Identity in the Open Metaverse: A Call for Community Collaboration

Over the next 3 weeks, LAMINA1 will be kicking off a number of community initiatives around our upcoming Identity Litepaper. Join us to help build an open metaverse for all.

In the future open metaverse, identity will be a critical component of how we connect and represent ourselves online — from how we verify who we are when interacting on the web with others, to how we safely navigate between next-gen virtual experiences in 3D, AR, VR and beyond.

But what is exactly is identity in the open metaverse? What is necessary to prove it and protect it? And where do future metaverse citizens stand when it comes to self-expression, sovereignty, and anonymity online?

Over the next 3 weeks, LAMINA1 will be kicking off a number of community initiatives around our upcoming Identity Litepaper (due out in June 2023) that will allow you to help directly shape where we’re headed in these efforts.

Read on for more info & join us to help build an open metaverse for all.

Metaverse Identity 101

Anyone who read our recent Metaverse-as-a-Service (MaaS) whitepaper can probably tell that tackling & addressing the identity questions above will be critical in the next few months of LAMINA1 development.

In the paper, we kick off the conversation by establishing four general categories of metaverse identity:

• Personal Identity: In the purest sense, one’s sense of self as a human being
• Sovereign Identity: The extent to which a nation or nation-state grants a personal “identity” in the bureacratic sense (e.g. a passport or national ID number)
• Self-Sovereign Identity: The extent to which a known federating “identity provider” grants you an identity (e.g. a Twitter handle that someone controls, a Facebook ID)
• Self-Sovereign / Permissionless Identity: The ability of anyone to say “This is an identity” online (e.g. an Ethereum address)

…And lay out a few short-term and long-term goals we have for how to support identity-related initiatives in the open metaverse, including:

• Self-sovereign/permissionless identity
• Sovereign identity links to self-sovereign addresses
• OpenID connect identity links to self-sovereign addresses
• Non-federated self-sovereign identity systems (Stephenson’s PURDAHs fall in this category, for instance, and would be very useful to have deployed on Lamina1).
• “Pure” personal identity features (e.g. have Lamina1 be able to know it is interacting directly with a particular person)

Working together to address these challenges will help us define how users will connect with each other and represent themselves both personally and cryptographically across games, apps, and experiences across LAMINA1.

However, we can’t take these next steps into the open metaverse alone. As such, we are asking for the support of all our community members to help us build what identity will look like on LAMINA1.

Get Involved

Over the next three weeks, LAMINA1 will be launching a number of community & Quest initiatives on our Discord and social media pages focused on metaverse identity, including:

• Community Surveys to gather some benchmark data from LAMINA1 testers on their beliefs, values, and must-haves in the metaverse identity arena. To take the first survey, click here.
• Educational Blog Posts on the LAMINA1 Medium to help onboard the community onto this initiative and provide key background/context on how online identity has been envisioned and evolved over time.
• Special-edition AMAs with co-founders Peter Vessenes (Friday, May 19th) and Neal Stephenson (Friday, May 26th) on timely identity-related topics including: artificial intelligence, personal expression, and interoperability in future metaverse experiences
• New Side-Quests on the #identity working group to facilitate the sharing of ideas, resources, and conversation points for an upcoming Identity Litepaper, due out in June 2023.

To recognize you for your inputs, all community members who participate with over the next few weeks will be credited in the upcoming litepaper via their Discord handle.

There will also be quite a few XP-earning opportunities on the LAMINA1 Zealy rolling out related to the effort. Stay tuned on #testnet-updates for the latest Quests & updates.

Finally, we encourage all community members who are interested in joining us for this sprint to check out the dozens of projects and organizations working on standards and frameworks for Web3/metaverse identity, including: W3C, DIF, Web3Auth, and OpenID.

We are excited to kick off this initiative and work together on defining identity in the open metaverse.

Thank you, and Happy Questing!

Secret Code: ID3NTITYKICKOFF!