ADA Handle Introduces Personalization

The idea of personalization isn’t just an outlet of creative or personal expression, personalization is a cornerstone of digital identity in that people have the opportunity to be unique, different, and most importantly themselves. As we all know, ADA Handle has cemented itself as the defacto naming alternative to the cryptographic hash on the Cardano blockchain, with the intention of no longer being the alternative, but the Standard. In order to make strides into achieving that goal it is of paramount importance for us to use the naming foundation we have built within the Cardano community and begin to build additional functionality. We’ve come to realize that this direction inevitably leads us down the road of digital identity.

Digital identity is an extremely broad topic and outside the scope of this blog but we feel a large part of identity on the blockchain lay on personalization. So how do we implement something like this?

Personalization in Web 3

The fabric of Cardano is based on the decentralized and permission-less nature of the blockchain. This means that in order to implement a sense of uniformity, it is essential to create standards for applications, projects, and users on the blockchain to customize and subscribe to. This enables a more useable, functional, and familiar experience for end users. So what does the end-user experience look like if a personalization benchmark were to be created by and subscribed to by the Cardano community?

For the first time, you’d have a very familiar-feeling social experience that harkens onto the Web 2 world, except entirely on the Cardano blockchain. This means that as you navigate different dApps from blockchain-gaming, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces, not only will you have your Handle on display, but other custom information like your favorite NFT profile pictures, email, phone numbers, etc. The specific custom information that exists on a Handle is entirely optional to provide.

This allows the option for users to either streamline their social presence with the same Handle and same profile picture (plus other information) across different applications or segment them using different Handles for different dApps, much like the Web 2 world. For example, presently, a user can maintain a pseudonymous identity on Twitter, but an entirely real identity on Instagram and Facebook. This can be the reality with the buildout of personalization. What does personalization enable for the Handle Standard itself?

The Handle Standard

With nearly 45,000 unique wallet-holders holding a Handle, the Handle Standard is the largest naming alternative on Cardano. This consequently will make the personalization benchmark the largest working implementation towards digital identity on Cardano. This is a large undertaking in terms of technical buildout and will enable us to begin doing a multitude of new things outside of personalization.

In building the architecture of personalization, we will be allowing ourselves to extend the Handle Standard into further functionality such as:

• single sign-on authentication for dApps
• encrypted datasets for user-controlled information sharing
• loading IPFS/decentralized websites (more on this soon)
• NFT gallery display’s
• personal portals
• many more

Needless to say, as we continue to extend the functionality of the Handle Standard, the value of the Standard continues to grow along with its adoption. Many of these additional functionalities that the buildout of the personalization benchmark will allow for us to tackle many of the biggest issues like privacy, domain names, and cross-chain compatibility. We are also looking at ways to create versions of this functionality to one day support Atala PRISM identity frameworks in the future. How will this all be possible?

Catalyst Fund 9

It has always been a prerogative of ours to be as transparent as possible with our community, so we would like to continue that transparency and make our case as to why we are asking for funding. We’ve put up hundreds of thousands of our own dollars and thousands of hours of our own time before launch. We refused to sell out to VCs even though we had many inquiries. We refused to launch a token before our product was built. We refused to launch an ISPO for a token that needs a product. These decision were made so that we could have full autonomy over our products so that they may best serve our community.

For the last 9 months we all worked our salaried day jobs and then put nearly the same amount of time into ADA Handle. We dedicated time to the Plutus and Atala Prism Pioneer Programs, and to participation in the Cardano community. Our company and the entire team are based in the USA. We all have families and households to maintain and bills to pay and we all recently quit our full-time, salaried positions at secured companies to dedicate ourselves to blockchain, the Cardano community, and our vision for ADA Handle and building a standard for NFT-based digital identity.

When we were approaching beta launch, ADA was in the $2.00 range. We thought it prudent to build our financial plan around $1.00. Of course we are well below that now. When we had our main launch ADA was twice what it is now (around 90 cents). At the amount of ADA we made, our taxes will be about 50%. The IRS says we have to pay taxes at the value when we received the ADA. With ADA at 45 cents, that wipes out everything we made. But even if we didn’t have that big of a tax bill — something we are hoping our CPA firm can help remedy, we still have to somehow navigate this down cycle. And no one knows how long that will be. 2 months? 2 years?

If we can find a way to have a balance after taxes, it will be a pretty short runway — it probably can’t last 2 years. We still have infrastructure and business costs as well. We are not the only project in this position. We have pretty close relationships with other projects that have let us know they are in a similar space. So we are faced with some options. Do we go back to our full time jobs? Do we finally give in to VCs? Or do we get help from the system that was designed to keep moving Cardano forward — Catalyst. If you don’t believe we are using it correctly, that is OK. Don’t vote for us. We will do whatever necessary to survive regardless if we get the funding or not.