Treasury Proposal: Encointer Self-Sovereign Identity Parachain for Polkadot

4yrs ago
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Encointer is a platfrom for self-sovereign identity and local community currencies with self-issued universal basic income.
The fundament of Encointer is its unique-proof-of-personhood protocol which leverages the fact that a human can only be in one place at one time.
Employing physical concurrent pseudonym key-signing parties, Encointer aims to bring self-sovereign identity with strong guarantees to Polkadot.

What Encointer SSI will enable for the Polkadot Ecosystem:

  • one-person-one-vote governance schemes
  • sybil-attack prevention for various use cases (faucets, airdrops, social media)
  • proof-of-location: We can learn in what region people are at the time of Encointer ceremonies because their physical presence is attested by other humans.
  • selective disclosure of verifyable credentials thanks to trusted execution environments (TEEs) (built on SubstraTEE)

The current status of Encointer is a functional prototype with two live testnets: Gesell and Cantillon. Our bot communities are constantly actively testing. Cantillon development has been funded with a web3 grant which has been delivered in July.

https://book.encointer.org/testnets.html

Moreover, we developed a mobile phone app based on polkawallet.io for the purpose of participating at Encointer Ceremonies and as a wallet for Encointer local currencies. Showcase:

https://youtu.be/tcgpCCYBqko

Encointer is now actively planning pilot projects with NGO's targeting local communities in developing nations where many people have neither a state-issued ID document nor a bank account - but do have a mobile phone.
We aim at furthering financial inclusion and improving on equal opportunity for all humans. Encointer is a non-profit Swiss association.

Read our primer article: https://medium.com/@funny_mango_mouse_595/towards-a-decentralized-global-universal-basic-income-995651b2ceb6

Encointer requests funding from the Polkadot treasury to:

  1. Integrate testnet Gesell with Rococo as a parachain (local testnet first, then Rococo as soon as it allows new parachains (currently there's a freeze))
  2. Demonstrate SSI authentication on a second parachain (i.e. subsocial) through HRMP (the most simple claim being that certain AccountId has attended the last N subsequent ceremonies and therefore can claim this only for one account). Encointer is the ISSUER of that claim, the other parachain is the VERIFYER in need for sybil-attack prevention, the account holder being the SUBJECT.
  3. Participate in first Kusama slot auction with a Gesell-style parachain (transparent, pure substrate pallets) and set up crowdfunding
  4. Participate in first Polkadot slot auction with a Cantillon-style parachain (SubstraTEE-based, privacy-enhanced and scalable with sharding) and set up crowdfunding

This proposal also covers the following maintenance expenditures:

  • infrastructure: servers for validators and other services
  • substrate dependency upgrade to 2.0.0 once released (thereby upgrading substrate-api-client and SubstraTEE at the same time which are currently on alpha.7)

Assuming the current DOT valuation of ~6$ we would commit to deliver the above for 7000 DOT (bond: 350 DOT)

Disclosure: The "Encointer Testnet Cantillon" web3 grant is currently the associations only capital and is paid in vested DOTs, which means the association lacks
liquidity to pay developers. We can't access the recent gains on DOT valuation which we will gladly contribute to further development entirely as soon as they become transferrable.
We are a non-profit association and will spend all funds on furthering the associations' goals. No risk of overpaying this proposal.

Our submitted proposal: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/9

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