You can now prove the ownership of your social network accounts with a single Ethereum wallet address
Tags: Identity, Ethereum, Wallet, Web3, Social Network

You can now prove the ownership of your social network accounts with a single Ethereum wallet address WalliD Jul 25·5 min read

In the online world, Social networks are becoming a valuable footprint of one’s history and turning into unique and very accurate identity standards.

In an ever growing distributed economy and changing social fabric, there’s not much value traditional identity assets such as ID cards or driving licenses can add when it comes to building trust between two or more parties unknown to each other.

Social networks, on another hand can provide much of that needed trust as they record individuals’ history, opinions, connections, progress and achievements.

As of today they are already acting as the source of trust for our digital identity but bridging this trust across platforms remains a challenge and most often a burden.

Paris Hilton’s use case and how to prove on Discord who you are based on your Twitter account.

In the midst of the NFT hype and boom, Paris Hilton was one of entertainment celebrities who managed to make a few bucks (1.1M USD) selling a digital art collection .

Most of the success of an art related NFT sale comes from community and demand generation prior to the sale or auction event and Paris Hilton knew what she was doing when she targeted Discord and some of the most popular NFT related servers as a preferential channels to outreach and nourish that community.

The trick here was that Paris was not on Discord when she decided to go for this campaign and as soon as rumours hit the street many scammers hurried into making their own fake Hilton accounts and target the less attentive collectors.

When the real Paris went on the Whale community server it was only natural that everyone was demanding proof that the user was the real Paris.

Things didn’t get easier as the only way she had to do it was to access Discord developer tools, get her unique user ID, copy and paste it into a Twitter post, just to go and share the post it back on Whale’s Discord channel.

Things would have been much easier if only MyWalliD Online IDs’ features were around at that time as she would only have to access her wallet plug-in, and generate a verifiable link with a combined proof of ownership for her Discord and Twitter accounts and share it with anyone interested.

Enter MyWalliD Online IDs

Online IDs are Identity assets that can be associated with a user’s Ethereum wallet address on MyWalliD wallet interface from where one can also generate and share a verifiable proof of identity.

As of this moment users can add Twitter, Discord, Reddit,and Github accounts to their MyWalliD wallets.

The proof of identity is generated after the user signs his social network account ID alongside his wallet address and pastes the signature on a publicly accessible post. The signatures and the post are then encrypted with the wallet private keys and stored on the users’ local memory.

From that point, the Online ID asset is available anytime on MyWalliD’s plug-in and app and the user can generate a link with a proof of ownership of one or more of those accounts.

See the full tutorial here.

Online IDs proof-of-identity

The proof-of-identity is a link generated within MyWalliD plug-in that points to a URL where the ID asset data is displayed and verified. Upon users’ permission, MyWalliD gathers the ID data stored in the browser’s local memory for one or more Online IDs.

ID data contains:

Wallet address- User’s public handle that will be associated to an Online ID Account ID signature- Social network account ID signed with users’ wallet private key. Proves the owner of this wallet claimed the ownership of a certain social network account ID. Public Post- Link to a public post made by the intended social network account ID owner with the two elements above proving the claimer is the actual owner of the social network account.

Verifying a Proof of identity

The Proof of identity link points to a wallid.io/verify URL that is connected to WalliD’s verification smart contract and can be audited by a human or a machine. The result of the verification as well as the actual data are displayed on the frontend:

Verify smart contract, on the back gathers the ID data attributes (Wallet address and Account ID) and performs the following checks:

Account ID Signature — Is this field a result of a signature by the intended wallet address on the provided Account ID? Public Post verification — Is this ID data published on the intended user account ID page or repository?

A human or machine verifier can access Verify smart contract and input these data themselves as it is provided on the frontend.

In conclusion

The internet doesn’t need to be a fully anonymous or fully over-sighted place. The time to reshape our identities in the online world and decide which part of them and with whim we would like to share them has come.

It starts with your Social Network accounts but MyWalliD is the tool to keep control of all your identity assets, either they are a Citizen Card and a driving license or your membership badge and achievement certificates.

You can now bridge them between platforms and share combined or separate proofs of identity. Private or publicly. Your keys, your wallet, your IDs.

Stay safe and in control of your identity,

WalliD’s team