BrightID Verification Story

Reaching the Next Milestone in Counteracting Sybil Attackers

The development of BrightID began three years ago with the goal of providing a decentralized platform for applications to ensure the uniqueness of their users and counteract the attack of bots on their applications. We believe that the only decentralized, scalable, and reliable way to detect humans from bots in the future of cyberspace is to rely on the social relations of humans.

From the beginning, BrightID was supposed to distinguish real users from bots and verify them by analyzing the graph formed by connections that users make with their friends and family members. However, the graph-analysis-based verification methods can only be used if there is enough data covering them. It is not possible to use such verification methods unless a graph of a significant number of users who have connected with at least a small number of friends exists. That is why BrightID had to make use of another verification method to verify its early users in the initial stage although that method was not reliable and scalable.

Joining connection parties and making connections with a trusted person who hosts the call was the initial verification method that BrightID used. In this stage, BrightID was like a newborn fed on milk. As milk is the only suitable food for a newborn to grow in the first stages of growth, the only healthy way that BrightID could grow enough was to rely on the Stars in connection parties to verify users. And just as milk is not enough for newborns to grow as they age, BrightID cannot grow by only relying on stars. And just as humans always use milk as nutritious food, using stars can always be a basic verification method in BrightID.

Today, we are proud to announce that BrightID has grown enough to start using graph-analysis-based verification methods. BrightID has more than 30,000 active users, 10,000 of whom have made 4 connections on average with the people they know in person. That is why BrightID can now start to use other verification methods. Soon BrightID will be making use of various verification methods, the first ones are Aura and Bitu.