# Anonymous attested identities

## Objectives

We are looking to adapt incremental improvements to attestation protocols to further explore how they may be used in the following domains:

- governance and public policy
- management and organization design

Problem areas addressed:

- Simplifying complex protocols, especially technological ones
- Protocols and patterns of conflict (ranging from military and policing to economic and cultural)

Attestion schemas, issuers, provers and zk-tech involve complex toolchains.

How individuals and companies coordinate in decentralised environmenats are highly charged where reputation acts as a form of structural bias (eg. Members with a lower economic stake may have their opinions overlooked) or prevents transparent communication by means of representational bias (eg. Members who may represnt a larger company or institution are limited to what they can express whilst being associated with a firm).

Privacy preserving attested identities, create the ability for users to express themselves freely without risk to their real world identities.

## Summary

Attestions are useful in establishing trust however can be problemetic when participating in discussions as status or representation may prevent organic discussion to be had. This is especially true in decentralised organisations.

The EAS protocol allows a (potentially) trusted entity to issue claims pertaining to a person's reputation or experience.

There are ongoing experimets exploring attestations, notably:

- Gitcoin Passport
- POAP
- GitPOAP
- Optimism Badgeholders
- Hats Protocol/Guild Roles

We want to make it possible for users to anonymously prove aspects of their reputation based on an existing EAS attestation or set of attestations, without revealing their identity.

We believe that:

- Reputation is needed to build trust when discovering projects. However;
- Anonymity is needed to improve community participation, to remove bias, unlock better communication.

People in the Optimism community have already started looking at this problem, and we want to try to solve it

Our R&D will focus on tackling an improvement that is needed by an existing product with decentralised/uncooridnated developer teams, and the process of working to address that need

## What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?

Exploring how vendors can issue privacy preserving attestations.

Our software kit will provide a guide on how to.

* Issue commonly sought after attestations `(a)`
* Issue Anonymised, Disposable identies, with a proof it was derived from `(a)`

<!-- Each community will have their own rubric for what is important to attest,
however it is important to have standards to maximism interopability.

Broken down this involves:

* Establishing what is important to attest.
* eg. Is a Gitcoin Donor, Passport score > X
* Aggerating one or more sources of on-chain data
* Exploring attestation technologies and methods
* Computing trustless proofs

Then;

* Surfacing that identity and reputation to be consumable

By creating a machine readable stream of verifable attested data, we unlock the the ability for other tools to be built upon these data primitives. Previously coined as `Autonomous Data` [1] -->

## What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol?

As governance tool builders and practitioners, we have identifed existing pain points and though industry research and observations have found calls to action on this subject.

Optimism is one of the largest and most successful decentralised governance groups. They use attestations, built on EAS and have open requests to builders to explore this problem space.

Sources
* <https://optimism.mirror.xyz/nz5II2tucf3k8tJ76O6HWwvidLB6TLQXszmMnlnhxWU*>
* <https://gov.optimism.io/t/ready-to-vote-advancing-optimism-anonymous-community-and-governance-tooling/7437/27>
* <https://contribute.optimism.io/issue/attestation-data-duplicator>
* <https://gov.optimism.io/t/collective-intents-season-5/6883#intent-4-improve-governance-accessibility-5>
* <https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/ecosystem-contributions/issues/60>

## In what form will you prototype your improvement idea?

We will release a standalone open source toolkit documenting the pipeline for ingesting data, computing proofs and relevant smart contracts to allow for collaboration.

Our goal is to demonstate the following.

* Identify/Propose, attestation schemas useful to organization design
* Tooling to ingest onchain data, generate and verify attestations
* Tooling to further encode attestions

## How will you field-test your improvement idea?

We will be also opening communication channels with Optimism though their public channels.

We also invite anyone who is interested to join a Telegram Group to
futher discuss and exchange ideas freely.

## Who will be able to judge the quality of your output?

Optimism PGF reviewers, given they have asked for builders to solve these problems.

## How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea?

We will create a decicated standalone micosite, documenting the project and allowing futher OSS contributions.

## What is the success vision for your idea?

Prove it's possible to anonymously attest to being the target of a non-anonymous attestation.

Provide standalone software to allow others to implement the protocol themselves.

Establish a primitive that is deemed useful by industry practitioners thats fosters further developmennt and discussions.

## Disclaimer

* We are a founders from a bootstraped organisation <https://lighthouse.cx/> with a mandate to further improve governance coordination.

## Reading

Background
- <https://attest.org/>
- <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust>
- <https://docs.optimism.io/chain/identity/about-attestations>
- <https://mirror.xyz/cerv1.eth/HikrWg-CneYoHruCON5gCi6BL7R71TEBpdJjgqon9M8>

Extended

* [a16z, Machiavelli for DAOs](https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/machiavelli-principles-dao-decentralized-governance/)
* [World Economic Forum - Decentralized Autonomous Organization Toolkit](https://www.weforum.org/publications/decentralized-autonomous-organization-toolkit/)
* [Data Vaults: Strategies for storing, verifying and sharing
private data](https://www.dropbox.com/s/4au9fefvhn45n9k/%5B1.0%5D%20Data%20Vaults%20-%20Methods%20for%20storing%2C%20verifying%20and%20sharing%20private%20data.pdf?dl=0)

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Currently there are several efforts that are looking to attach social reputation to bolster the credibility of a `0x` profile. -->