on malicious accounts.
Nomis also published a related article, stating that they are the first identity protocol deployed on zkSync, which is significant for them.
But instead of worrying about the project team catching witches, it is wiser to be prepared in advance and improve your score. That's the better choice.
Using Nomis projects:
https://nomis.cc/multichain
Open the official website and you can see the comprehensive scores for our connected wallets on the left side. Users with scores above 40 can mint the Score SBT on the right side, which requires payment. In other words, 40 points may be a passing score.
If you want to improve your score here, you can take a look at the score composition below the score in the Stats section.
Based on the description on the right side, we can basically summarize the following operations to improve the score:
Increase wallet funds
Increase trading volume
Increase trading frequency
Increase wallet NFT quantity
Increase total NFT value
https://mirror.xyz/0xnomis.eth/ ne_vvBn 04 A 0 OmInI 2 ssirP 4 iMCwb_E 0 jNZcV 8 znQ 9 go
In addition to some operations of the project itself, the article mentioned above that zkSync was launched on Mirror can also be minted for commemorating. Optimism's fees are very cheap, about 0.1 U, and currently only 28 people have minted.
04 Degenscore
Introduction
Degenscore is a decentralized identity system based on on-chain behavior. Unlike Nomis mentioned above, Degenscore only supports Ethereum mainnet.
Users with a score of over 700 can mint a SBT for Degenscore Beacon, but reaching 700 points is not easy.
Although it is difficult, once certified by Degenscore, there are still many benefits.
Many projects cooperate with Degenscore and provide whitelist benefits to users. The most well-known one is the whitelist of Lens, which was worth about 270 U at its peak.
Projects that adopt Degenscore:
And so on...
Degenscore has many collaborative projects, which can be viewed on the official website. The projects listed in Cafe basically adopt Degenscore.
Operation
https://degenscore.com
When you open Degenscore's official website, you will see the Cafe interface. Here, Opportunities, Abilities, and Jobs are included, which straightforwardly inform users of the benefits of holding Beacon tokens.
Opportunities: Beacon holders can experience the beta features of these collaborative projects in advance.
Abilities: Beacon holders have special privileges in collaborative projects.
Jobs: Beacon holders can get priority job opportunities in recommended projects and companies.
Click on Beacon in the menu bar above and select Overview to see the application interface. The minting process is simple, with the only requirement being that the address must exceed 700 points.
To improve your score, simply go to "Beacon" under the top menu bar and interact with the projects that the top 100 high-scoring users have interacted with.
Since this is on the mainnet, users need to prepare some ETH as GAS.
05 Sismo
Introduction
Sismo is an on-chain reputation project based on zero-knowledge proofs. It is said to be a project started by a former employee of Aave and completed a $10 million financing in December 2021.
The investment lineup is quite strong, including Framework Ventures, Delphi Digital, Fabric Ventures, Global Coin Research, Seed Club Ventures, and more.
One of its main features is that users can prove ownership of a certain asset without revealing their wallet address.
This is extremely attractive to users who want to showcase their strength but are afraid of leaking their privacy. For example, Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, mentioned in his blog that he highly values the identity ecosystem and gives an example, Sismo, which is a project he specifically mentioned.
(Vitalik's blog, https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/12/05/excited.html)
So how does Sismo solve this problem? In the encrypted world, many users do not have just one wallet. For example, one wallet has 100 ETH and another wallet has 100 UNI. When I participate in the corresponding conference, I need to show proof of assets for both wallets separately.
There are two problems here. One is that I need to publicly disclose my two addresses, which compromises privacy. The other is that I need to provide proof of assets twice, which is cumbersome.
In Sismo's official introduction, the concept of single sign-on is mentioned. This means that users only need to log in once, and other places can be verified without logging in. For example, once you log in to your Google account, Gmail, YouTube, Google Translate, Google Docs, and other platforms will automatically log in without requiring users to repeatedly enter their account passwords for logins.
Sismo's badge serves this purpose. Users only need to go through verification once to generate a badge, which can be sent to a new address without any assets.
In this way, even if the new address doesn't have the asset, with the badge, it can prove your identity on the chain. And since the badges are on a single address, users don't need to use multiple wallets for multiple verifications.
Projects using Sismo:
Multi-chain DeFi aggregator rhinofi
Operation
The operation of Sismo is currently to obtain badges. There are two main types of badges: official badges and third-party badges, such as badges that can be obtained by users who donate to G 15.
https://app.sismo.io/
Open the link above, and the first thing you will see is the badge of G 15. If you cannot find it, you can search for keywords in the search box on the left side.
(Note: The website app.sismo.io may become unavailable in the future, you can use apps.sismo.io as an alternative.)
Enter the badge details page and claim it directly. If your wallet doesn't meet the requirements, you will be asked to switch to another wallet.
Currently, many badges have time restrictions and there are only a few that can be claimed. After the update, Sismo also provides the function to create badges.
Open the website below and click on "Create a Data Group" to create your own badge. Although self-created badges may not have much weight, consider it as an experiential project.
https://factory.sismo.io/
06 Summary
The above-mentioned projects are only a few of the popular and noteworthy projects in the field of identity verification. There are still many other similar projects:
Binance Account Bound (BAB): Identity verification for Binance wallet accounts, complete KYC to qualify, threshold for Binance-related projects
Galxe Passport: Passport introduced by Galxe, complete KYC to qualify, threshold for some projects on Galxe
Debank: A multi-chain unified DeFi wallet that recently introduced the badge feature and has its own WEB 3 ID, but requires payment of $96
Summary of the five projects mentioned above:
1. World ID is currently the most controversial. From the perspective of witch prevention, its iris authentication can filter out the majority of witches. However, due to the difficulty of verification, some genuine users have also been filtered out.
Collecting users' biometric information is a sensitive operation. Although Worldcoin claims not to save users' iris images and will delete these images once the algorithm is optimized, we don't know when the optimization will happen and whether there will be leaks during the collection process by local agents.
Also, due to the limited number of Orbs, the efficiency of this off-chain verification is far less than on-chain. Therefore, the reliability, effectiveness, and security of World ID as an identity authentication tool still need to be verified.
2. Gitcoin Passport is widely used. It uses a large number of tasks to verify users' identities, both on-chain and off-chain. It has a relatively comprehensive and reliable evaluation of user identities.
In the future, many projects may adopt Gitcoin Passport verification as a tool to filter out witches. Users who want to receive airdrops should pay more attention to and improve their scores on Gitcoin Passport.
3. Nomis is the simplest and most cost-saving option. Users don't need to complete various tasks, only need to perform more operations, save more money, and buy more NFTs on-chain to improve their overall score.
Moreover, it also involves a multi-chain comprehensive score, allowing users to operate on Layer 2 chains, which not only saves money but also provides a more diversified evaluation of users.
4. Degenscore is the most difficult and expensive to operate. It involves multiple tasks and requires operations on the mainnet. Users may need to prepare a significant amount of fees to support the interactions, which results in high costs.
Although the amount of funds can partly indicate the authenticity of an address, for a project, the premise of filtering out genuine users is authenticity, not just the amount of funds.
Using Degenscore as a witch judgment tool will lead to severe distortion of the results. In my opinion, Degenscore is more like a rich people's club or, as its name suggests, a Degen (experienced, heavy user) club. Therefore, ordinary users do not need to be too obsessed with their score.
5. Lastly, Sismo's advantage lies in its use of zero-knowledge proof and emphasis on privacy protection. However, Sismo is still in its early stages with few cooperative projects, and its technical roadmap is subject to change. Therefore, there may not be many things for users to experience at the moment. For now, users can try out badge collection or its badge creation feature and stay updated with its latest developments.
