How to Create and Maintain Your Colendi Account
Previously, we have covered the Colendi Products and most importantly for your Colendi Account, the Colendi ID, which is the flagship product of Colendi that gives you an anonymous and genuine Digital Identity on which only you have the full control. All other advantages and processes of Colendi are designed to be connected to this Colendi ID in order to form a common ground for all protocol contributors.
Create Your Digital ID
It is crucial for you to fully understand how you will create your Colendi ID when you register for the first time. As an application handing full sovereignty over to the user, Colendi emphasizes the importance of personal experience and control in the first steps of becoming a Colendi user.
- Register ===> Sign Up ===> Fill in Details ===> Read User Agreement
- Set PIN!
- Store and Validate your mnemonic — your private 12 words!
You must store your 12-word mnemonic, and if possible, also save it in another device or media
- Congratulations!!! You now have your Colendi ID
Importance of Security and Our Safety Protocol
In order to log in to your Colendi ID, you will be required to enter your PIN that you set during registration. It is vital that you remember your PIN.
In case you forget your PIN or want to log in to your account from another device, there is a safety protocol that will help you recover your account. For now, this is the only method for recovering your account. We will also introduce more methods to improve our recovery processes in the near future.
Your 12-word mnemonic will is also your private key to your automatically generated Ethereum account. Therefore, it is unique, special to each user and unhackable. You must store your 12-word mnemonic, and if possible, also save it in another device or media (i.e. writing it on a piece of paper, saving it in another offline device etc.). Because your Colendi ID is on the blockchain, nobody but you can access your account, including the Colendi team. To understand better how blockchain works, and why Colendi must give up control over your accounts to reach absolute decentralization please keep on reading the parts below.
Blockchain and Privacy
Blockchain has been gaining traction and perceived as one of the most famous “buzzword” for a few years now. Although most critics have doubts about its capacity to provide scalability, privacy, and sustainability, it has already managed to come into our lives due to its inordinate influence on numerous fields like diverse industries and businesses. Granting that blockchain is the best of recent times in terms of guaranteeing more reliable and expedient services, it is important to consider the security and privacy issues behind that innovative technology.
A key aspect of privacy in blockchains lies in the use of private and public keys. Blockchain technology is based on a cryptographic system to guarantee the security of transactions in a decentralized network which is currently required to enable each user to obtain a public and private key. Distributed public ledger, the backbone of Blockchain technology prohibits the users to guess another user’s private key by processing their public keys. The public and private keys are known to be related to one another, but this is specifically hich in turn can contribute to the security and privacy of users’ accounts. Therefore, it’s of paramount importance storing private keys safely and storing it in multiple locations and media in case the main storage device is compromised. Many people have faced with potential security risks, such as storing their private keys on a computer, flash drive or phone and in case they are stolen, hacked or forgotten these people may face serious problems.
Preserving the privacy of users is an important concern for most decentralized applications and platforms built on the blockchain technology. One of these platforms, Ethereum allows developers to build and deploy other decentralized applications that enable individuals or entities to manage digital identities with an unprecedented private and secure manner using smart contracts. As stated in the Ethereum white paper, “Contracts in Ethereum should not be seen as something that should be “fulfilled” or “complied with”; rather, they are more like “autonomous agents” that live inside of the Ethereum execution environment (EVM), always executing a specific piece of code when “poked” by a message or transaction, and having direct control over their own Ether balance and their own key/value store to keep track of persistent variables.”
Colendi Account with Self-Sovereign Digital ID
As a response to the failure of traditional credit scoring mechanisms and which only creates un/unbanked people on a global scale, Colendi provides a private key and a personal account for these individuals with the help of Colendi ID on the Ethereum Blockchain. As a self-sovereign and borderless identity, the main component of Colendi ID is a unique identifier which facilitates the authentication of an entity in a secure manner. Decentralized Identity (DID), a data structure defining self-sovereign digital identity, is fully controlled by the user and independent from any centralized registry, identity provider, or certificate authority.
In addition, integration of ERC-725 which is an existing decentralized identity standard and ERC-735 that is complementary to identity claim standard of the ERC-725 for the Ethereum Blockchain network is vital to form reliable identity and measure creditworthiness of the owners of these identities. With the help of ERC-725 and ERC-735, off-chain identity will be included as a component of Colendi ID as a next step. Thus, we will be able to make claims about users without revealing their sensitive data to third-party applications which would be integrated into our identity services, targeting the privacy and security of users’ data.
12 words mnemonic will be saved to recover users’ account, in case they need to recover their account.
At this point, it should be kept in mind that when the users first open the Colendi application, they will see a screen to log in and register to the application through a unique pin number, a password for themselves. After that, users will also be given a mnemonic 12 words should be saved to recover users’ account, in case they forget their PIN.
Sources
https://www.colendi.com/whitepapers/Colendi_technical_paper_EN.pdf
We will keep on working hard for the Colendi Project and keep you updated. Keep following us!
