MetaVisa, Metaverse Identity, and why digital identity must be decentralized

The next frontier of the internet and blockchain protocols is the Metaverse.

A brave new world of interconnectivity, it promises to be the stage of digital development that makes it possible for large numbers of people to simultaneously experience and interact with enduring digital worlds, platforms, applications, and experiences. Using digital identities that are not limited to the propriety networks of a single website, service, or blockchain protocol, a person will be able to live, play, socialize, and do business with ease and all while maintaining the same, holistic, Metaverse identity.

But, what is the Metaverse, exactly? Why will we need to manage our identities on it? Most practical of all, why is MetaVisa uniquely positioned to provide the tools needed to establish your Metaverse identity?

What is the Metaverse?

The word “Metaverse” comes from two Greek terms, “meta,” meaning “beyond,” and “verse,” here meaning “everything.” Putting them together gives you a word meaning “beyond everything.” This breakdown can help us get a basic idea of what the Metaverse is often treated as; it is a space beyond any one aspect of the internet. From it, one can interact with the component parts while also being able to move outside of them.

Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, defined the term Metaverse as being one of two possibilities in a Twitter post:

“As far as I can tell people use it to refer to either the internet + super-immersive virtual reality, or the internet + shared state (so objects that can be moved between platforms).”

The latter definition of a shared state of items, objects, and history that can be moved from one app, platform, or virtual world is the broader term many developers and big thinkers use when discussing the idea. But, importantly, even in this kind of Metaverse, an individual’s identity and the items they own are maintained no matter where they are.

Writer and Metaverse authority Mathew Ball suggests that a good film analogy for what the Metaverse is would be The Nightmare Before Christmas. In that film, characters can move between different worlds representing different holidays by simply walking through doorways connecting the worlds to each other. The characters don’t need to jump through hoops to do so, either. After walking through the doorways, they can engage with the new world they find themselves in with little difficulty.

In this analogy, different platforms are the different holiday worlds. The Metaverse allows for different platforms and DApps to be connected in ways that allow users to easily move between them without trouble or abandoning the identity that they have in any one location.

While the Metaverse promises to more fully connect the various parts of the digital world and its economy, the infrastructure needed to fully manifest that promise doesn’t currently exist. Importantly, the current way that identity is created and managed on the internet is incompatible with what the Metaverse will be. So to make the Metaverse work, we’ll need to create Metaverse identity systems.

Metaverse Identity, why we’ll need it, and why it will be good for the Metaverse

The need for some kind of identity as an individual uses the internet is obvious. Even the most mundane of activities require some ability to guarantee that you are the person you say you are. Your email account asks you if you are the real owner before it lets you look at new messages. Your online banking provider wants to be sure that it isn’t just letting anybody look at your account numbers. Your social media pages ask you to prove yourself before trusting that you did forget your password.

At a larger scale, even the operator of the infamous darknet market Silk Road, Dread Pirate Roberts, felt the need to present an identity to the world so they would trust his service- as far as one can trust a service like that.

Right now, identity on the internet is highly centralized. The systems we use to process identifiers and public keys typically fall back on trusted third parties to register and certify the users of public and private keys. Devised before the internet could agree on a model of decentralization, this model has done what it was designed to do reasonably well over the last few decades.

This model is not without flaws, however. First, the centralization provides clear attack points for malicious operators trying to get their hands on private keys. Second, the complexity of many public-key systems means that most interactions on the internet are unencrypted for the simple reason that it is too difficult for many people to encrypt their data. Finally, domain registrars, certificate authorities, and other third parties technically own things from website domains to usernames; website “owners” merely rent the space.

Additionally, as Vitalik Buterin argued in a 2013 article in Bitcoin Magazine, giving that kind of power to a centralized authority opens up the possibilities for abuse and coercion:

“If this system is managed by a corporation, that corporation would have the incentive to start charging high fees once its product becomes ubiquitous and necessary. If it is managed by a government, then the government would have the incentive to tie these identities to its own real names, and remove any privacy features (or at least install a backdoor for itself). Furthermore, it might want the ability to revoke identities as a punishment, and if large parts of the internet (and society at large) start relying on these mechanisms it would become much harder to survive as a fugitive or dissident.”

In the same article, he proposes that a decentralized take on creating identity is the only viable solution:

“The only solution seems to be, once again, decentralization and redundancy: have many different agents collecting the same information, and require individuals looking to get an identity to confirm it with several different agents, ideally randomly (or otherwise) selected by the system itself. These agents would all send out messages to the network containing both biometric data and the identity that data is mapped to, perhaps encrypted using some cryptographic mechanisms that allows two datasets to be checked to see if they are nearly identical but shows nothing else. If two different agents assign two biometric identities to the same data, the second identity can be rejected.”

Beyond these concerns, there are practical problems with a centralized identity in the Metaverse that makes decentralized models more attractive.

The current centralized identities we have on the internet often fail to travel with us as we move away from the provider of that identity, for example, Facebook, and towards applications and platforms that do not have and are not likely to have a Facebook login feature. You do not entirely own the identity you use, and the data used to create it in the first place is often poorly secured from hackers and frequently bought and sold by the operators that constructed it in the first place. In a Metaverse where anything is possible, security and ownership will be essential.

Whatever identity system is used in the Metaverse, these issues, travel, privacy, and ownership, will have to be resolved. Any model that fails to solve all three will hinder the individual as they move throughout the Metaverse.

Luckily, this is entirely possible. Ideas for decentralized public-key systems have existed for years. As explained in one document on the subject, this can be done in a way that restores identity ownership to the individual while still assuring that third-party validators have an incentive to maintain identity protocols:

“Trust is decentralized through the use of technologies that make it possible for geographically and politically disparate entities to reach consensus on the state of a shared database. [Decentralized Public Key Infrastructure] focuses primarily on decentralized key-value datastores, called blockchains, but it is perfectly capable of supporting other technologies that provide similar or superior security properties.

Third-parties, who are called miners (or validators), still exist, but their role is limited to ensuring the security and integrity of the blockchain (or decentralized ledger). These third-parties are financially incentivized by a consensus protocol to follow the rules of the protocol. Deviation from the protocol results in financial punishment, while consistency with the protocol typically results in financial reward….A principal can be given direct control and ownership of a globally readable identifier like a website domain by registering the identifier in a blockchain, just like any other type of transaction. Within the key-value datastore… the principal uses the identifier as the lookup key.”

As Vitalik Buterin explains in his forward to the book The Business Blockchain by William Mougayar, this information can be processed in combined in ways that make it quite useful without ever compromising the privacy of the individual the information belongs to:

“All transactions under ‘crypto 2.0' come with auditable trails of cryptographic proofs. Decentralized peer-to-peer networks can be used to reduce reliance on a any single server; public key cryptography could create a notion of portable user-controlled identities. More advanced kinds of math, including ring signatures, homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs, guarantee privacy, allowing users to put all of their data in the open in such a way that certain properties of it can be verified, and even computed on, without actually revealing any private details.”

Providing that traveling, secure, and self-owned Metaverse identity (MID) is where MetaVisa comes in.

MetaVisa- and the MetaVisa Credit Score

MetaVisa, a layer three middleware protocol, is preparing to provide the best in Metaverse identity as the number of applications in what we understand the Metaverse to be continues to expand.

Using indelible blockchain data, MetaVisa conducts comprehensive processing and evaluation of information such as credit history, on-chain behavior, address activity level, asset holdings, and address correlation to construct a MetaVisa Credit Score (MCS) for active members of the Metaverse which can serve as a decentralized Metaverse identity owned by the individual.

The credit system will award the users with ranked badges based on their MCSs. Users with higher MCSs will be rewarded with high-ranking badges. These badges, which are unique NFTs, can serve as a kind of MID verification system, assuring other users and platforms that the bearer of a badge is who they claim to be, own what they claim to own, and is being truthful about their past on-chain behavior.

Developers can use MetaVisa’s credit system to improve the Metaverse experience for everyone involved. Beyond just providing a MID, which will make effective interaction with other people and applications in the Metaverse possible, MetaVisa’s credit system can be applied by platforms and applications to provide better services, improve their governance, and manage their communities.

Developers and community members can formulate a corresponding membership system based on the MetaVisa credit system to motivate and retain users with high scores in desired areas. The MetaVisa credit system can also allow developers to quickly identify upstanding members of the community they wish to attract and reward, improving the user base’s quality and making marketing efforts more efficient.

DAOs can use the information in a badge to enhance and improve their governance models. For example, a model utilizing the MCS could look at the number of tokens or shares held and at factors like engagement, history with similar applications, and credit score to determine how votes should be weighed.

For DeFi, MetaVisa makes improved lending possible by developing a credit score for the user based on their past behavior and current assets. As a result, DeFi protocols will be able to offer new and improved services, knowing that the person they are dealing with is a reliable, active, and creditworthy denizen of the Metaverse.

Games in the Metaverse can be combined with the MetaVisa credit system to provide special rewards distribution, settle asset ownership issues, and provide rewards to loyal users. Additionally, the MetaVisa credit system can be used as a credential to log in to third-party applications in Metaverse, including other games and platforms that players may wish to bring their assets to.

The next frontier for the internet and blockchain protocols is the interconnectivity that the Metaverse will offer. MetaVisa offers users the tools needed to establish their Metaverse Identity and take it with them between apps, platforms, and entire virtual worlds for everyone’s benefit.

For more information, be sure to check out the MetaVisa website, follow us on Twitter, Telegram, Medium, or Discord. For business inquiries, please reach out to (email for business discussion).