What is IamHuman?
The NEAR Digital Collective (NDC) is building a truly decentralized form of governance that will allow Web3 communities to fund, develop and vote on how they grow and develop.
A vital component to creating on-chain governance is to have a verifiable way of proving who people say they are. Why is this important? Because for a community to work, it needs to be able to vote on what direction it should move in.
Like any democracy, maintaining a system of one person, one vote, is vital for the health of any community. Failing to create that system, would expose the NDC to abuse and disrupt it from fairly enacting decisions made by all.
The NDC’s solution to this problem is IamHuman, a protocol that allows people to be verified in a way that gives them access to voting and a variety of other features, which we’ll explore below.
What is IamHuman?
IamHuman is a process that combines different techniques to verify someone is a human, and not a bot. It does this in three ways:
- Face verification: We’ve partnered with GoodDollar which is a protocol that verifies each user with a 5-second 3D selfie. They are an open-sourced public good. The video is not saved and there is no biometric data stored.
- Community Verification: In our first version of the community verification we will either meet you in person at a conference, or you apply on our website and we verify your Telegram account.
- No-Knowledge KYC: You can choose one of several attestation providers, which will certify the fact that you have undergone KYC. You show your government-issued ID to a document verification service that stores it securely, and we don’t ever get access to it.
How does it work?
A person looking to become verified to take part in elections within the NDC, needs to go through all of the processes above.
Why does IamHuman require all three processes? Thanks to the increasing sophistication of bots and technology more broadly, IamHuman needs to be one step ahead of any attempts to get around it. As a result, the process of proving someone is human is split into three distinct parts. These are:
- Uniqueness — there’s only one of the person applying.
- Humanness — there is a verifiable way of seeing a person exists.
- Aliveness — a person is alive and not deceased.
All these factors go into how IamHuman establishes what we call ‘personhood’. Once that has happened, they will receive a Soulbound Token. We’ll explore this more below.
What is a Soulbound Token?
A Soulbound token is a specific type of NFT that is used to verify your personhood when it comes to voting and taking part in the NDC and the Near community. There are a number of different Soulbound Tokens that are designed to reflect the various means of verification you can go through. These are detailed below:
- Face Verification Soulbound Token — this token will be awarded when someone has successfully recorded a 2–3 second video selfie which is compared to all previously scanned faces in a database.
- Trustee SBT aka “OG” SBT — A strong indicator of personhood is that you met someone in person or on video, and that this person attests to you being a unique human. Key members from our project team (“trustees”) will be meeting users and issuing this SBT for an inaugural batch of people.
- NK-KYC SBT — We really don’t want to hold or even see the personal data of our users. We call this a No-Knowledge-KYC SBT because we actually won’t know anything about the user, other than the fact that they have subjected themselves to KYC somewhere. And that they are above the age of 16, which helps us stay out of trouble in most countries.
- NDC Community SBT — This SBT will allow people to sign up to be verified and then be randomly paired with each other into impromptu video calls. During these video calls you chat for a few minutes until both are convinced that the other person is a real human. If successful, then at the end both would receive a point. After three such successful calls, you’d be awarded a Community SBT. When implemented and battle-tested for a while, then this SBT is intended to replace and supersede the Trustee SBT.
- TrustGraph SBT — We are not just defined by who we are but also by which friends we have. To qualify for this SBT you must be followed by a minimum number of trusted accounts. In a later version we also hope to replace the generic “followed by” with a more specific “trusted by” link, and perhaps also layer in an analysis of other components of your on-chain activity and reputation.
- Aliveness Voice SBT: To qualify for this SBT a user will log on to a site where they will be given a randomized string of words to read. The algorithm will check that it is the same voice “fingerprint” as last time, and that the right words were read. This SBT can be set to short expiry, e.g. one or a few months, and be used to assert that the user is still alive and has not been replaced by someone else.
What does it allow people to do?
There are lots of benefits to joining IamHuman and getting verified. Below are just a few:
- Voting and Polling
- 1-person-1-vote
- Quadratic voting
- Universal Basic Income
- Fair product launches and Airdrops
- Reputation systems
- Quadratic Funding (like Gitcoin)
What’s the future of IamHuman?
IamHuman is a public protocol. This means all other websites, apps, DAOs and other protocols on Near will be able to leverage it. There is no need for them to build their own personhood protocol.
If something needs to be modified then they can easily add or remove any component too. It’s an open and public protocol, which means that you only need to maintain one IamHuman status.
How do I get started?
The first, limited version of IamHuman is now live, this version allows you to verify as a human by going through a Face Verification process on GoodDollar. Follow the next steps in order to become a verified NDC Community Member:
- Go to the IamHuman website.
- Follow the steps in the IamHuman registration guide.
- Join the NDC Community Hub for registration support, information and news on the NDC and much more!
