Episode 014: 05‐14‐2024 What's Unique About NFT's - GluuFederation/identerati-office-hours GitHub Wiki
- Host: Mike Schwartz, Founder/CEO Gluu
- Guest: Stephen Wilson, Principal Analyst Constellation Research
- Co-Host: Otto Mora, Tech. Product Manager - Polygon ID
Description
Do proposed decentralized identity solutions share some common patterns with Bitcoin and NFTs? They share the same techno-libertarian roots, and they all pull off a very similar trick--proving the uniqueness of certain digital events, without relying on any official or central authority. Are there some lessons to be learned and what are the applications for enterprise and the digital identity landscape?
Homework
- What's Unique About NFTs
- ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard
- DID Method Registry
- ERC-4910
- Almost everything you read about the blockchain is wrong
Takeaways
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NFTs are blockchain smart contracts which enable you to mint, assign token ownership, and activate or deactivate NFTs. ERC-721 is the basic NFT definition, which descibes a "deed." This is an important distinction because the deed and the asset should not be conflated. For example, you may but the deed to your house in your bank vault. The deed is not the house obviously. So instead of the bank vault, we could write the deed to a blockchain, because ... those are eternal and immutable (haha). ERC-4910 defines how to use NFTs to track royalty payments.
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DIDs provide a W3C mechanism to enable a domain to establish a namespace and define identifiers. Whether browsers will support this namespace is driven by demand--e.g. will the Chrome or Firefox team prioritize it? Some of these did methods are used by blockchains. For example, Polygon has defined a DID method and Otto described how they are using it for their identity offering that supports selective disclosure.
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What do you store on a blockchain? Proofs (i.e. hash values) are always useful to prove integrity of data. Otto suggested some other things you could privately store on a blockchain.
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There are similarities between presentation of an NFT, and presentation of a Verifiable Credential. One of the most common use cases for NFT is to obtain access to a Discord server. However, not many older then Millenials have a crypto wallet and would know how to present their NFT. Basically, there is know cultural familiarity with wallets, and there is still a lot of uncertainty around which, or how many wallets I may have. And how will both Issuers and Verifiers trust these wallets?
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Everyone loves to get behind "decentralized" but when you actually see what this looks like, is it actually decentralized? I can present my VC to anyone, but only this one website supports creds from this one wallet in practice. Steve also raised the issue of Counterparty Trust which we discussed in Episode 14 with Jeff Schwartz from Dentity.