[AMA Recap] Litentry x Binance Official Telegram ( 17th, June 2022)
Catch up on the latest discussion of the Litentry team during an AMA with Binance on their official Telegram channel. The AMA was divided into 3 segments and community members had chances to win a total airdrop quantity will be $5,000 worth of $LIT by joining Litentry social channels and answering questions from the team.
[Note: some of the text may have been edited for clarity and grammar.]
Segment #No1: The host will ask the Litentry team a few questions.
Host (Rika): Good day Hanwen, thank you for joining us today, would you please introduce yourself to the chat and share a quick overview of LIT?
Hanwen: Hey, thanks Ribka, I am very excited to share about Litentry and our products here! I am a software engineer and start working in the blockchain field since 2016. I worked at Parity before and from 2019 I am building the Substrate multi-chain identity protocol Litentry. And today we also have Jacky here from our team as well.
Jacky: Hi I am Jacky Kong. I joined Litentry in March 2021 as Director of Growth. Before Litentry I worked in a crypto venture capital called IOSG Ventures.
Hawen: A short intro for Litentry
Litentry is a cross-chain privacy-preserved #DID Aggregator that allows users to collect their historical cross-chain data including credit and on-chain reputation, and aggregate them into one identity. Our core architecture consists of 3 layers: Source data layer, address analysis layer & Identity aggregation layer. By indexing multi-chain data or data analysis results, identity data can be aggregated and computed in the private, isolated environment of Off-chain TEE workers, and finally, a multi-chain aggregated identity calculation result can be provided to users. And can be widely used in lending, on-chain governance, airdrop or IDO whitelist, and other scenarios.
We have been working on DID since 2019 and we are working to become the first and the standard of cross-chain identity. We’ve received a grant from Web3 Foundation and joined the Substrate Builder Program, got listed on Binance Launch Pool in February 2021, and won Kusama and Polkadot Parachain slot in April 2022. We have certainly demonstrated background in the #DID field and are actively building a wide range of products that provide identity solutions. Our development team is distributed across Europe and Asia, the headquarter is in Berlin. Our team now has more than 40 members and most of us are developers.
Our goal is to become a Web3 identity Hub. In one sentence, with an aggregated cross-chain identity, we enrich the context behind the web3 user, blockchain projects could offer dedicated graded identity services/functions to power better Web3 services.
Remy: You can also watch this video explaining Litentry DID Aggregation https://youtu.be/SImEtW9SNxE
Host: Let’s jump right into the first segment of today’s AMA session. Here’s our first question for you.
Q1: What is DID and why do people care?
Hanwen: Thanks for the link! Forget to mention that LIT is Litentry’s multi-chain native token, available on Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum, Polkadot, and Kusama.
A major problem that we are facing in the Web2 world is that, when you entrust safe storage of your passwords and online activity data to third parties on the app-centric internet of today, you are often asked to comply with ambiguous and unfair privacy policies which involve handing over control of your data. As a result, users’ data is often harvested and used in ways you do not have a say in and which you have not approved of. For example, Facebook makes its money from advertisers who pay for people’s data to sell ads without necessarily the individual’s consent.
DID, short for decentralized identity, is an assembled collection of identity data that is generated on decentralized applications, with which users have the ultimate ownership and control of their ID. These data are decentralized in the sense that they are not collected by any centralized institution, not stored on centralized file storage, or managed/ taken advantage of by any third party without the permission of the identity owner.
Let’s make an example of the usage of DID. In terms of Defi lending, one of the big problems that are happening is that people have to put more than 1 dollar as collateral to borrow a dollar because you don’t know who your counterparty is. That’s called overcollateralizing and is causing low capital efficiency. With asset holding status & borrowing history from a decentralized and especially aggregated identity, Litentry can calculate an individual’s credit rating to facilitate analyzed Defi services, and potentially leads to under-collateralizing:
- With on-chain governance history, Litentry can solve big whale issues and empower those with good on-chain behavior and special contribution, leading to the balance of voting power;
- With all the on-chain activities data we aggregate and attach to addresses, A user could generate proof in a decentralized way and submit it to other on-chain businesses like IDO/airdrop whitelisting, which is also the SoulDrops Vitalik mentioned in his latest paper.
And so many more to achieve!
Host: Q2.Congratulation on winning the Parachain auction. What is the plan after?
Jacky: When Litentry becomes one of Polkadot Parachains connected to and secured by the central Relay Chain, we share and benefit from the security, scalability, interoperability, and governance of the Polkadot network, all with our own individualistic design. Also, its composability nature allows sharing of data and assets between Parachains, opening up a host of new use cases and applications beyond your imagination. We are able to deploy the Litentry decentralized identity aggregation protocol, which means we can aggregate identity data in web3 in a decentralized way to support many different use cases.
Actually, we already have a number of applications in the ecosystem now, for example, we help Polkastarter to do on-chain IDO whitelisting. We have My Crypto Profile launched its new identity as a service version (the front-end of Litentry aggregated identity) to support managing your identity & get indexed by other projects in a secure, decentralized way. (mycryptoprofile.io)
Web3go, a Polkadot data analysis platform & Drop3, an airdrop platform based on your Litentry identity credentials. We also have a lot of projects building infrastructure around Litentry’s DID protocol like the Polkadot Name System. After we become parachain, all these services will onboard the Litentry chain and interoperate. And we do have a DID startup grant program for projects to come on board and start building on the Litentry blockchain.
One more interesting thing is that with the cross-chain messaging (XCM) feature on Polkadot, we are able to communicate with other parachains like Moonbeam and Acala so that we could use LIT in more Defi services. We are working on the integration and tests and will disclose more info when the tests are done. Thank you
Host: Q3. Are there any new updates you would like to share?
Hanwen: Many exciting things are happening. Today we are launching My Crypto Profile 2.0’s pre-release and have internal testing. The application is the frontend interface for aggregating identities developed by the Litentry team, it is a decentralized Web3 personal data management tool designed for users to aggregate and manage their personal data in both Web2.0 services & Web3.0 blockchains and decentralized storage systems. With MCP, users are enabled to provide data access to 3rd party Dapps to maximize personal identity value without compromising privacy & anonymity. Now you can experience the aggregated identity with real usage of a Web3 Game PhalaWorld. You may ask the ambassadors in this group for more information.
In the new version MyCryptoProfile, we supported most EVM-based and substrate-based address linking, support Twitter, Discord, Github, and discourse accounting linking. We allow customized identity data aggregation metrics by Web3 projects. And enables Dapps to query a user’s aggregated identity data through a single crypto address.
Litentry’s airdrop platform Drop3 has been focused on the anti-fraud side lately and will be soon connecting with projects to provide this as a service through an API. We are particularly interested in funding projects that can give us additional User data to learn and improve our model.
Together with Parity (Polkadot) team, we are also working on the new governance module, as we put lots of effort into the governance part.
#DID research and its nexus to sociality and public goods also mean a lot to us. We kickstarted a soul-run research DAO called Identity’s Discourse from a group of artists, researchers, and technologists committed to amplifying the positive social changes #DID could bring, and more importantly, allowing collective efforts in finding innovative identity solutions. We’ve hosted great intellectual discussions around the fields of Soulbound Token and social layer, and are aspired to bring new insights to the Web3 ecosystem.
Host: Q4. In Litentry’s network ecosystem, how do data control and revenue rights return to users? How is the value of these data reflected?
Hanwen: We have a very strict user data authorization control & privacy protection setting. We don’t store any user data, we only store the linking relationship between addresses. On the Litentry Webapp, users have full rights to decide what addresses they would like to link or delink, and which Dapps could index their identity data. Also, Litentry integrates substraTEE privacy computation solution, which means when calculating the identity data, even Litentry’s validator has no knowledge of the actual identity data.
Host: On to the last question for this segment! Q5. Is there any real use case that community members can experience soon?
Hanwen: We have just released MyCryptoProfile by Litentry’s first use case with a Metaverse Play-to-Build project PhalaWorld, mainly to empower PhalaWorld players to build their Web3 aggregated identity and enhance their Web3 gaming experiences. We help PhalaWorld to aggregate & evaluate their players’ contribution value based on users’ previous behaviors on Web2 and Web3 service platforms such as social media and discord community, as well as their Web3 behavior data on multiple chains — in PhalaWorld, which will be transferred into their character attributes of Spirit NFT. The higher the level is, the greater the advantage users enjoy. Feel free to try it out now! It’s going to be the first Soulbound NFT in the industry, based on the aggregated identity! While Metamask helps users to control funds, and we help users to control personal data, the next version of MyCryptoProfile by Litentry will be presented as a browser extension. The airdrop module is also ready for having anti-fraud airdrops with our business partners. We have done a discord airdrop test, and plan to do more!
Jacky Kong: For more info about My Crypto Profile by Litentry’s testing, please join : http://discord.gg/CFVSw4tHeM
Segment #No2: Segment 2: LIT Team will ask the chat a total of 5 questions. A link to a google form will be sent into the chat for each question, so a total of 5 Google forms. Each Google form will accept submissions for 2 minutes. Participants must fill in: (a) the answer — (b) Telegram Username — © Binance ID. There will be $5,000 worth of $LIT to be airdropped for all those who answer correctly 5/5 questions.
Host: Great! Here is the form with all the questions, you have 5 minutes to answer, users that get all 5 answers right will share a bag of $5,000 in $LIT tokens
Hanwen:
Q1: What is the name of the project that is launching in collaboration with My Crypto Profile by Litentry.
Q2: Why is identity aggregation with privacy-preserving important?
Q3: What is the first layer of Litentry infrastructure?
Q4: What is the focus of Drop3 recently?
Q5: What is Web3Go?
Host: Awesome! if you paid attention you would know the answers. 1 minute left and Finished!!! The form is closed. Hanwen what are the answers?
Hanwen:
A1: PhalaWorld is the project we first collaborate on.
A2: Enrich web3 user data as web3 accounts are usually fragmented.
A3: Source data layer is the first layer of Litentry.
A4: Anti-fraud is the focus of Drop3 now and will be exposed soon.
A5: Web3go is a cross-chain open data analytics platform!
Host:
Thank you so much for sharing this is awesome. Congrats to those who have had 5/5 correct. Now on, for the next segment. As we move on to Segment 3.
Segment #No3: Chat asks LIT Team questions. Please take the time to think of some good questions, which will underline quality and uniqueness.
Q1. Can you explain the Litentry ecosystem “Credit Governance Model”? Who is responsible for managing the system, and what is required to qualify for authorization? And On what types of decisions can they vote & contribute to the project?
Hanwen: Very good question, this comes to the question of how we evaluate credit/reputation, we are adopting the innovative governance model from Substrate and will let the community curate the algorithm with on-chain democracy.
If you ask who, then you may imagine it as a decentralized notary service, it is not owned or held by any institutes or individuals, but owned by a network, and the network won’t disclose any personal information.
To the use case of the voting power, ideally “everything”, but we expected it to be firstly used on big topics with common good affected, a good thing about on-chain governance is transparent and efficient, so having more use cases does not hurt. It is mainly some Busines Development work, we are working on that and it starts from our own community.
Q2: Why is $LIT built on the Substrate chain?
Jacky Kong: There are a couple of reasons: the historical context is that back in the early days of our project, we were using Ethereum to build applications which heavily subject to transaction fees and long duration time. It wasn’t a particularly good experience for both users and developers, so we started to look for alternative products. We believed that cross-chain will be the future of blockchain, and after comparing different projects ex. Cosmos, Polkadot, we decide to move forward with Polkadot.
Polkadot has fast iteration, cutting-edge technology, and high potential in the cross-chain space. It has a vision of helping people build entire blockchains and integrating these blockchains with each other. The CTO, Gavin Wood also has a deep understanding of Web 3 and the blockchain application ecosystem. With Polkadot, we find it relatively easier and more efficient to build our protocol related to building from scratch.
As we all know Polkadot’s goal is to build a “high performance, scalable & heterogeneous multi-chain network” which enables external networks as well as customized layer one “Parachains” to communicate, creating an interconnected internet of blockchains. That’s how it differentiates itself from siloed blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum which are not able to communicate information or value with each other.
Built on Substrate allows us to become a Polkadot Parachain, sharing the security & interoperability of the relay chains while having our own customized blockchain design which is essential for a cross-chain identity aggregation protocol.
Q3. I’m a long-term holder on LIT. But I didn’t find any stake or liquidity options. But I like your use cases. So have you held any staking or liquidity system to get extra benefits for holders?
Remy: We just launched Litentry on parachains on the 4th of June, on parachain we will activate staking programs for collector/validator ( phase 2 according to our rollout out plan) At the moment, collators are maintained by Litentry team and users make a delegation request through staking. We want the ecosystem to become decentralized once the network is stable and ready to activate staking, we will share the staking program with the community.
Our partners, Acala and Moonbean are working with our devs to activate XCM for Defi applications. It’s still in the early stage but we wish to enable LIT as collaterals and received benefits outside of our native staking on parachains
Host: Thank you everyone for participating in the AMA.
[End of AMA]
About Litentry
Litentry is a Decentralized Identity Aggregator that enables linking user identities across multiple networks. Featuring a DID indexing protocol and a Substrate-built distributed DID validation blockchain, Litentry provides a decentralized, interoperable identity aggregation service that mitigates the difficulty of resolving agnostic DID mechanisms. Litentry provides a secure vehicle through which users manage their identities and dApps obtain real-time DID data of an identity owner across different blockchains.
