The PhotoChromic Soulbound Collection — A “starter pack” for crypto

The internet was built without a payment layer, something which is now famously referred to by Marc Andressen as the “original sin of the internet”. Banks have made an admirable effort to step in and make payments as frictionless as possible, knowing full well that by keeping a customer locked into their centralized ecosystem they can glean all sorts of economic and behavioral insights from collating spending data en masse. Truth be told: your bank knows more about your spending habits than you do.

Cue Web3

Web3 admirably steps up to the plate in its quest for decentralization, ownership and user-centricity in the hopes of being able to lure you away from the centralized monoliths that currently control payment data and banking history.

For any n00b coming into crypto for the very first time, you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that paying via Web3 is reminiscent of trading salt in the dark ages. It can at times be a little cryptic and somewhat weird. No matter the reason for effecting a transfer, paying someone in crypto is not as simple as clicking a button and entering their details. Instead, you’ll need to tangle with long strings that denote an address, hoping the transaction goes through. Heaven forbid you get one of the 42 hexadecimal numbers incorrect in the payment. Good luck chasing that up with the address holder. You can’t simply “phone someone at Ethereum.”

At present, that long string that denotes a wallet address is a 42-character hexadecimal string derived from the last 20 bytes of the public key controlling the account with 0x appended in front. Here is a fictitious example:

Web3 is so promising and we want to take nothing away from the great strides that have been made in making peer-to- peer transacting possible without having to go through a centralized intermediary. But crypto still has some way to go in streamlining the process such that it feels skeuomorphic and comfortable for anyone new to crypto. Herein lies the greatest challenge and opportunity for crypto today. Mass adoption lies just on the other side of a more streamlined UI. We believe it is now on the horizon.

Cue Ethereum Naming Service (“ENS”)

ENS is just one of a handful of decentralized naming services that have developed of late to fill this void in user experience. With an ENS-domain name, copying and pasting long addresses is a thing of the past. To effect a transfer, you simply have to know the ENS-name of the person that you are transacting with and away the payment goes. Your ENS-name automatically resolves to some of the largest and most secure wallets in Web3 and, at last count, over 500 integrations. At the time of publishing this blog post, there were over 1,2 million ENS-names belonging to just over 400 thousand owners.

ENS is a foundational building block of Ethereum that provides much needed interoperability and composability across the Ethereum ecosystem.

Leveraging ENS

Photochromic leverages ENS and Sign-in With Ethereum(“SIWE”) enabling a user to mint an NFT that can be used to verify their identity or a particular attribute of their identity (e.g. the fact that a user is above the age of 18 years and therefore is eligible to vote, drive or buy alcohol).

By using the PhotoChromic decentralized application (“dApp”), a SBT can be created in 5 simple steps:

• Reserve a PhotoChromic identity as an ENS sub-domain e.g. janedoe.photochromic.eth. Customers can also enable an existing ENS that they already own.
• Connect a wallet to the PhotoChromic dApp.
• Verify the user’s identity through a trusted identity provider that resolves to a government-backed identity and proof of liveness (“IDV”).
• Generate an avatar / PFP of identity using algorithmic art, which is generated with biometric data seeded from the IDV process.
• The identity NFT is then minted on the Blockchain.

By using a SBT, the user has confidence that the person they are interacting with is both a real person (aka not a bot) and the person that they say they are offline. The SBT therefore provides you with all the tools that you need to interact in Web3.

The PhotoChromic Starter Pack

1. Verified wallet.
2. Personalized image.
3. Human readable ENS address (not SWIFT code, IBAN or any other potentially confusing mechanism).
4. Set of verifiable credentials to verify or attest to your identity without having to undertake a new IDV process.

With the PhotoChromic Starter Pack, users have comfort that the identity of the person that they are interacting with is verified, creating a safe digital space, where everyone can conduct crypto transactions, with confidence.

Now a Payer can pay a Beneficiary by using a human-readable name, without having to know their wallet address that it resolves to.

How is an SBT useful in business?

Following the introduction of the EU Regulations on the “Travel Rules”, any entity that is a party to the transfer of crypto assets above 1,000 Euros are required to collect and verify data related to by transferring party and the receiving party to the transaction.

For a corporate, a SBT enables the corporate to leverage the existing IDV process for existing customers with the effect of reducing the time, cost and resources required to undertake IDV on subsequent transactions in excess of 1000 euros. In addition, the current IDV processes can be reused anywhere in the network where the PhotoChromic SSI NFT is integrated. Lastly, the SBTs of clients can be branded in the name of the corporate, providing brand affinity and community wherever the client interacts in Web3.

By far, the greatest benefit to both clients and corporations is that secured customer data now remains under the control of the user, empowering the user with autonomy over their identity and lightening the compliance and regulatory load for the corporation.

There it is: That Web3 Utopia we all keep thinking about. A safe digital space, where digital identity is secured and crypto transactions can be conducted with confidence. Isn’t that what every user and business aspires to? In the next blog, we will unpack the use cases and benefits of a SBT.

Welcome to PhotoChromic. It’s nice to meet you

About PhotoChromic

PhotoChromic introduces a unique use case for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) by integrating them with user identity, to develop a biometrically managed model of Self-Sovereign Identity (“SSI”) on the Blockchain. Using NFTs, PhotoChromic aims to make identity programmable, verifiable, universally addressable, and digitally secured.

Powered by an ERC-20 token, $PHCR, running on the Ethereum blockchain, PhotoChromic addresses the current challenges faced by people the world over, as they pursue ownership over, and the ability to secure, their identity. PhotoChromic gives control and ownership of user identity back to the individual, where it belongs.

Learn more about PhotoChromic at:

Website | White Paper | Medium | Telegram | Telegram Announcements |