Dear Litentry Community,
We can’t believe it’s almost the end of the year! Whether you’re new to the Litentry family or have been with us for a while, we want to express our gratitude for your support. Your ideas, questions, and discussions have played a major role in our efforts to reclaim data ownership and privacy, and we appreciate your contribution.
This year has been challenging for many people and industries, including the crypto and Web3 sectors. However, we have made significant progress and seen improvements despite the challenges. Sometimes building during difficult times can provide a clearer focus and allow us to take the time to carefully develop our projects rather than getting caught up in market hype and rushing things.
As a company that values transparency and communication with our community, we want to share our progress and plans for the coming year. In this article, we will provide an overview of the developments and achievements we have made in 2022, starting with the growth and changes in the Litentry ecosystem. Some of that growth came in the form of a great increase in followers and active engagement on platforms. We are thrilled by the support and enthusiasm of our online community and look forward to continuing to connect with them and bringing our support and education into the Web3 space.
Twitter: 72,000+
Telegram: 8300+
Discord: 2,330+
Medium: 4,600+
In the past year, our ecosystem has grown and strengthened through partnerships that align with our core values. We have also made significant progress on several initiatives, which have now been reorganized into three key projects (Web3go, TDF Labs, Admeta) that offer the best solutions and services in Web3 DID.
As we come to the end of a successful year, we are excited to share our progress with you and look forward to more achievements in 2023.
We wanted to take this opportunity to provide a quick recap of what we’ve been working on at Litentry Protocol this year and to reflect on the challenges we’ve faced, the accomplishments we’ve had, and what’s to come.
Once again, thank you for being a part of our community. We can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve together.
Litentry’s Product Evolution — ID Hub Incoming!
Litentry’s MyCryptoProfile (MCP) 2.0 featuring PhalaWorld was launched on June 24th of this year and has successfully driven the creation of over 5000 ID graphs for use in PhalaWorld through MCP’s shielded aggregated web3 identities. MCP is positioned as a pilot version of Litentry’s trustless aggregated identity and has proven to be an effective way to connect dApps with targeted audiences while protecting user privacy.
Since its launch, MCP has received valuable feedback from users and has garnered support from business partners. This has led to the conception of the Identity Hub (IDH/ID Hub), which is a merging of Drop3, an on-chain quest and airdrop platform based on aggregated identity and MCP. ID Hub is an open platform for dApps and users to exchange identity data while maintaining privacy. As MCP is a middle-layer service, it adds value to the dApp experience but may not provide enough guidance to users on why they are being asked to record their on-chain identities.
This is where the “ID Hub Quest” feature comes into play. The quest feature guides users through understanding and fulfilling the eligibility requirements to access certain gatekeeping services of integrating dApps. It also helps to explain to users who they will be sharing their identity data with and why whilst also giving them more time to understand and explore the benefits of Litentry’s trustless Web3 identity with privacy preservation.
As previously announced, we had hoped to launch the ID Hub by the end of this year, but after careful consideration, we determined this was not feasible. The actual development of IDH began on October 11th, and the team aims to release a public alpha version in Q1, 2023, with trustless ID Linking and Verifiable Credential generation features based on the Litentry Parachain.
Some key facts about VCs within the Identity Hub:
Improved efficiency: Verifiable credentials can streamline processes and reduce the need for manual verification of credentials, saving time and resources.
Improved privacy: Verifiable credentials can be selectively shared, allowing individuals to choose which credentials to share with whom and when. This can help protect personal privacy.
Greater convenience: Verifiable credentials can be stored and accessed electronically, making it easier to present and verify credentials online without the need to carry physical copies.
Enhanced trust: Verifiable credentials enable trusted third parties, such as governments, universities, and professional organizations, to issue and verify credentials in a way that is more transparent and secure than traditional methods. This can increase the trust that individuals and organizations place in the credentials that are presented.
Improved efficiency: Verifiable credentials can streamline processes and reduce the need for manual verification of credentials, saving time and resources.
The process of conceiving, developing, testing, and fixing the ID Hub has taken longer than we expected, and at the same time, we were also maintaining the existing MCP App. Given these factors, we sadly concluded that it was impossible to launch the ID Hub by the end of the year as initially planned.
As a result, we have revised our timeline, and we are targeting a launch date for the ID Hub Alpha version in the first quarter of 2023. While this delay is certainly not ideal, it is a more realistic and achievable timeline. We are confident that everything will go according to plan, but we always remain cautious and prepared for potential setbacks. Stay tuned to our socials for the most accurate and up-to-date information on progress.
We assure you that we are working hard to bring the ID Hub to you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Parachain Progress & Token Utility
2022 was a big year for Litentry on its parachain front. We won the Polkadot Parachain Auction #15 in April and launched our Parachain in June. To ensure the sustainability and security of our project, we also proposed a new tokenomics plan that was voted on and passed via a referendum by the community.
We were also excited to announce the activation of our staking pallet, which was opened to external collators and enabled staking delegation. Our stake dashboard also went live, courtesy of Web3go, allowing users to begin staking and earning rewards.
But that’s not all — we also took big steps to build cross-chain messaging for better interoperability with other ecosystem projects by opening several XCM channels with Acala, Darwinia, Moonriver & Karura. And if that wasn’t enough, we also built a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) side-chain and delivered versions 0.1 and 0.2 to the staging environment, which was enabled with Intel SGX hardware.
Some key facts about the TEE:
- Sensitive user data, such as user account information and computed scores, must be stored for identity aggregation. This means the data is being collected and combined to create a complete and comprehensive identity profile for each user.
- To ensure the full security and privacy of data storage and processing, the Litentry Network built a TEE sidechain. A TEE sidechain is a secure computing environment that consists of multiple nodes (computing devices) that are equipped with TEE technology. TEE is a secure area of a computer’s hardware that isolates certain processes or data from the rest of the system. TEE technology helps to ensure the security and privacy of data that is stored, processed, or transported within the TEE sidechain.
- The TEE sidechain ensures that private data will be stored, computed, and transported securely and privately. This means that the TEE sidechain is designed to protect the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data as it is being handled within the ecosystem.
- As TEE-worker for Twitter and Discord verification has been completed, users can expect that identity linking with their accounts on these platforms will be more secure and private in the Identity Hub. This means that the TEE sidechain has been tested and verified for use with Twitter and Discord, and users can feel confident that their identity data will be protected when it is linked to their accounts on these platforms through the Identity Hub.
Coming apart to work better together
Throughout 2022, we have made significant progress on several separate products within Litentry’s Orbit ecosystem. These products are not owned by Litentry, but were incubated by Litentry from the beginning and have been kept separate for specific reasons. Despite being separate, these products work together at the back end to provide high-quality services and functionality in the areas of data analysis, advertising, and project building, which helps to power the Web3 space.
If you’ve been following our work, you may have noticed that we have several different products under the Litentry umbrella — Litentry, Web3Go, AdMeta, and TDF Labs. You might be wondering why we structured our ecosystem this way.
To start, let’s take a step back and understand the focus of each product. Litentry is all about building an identity layer that connects users and dApps, serving as the infrastructure for cross-chain identity generation and verification. The other three products — Web3Go, AdMeta, and TDF Labs — also contribute to privacy and functionality, but they don’t serve directly as an identity layer connecting users and projects.
Web3Go focuses on providing on-chain data solutions for projects. AdMeta concentrates on providing advertising services that meet Web3 privacy standards, and TDF Labs emphasizes creativity in the space by providing blockchain indexing solutions and services to new projects.
While these products all offer great opportunities for collaboration, in the long term, they could distract from our development focus and operational transparency and block diverse investment types. By keeping them separate, we can improve and simplify our internal operating structures, freeing up management time and bandwidth on all sides.
So, in the end, this structure is a win-win for everyone. We get better organizational structures, with the added benefit of still working together and providing extra layers of service for improvement.
For further information on the company split, check out the article we wrote earlier this year.
Governance improvements
Litentry Network has launched the Litmus Governance platform on Subsquare, designed for off-chain discussion, council motion, and public referendum. This year, the council raised 12 motions, of which four were passed on to a referendum. Out of these 4, 3 were successfully passed and executed, including a new inflation model, a runtime upgrade, and the acceptance of an XCM channel opening request from Karura.
Looking ahead to the next year, the Litentry Network team plans to onboard 1–2 community members to the council and move 50% of internal all-hand issues to the Litmus Governance platform to decentralize project decision-making. This will allow for greater community involvement and participation in the decision-making process for the project.
Looking ahead to 2023
As we come to the end of the year, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all of our valued community members, partners, and internal team for their continued support and collaboration. Despite the challenges and uncertainties that we have faced this year, we have remained committed to delivering the best possible product and services by working in all areas internally and externally to improve and better prepare ourselves for the final product launch.
Litentry’s main goal for Q1 in 2023 is to deliver the ID Hub Alpha launch. In addition to our Alpha launch, we will continue to focus on making Litentry more decentralized, educating the community, and increasing the awareness of privacy-preserving identity in web3. Internally, we are focusing on continuing to strengthen and grow our parachain team, setting up structures to onboard more members, and being a desirable employer for talent interested in Blockchain, Web3, DID. We’re also looking forward to engaging more with our community and creating more opportunities for real-time feedback and real-life meet-ups.
Overall, we are proud of the progress that we have made and are excited about the opportunities and challenges that the new year will bring. We’re very grateful for the support we’ve been shown this year, with our successful crowdloan and despite our delayed launch of the ID Hub. We’re confident next year will start to bear the fruits of our labor this year and accelerate the digital identity transformation we’ve all been waiting for.
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.
