Namespace.gg: A Solution To The (Centralized) Identity Crisis

Identity as we know it – passports, email addresses, social handles – are controlled by centralized powers with the right to revoke it. Every government, platform or service has the concept of identity but, they’re all reinventing the wheel.

Offline, your identity is the sum of your driving license, passport, and various membership cards. Online, your Gmail account, Instagram handle, and usernames you use for each SaaS product composes another identity. All of these identities are fragmented and must play by someone else’s “centralized” rules. To offer real choices and unify incompatible standards is to solve the problem – that’s why DIDs exist and why we’re excited to be building and improving on them with NameSpace IDs.

DIDs, or decentralized identifiers, are a new type of ID that enables verifiable, self-sovereign digital identities. Unlike traditional identifiers, such as email addresses or usernames, which are issued by centralized entities (like email providers or social media platforms), DIDs are created, owned, and controlled by the subject of the digital identity without the need for a centralized authority or intermediary.

They are seen as a solution to many of the challenges and vulnerabilities associated with centralized identity systems, such as data breaches, privacy concerns, and single points of failure. And, for application developers, DIDs can bypass the need to roll your own identity layer.

However, even the next generation of identity, like ENS names, are just leased and will return to the market if the owner doesn’t pay renewal fees. Let’s look at how namespace.gg is built to solve these problems for developers and end users.

The Namespace.gg Solution

The namespace.gg framework enables anyone to spin up a custom name service for their DAO, protocol, or community. It’s an abstraction of the tooling in production for ANS, complete with minting, admin dashboard, and marketplace UIs.

Namespace is built on MEM and everPay, meaning that addresses from any chain can be assigned identities and paid for in any token supported by everPay.

That means sovereign identity for communities, transacted with your community’s token.

Each namespace is indexed by a master resolver, solving the fragmentation issue, and even extensible via Ark Protocol. Ark with namespace.gg enables users to build full profiles, collating and binding all existing DIDs into one, regardless of the chain. This is useful around social, reputation and identity verification.

All NameSpace IDs are stored permanently on Arweave and operate on a pay-once-own-forever model, so users don’t have to worry about losing the handle everyone knows them by. Need a custom identity layer for your dApp or community?

Check the docs for a DIY approach or ways to let us help you get your own live!

The Chain-Agnostic Architecture of NameSpace IDs

• MEM is a web3 serverless functions platform on Arweave. It allows developers to build trustless and scalable chain-agnostic application backends.
• everPay is a real-time payment settlement layer that uses the storage-based computing paradigm (SCP), where all calculations are done off-chain, and the results are synchronized with Arweave.
• Arweave is an L1 blockchain and the first truly permanent information storage network backed by a sustainable endowment.

Namespaces in Production

The first namespace to go live was Arweave Name Service. We built the infrastructure to work around the fact that Arweave smart contracts cannot natively custody the $AR token, so the solution involved going chain-agnostic and using a combination of MEM with everPay - an L2 payment processor for Arweave and the EVM.

Since its launch in February 2023, over 1,500 ANS names have been minted and the protocol has been integrated widely into Arweave’s block explorer, wallets, and dApp ecosystem.

We rebuilt the infrastructure for ANS to create an extensible generic MEM contract that can add any kind of wallet authentication or payment token via MEM’s molecules. The rebuild spawned namespace.gg, which is now getting ready to launch DIDs for Hackernoon, Raven Protocol and AlphaKEK.

Let’s Explore Use Cases for NameSpace IDs

DAO Identities: provide a custom TLD naming service for your DAO members with minting conditions based on factors such as governance participation. Make your DAO token the minting currency.

Multi-Chain Identity: Establish a unified identity for users across multiple blockchains. With namespace.gg's chain-agnostic approach, users can have a consistent identity whether they're on EVM, Solana, Polkadot, or any other supported chain.

Decentralized Content Addressing: attach human-readable names to content txids. For example, the namespace.gg user of ANS shrine.ar set their A Record to direct to a website on Arweave, which resolves via a custom namespace.gg gateway: shrine.arweave.gg.

Decentralized Social Profiles (DeSoc): As an alternative to centralized social media platforms or piggybacking on existing (expensive, limited) naming services, creators can develop a decentralized social ID layer where users mint their handles, ensuring true ownership of their digital identity and content.

NFT Gated Identities: create a custom TLD only mintable by holders of a particular NFT collection. Username layer for a protocol: spin up an identity system for your dApp users instead of building it from scratch. Integrate namespace.gg minting into your dApp UI.

Branded Corporate Domains: Companies can create a custom TLD specific to their brand, ensuring that all subdomains or identities under it are officially associated with the company. This can enhance brand trust and recognition.

Physical Events: Organizers of events, conferences, or festivals can offer custom domain names as tickets or passes, providing attendees with a unique digital identity associated with the event.

Educational Institutions: Universities and schools can create a custom TLD for their students and faculty, ensuring a unified digital identity. This can be used for academic profiles, e-portfolios, or even course-specific sites.

Two Ways to Get Started

While namespace.gg is in private beta, we are working closely with a handful of projects to onboard and build custom solutions. It is also possible to bootstrap your own implementations using our example contracts.

1. Build a DIY implementation with this guide as a starting point, or…

2. Get in touch with the team to discuss custom requirements and implementation support.

   
   

Check the namespace.gg docs for more information, and don’t forget to follow @NameSpace_ID on X for updates.