KILT Decentralized Identity Provider (DIP) - Polkadot Treasury Proposal
BOTLabs GmbH, the initial developer of KILT Protocol, is requesting funds from the Polkadot Treasury for work on the Decentralized Identity Provider (DIP), which has been ongoing for a few months now.
In short, the DIP is a protocol based on XCM that allows KILT identities to be bridged to any destination that XCM is able to reach, i.e., fellow parachains, the Polkadot Relay Chain, or other consensus systems.
The protocol implementation is already in the development phase, after the original idea was presented and refined with fellow projects.
More documentation about the system design and architecture will follow, but the main development work can be tracked on the KILT GitHub space, currently mainly as part of this Pull Request.
The full proposal can be found here (comment access): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1apqOcH5a5fV7pri_MVm9O5ExuHuOWs2Z4IbX-skWu5E.
How to verify the document integrity
The current version of the proposal document has been digitally signed with one of the DIDs that BOTLabs GmbH controls.
To verify the signature:
- Download the PDF version of the Google Document linked above.
- Download the DID signature of the file from IPFS, with CID QmRcYyPcCKGDQno2m5qBSZq7dftoZKuwraF9C9M96rXR36 (e.g., ipfs.io).
- Visit didsign.io, and upload both the PDF file and the downloaded signature. The signature should verify correctly and link to the KILT tx in which the timestamp was generated.
- To verify the back-link from the DID to the account to which the funds must be sent if the Proposal is accepted, copy the account in the Proposal (15oXzySe6tjF2MumHfUodH8pFQWjy2hraRmXUJXXMKKY6p3F for quick reference) and paste it in w3n.id. The account must be linked to the same web3name that signed the proposal document.
Further Discussions
Please post any questions/concerns/feedback in one of the following ways:
- In the comments section below
- In the Polkadot Direction Element channel
- Using one of the contacts included at the end of the proposal document
Comments (19)
And why should the Polkadot treasury fund this? Unsure why well funded teams with live tokens are allowed to take funds from the treasury? Keep the treasury for supporting infrastructure and new ideas and projects. If you have launched your token, and made money, then better use that for building things, rather than asking money from treasury. I think community will still vote aye for this and it hurts to see governance downgrading every day
@72e116ffdb204062b8d753445
Thanks for your comment.
In fact this proposal is exactly about infrastructure. The two pallets we ask funding for enable all parachains to either use or become a decentralized identity provider, in essence creating an identity infrastructure for the Polkadot ecosystem.
Without this infrastructure, any parachain that requires some kind of digital identity would need to build their own infrastructure, leading to duplicate work, incompatibility, and a delayed and costly time to market for projects.
KILT normally provides DIDs (decentralized identifiers) and verifiable credentials for applications via RPC and extrinsics interfaces. Providing this functionality for other parachains via XCM, and opening it in a way that other parachains can also become identity providers, was not on the KILT roadmap, but was requested by the fellow parachains. We tried to make this clear by quoting six ecosystem projects in the document.
We think the DIP will be a valuable accelerator for the whole ecosystem, will provide an excellent showcase for the power of XCM, and will help Polkadot to prove the power of a collaborative ecosystem.
In regards to the monetary aspect: The funds requested make up roughly 3% of the total spending we had for KILT in the past 5 years (not counting KSM and Polkadot slots). And it is our first Polkadot Treasury proposal ever. So please rest assured: this is not KILT‘s new business model.
Best,
Ingo
This kind of feels like very basic functionality / core feature for Kilt that should be covered by your own development budget. Not sure the treasury should be paying for a parachain to integrate their tech with other projects.