Proof Web3 Identity Management Tool

Funding Proposals
1

Name of Project / DAO / Company

Proof

Application type

Product Launch

## Proposal overview

Overview:

Proof is building your individual Proof of Work protocol. For the blockchain ecosystem, we want each individual to have have an accessible, trustless and verifiiable of all work contributed on-chain, allowing all web3 contributors to build their web3 portfolio of work. Below, we identify what the problem is, what the landscape is, what the initial product will be, and how we approach creating said product.

Identity Problem in DAO

  1. DAOs today are partially blind: they don’t know who their members are - their past work, their skills, their interest. ‘Who is this Anon I am talking to in Discord?’
  2. DAO contributors don’t have a way to easily show their past work and carry their credibility across DAOs. ‘How do I prove I can do this work without revealing my real world identity (resume)?’
  3. DAO workstream leaders/coordinators don’t know who they can trust to grant the project to, and don’t know what to expect for the quality of work delivery. ‘How do I know I can trust this person for this important work?’

On-chain Identity Landscape

Today on-chain identity solutions are mostly designed around NFTs, in following categories:

  1. Proof of ‘Skill’ (Rabbit-hole): mint NFT based on simple walk-through training on given topic, e.g. did defi farming walkthrough and get a defi badge in wallet, this tells you little about an Anon’s actual skill
  2. Proof of ‘Experience’ (POAP): mint NFT based on your past experience to show credibility, e.g. attended ETHDenvor. This again tells you little about an Anon’s actual work skill
  3. Proof of ‘Access’ (Token-gated xx): purchase token and/or membership NFT for accessing gated community, e.g. FWB/Index-coop. This is a liquid asset purchase and tells you nothing about the work capability of the individual
  4. Proof of WORK: to judge an Anon’s capability, it’s their past work that actually matters most, and there is no clear solution/leader in this niche. A past history of work is potentially most useful for Anon’s to prove their Web3 capabilities and for DAOs to leverage for coordinations.

PROOF of WORK: Pipeline Overview

  1. Upstream WORK Inputs: what is WORK? WORK here refers to ANY meaningful activities on-chain. In DAO context, primarily it can be composed of following events on-chain:

    1. past works that was submitted, accepted and paid by treasury (e.g. eng/design works),
    2. on-chain voting activities,
    3. on-chain post/discussion activities,
    4. treasury funding activities,
    5. and more.

    Note: to complete the picture, we could also track DeFi activities to generate on-chain ‘credit score’ for DeFi identities, which can be useful for many DeFi applications including personalized collateral without revealing real world identity. This will be a future roadmap beyond DAO, for now we will focus on establishing ourselves within DAO customers.

  2. Middle-tier Protocol & Interfaces: two things are important when it comes to protocol design: Readability, and Composability.
    Readability: yes, we can show all these through Etherscan today, but nobody look at it. We need to build wrapper of Etherscan to surface WORK in easy and human-readable way. More importantly, we need to add work context of those DAO payments to make it possible for DAO contributors to showcase past work, which leads us to composability.

    Composability: 1) on individual user level, we need to give them the interface to add work context for past payment, 2) on DAO organization level, ****there should not be a central, singular way for a party to judge web3 works. Instead, DAO can customize and design the proof of work mechanism themselves based on their need. Specifically:

    DAOs can define the logic, tiers, and visuals of their Proof NFT badge based on members’ past work history, and be able to use these badge to gate access across platforms. We need to provide interface at UX and Protocol for DAOs and individuals to interact with.

  3. Downstream Product:

    1. Web3 Work Portfolio Page (aka Web3 LinkedIn):
      An interface that automatically pulls out individual’s past transactions on chain related to DAO (can be extended to other categories in the future), allowing individuals to provide context manually, along with a verifiable pointer links to the DAO’s vote approval for payment, which includes DAO and individual’s wallet address.
      As users create more and more portfolio pages, we will be uniquely positioned to introduce Web3 LinkedIn features such as allowing them to connect with peers, follow others updates, get proper trainings to uplevel skills (partner with buildspace), and finally match to web3 job opportunities (today there is no winner in web3 recruiting space because there is no web3 developer platform large enough for all companies to be incentivized to post jobs on, which could be changed by Proof).
    2. Non Transferable NFT Badge:
      i. Default NFT Badge (Template): similar to reddit reputation system, there can be a default generic template we can provide to DAOs to determine different levels of NFT badges based on wallet past contribution history with DAO.
      ii. Customizable DAO Specific Badge:
      For example, a DAO can define tiers and skills of PoW Non-transferable NFTs as follows: Engineering / Design / Tokenomics / Marketing / Community / Languages as skills, Visitor / Novice / Intermediate / Advanced / Guru as tiers (e.g. x amount of past work payments will map to certain tier of non-transferable NFT badge being minted to member’s wallet).
    3. And more:
      1. Imagine a design in which the wallet’s overall content was kept private, but accessing a specif.ic facet of a person’s reputation required a specific access key.
      2. More advanced versions of Etherscan — a navigator for transactions on the ethereum blockchain — that would allow users to view all of a wallet’s interactions within a specific type of activity, for example, activities associated with community service.

What will Proof do?

I. D2C (User facing): a web service that turns your wallet into work portfolio

This scenario is only about back-filling, i.e. at any point of time pull up all past DAO engagement for a given user wallet. (Note: for any future ongoing works, in order to make it automated with work context, we need to work with DAOs to populate work context - see part 2 on D2D design.)

II. D2D (DAO facing): a decentralized, trustless protocol that power work identity for DAOs

In order to make work portfolio extraction process automated and trust-worthy, we need to involve DAO organizations in the proof-of-work process for all on-going / future work.
There are three pieces of the workflow: contract setup workflow, work annotation workflow, and NFT contract minting workflow.

Why is this important to the blockchain ecosystem?

Ownership & Fairness: People should own what they produce. The organizations they work for benefit from that work, but the individual has right to own that work moving forward, and have the ability to draw on their work portfolio in future. Proof helps individuals own, verify and profile that work.

Relationships: An individual’s record of work should be verified and available for community members to see, allowing greater understanding and connection. As we begin to form communities, it is difficult to share work with others, when we are oblivious to their skill level and expertise. With Proof, we can form deeper connections to produce more meaningful work in web3.

Network Effects: We are building a work identity protocol. With the underlying infrastructure in place, we are excited for new web3 tools and platforms to build on top of the Proof protocol, creating new important work products for web3 such as talent search engines, on-chain resumes, team skill-matching platforms etc. The possibilities for improving work in web3 are endless with the Proof protocol.

What stage of the product or idea are you (and your team) at? Is it live on Harmony and/or another chain? How many active users do you currently have, or aim to acquire? How much funding do you need? What are your milestones? What help do you need, or what gaps are there in your team?]

Stage: Seed stage, with an early MVP developed and working with 3 prominant DAOs to create a tool for their specific needs. Our team have made incredible progress in just 3 months of work, establishing our initial product, creating initial partners, creating a customer waitlist, and bringing together world-class talent from Stanford University. We aim to attract 5000 engineers in the next 6 weeks by deploying our product in the engineering departments of 3 major DAOs.

We need $20,000 to support our early engineering work: hiring expert level engineers to run audits of our smart contracts, including security audits of the initial work product. We are also aiming to hire initial designers to support in the design of our landing page, front-end and NFTs for our early customers. With this initial funding, we can appropriately serve our early customers, and raise institutional venture capital investment.

Upcoming Milestones:

March 2022:

Ship product to first major DAO partner (add work, edit NFT, mint NFT)

Ship user page to first major DAO partner

Deploy Proof on Harmony testnet

Deploy Proof on Harmony mainnet

Proposal of Proof DAO page for major DAO Partner

April:

Expand Proof MVP (User Side) to 3 initial partners)

Audit and GA of Proof (user side of Product)

May

Raise funding for further product build

Further gaps:

We are hoping to meet with experienced DAO Project Managers and Team Leaders of DAO working groups to test the user flow of the product, ensuring the NFT minting process is seamlessly integrated with your payment partner

We are a team of talented, although early, engineers in web3, and so we’re excited to engage in experienced mentors to help guide our product and engineering development.

Team

We’re a talented team of builders and previous start-up founders. We are smart, hard-working, and care deeply about making work better for the communities of web3.

CEO: Conor. Background in crypto investing at Alphabet’s CapitalG. Previous experience in the United Nations and a web2 start-up. Educated at Stanford, Tsinghua, and Trinity College Dublin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/conor-o-meara/

CTO: Honghao Qiu. Senior Product Manager at Filecoin, previously Microsoft AI research and product. Educated at Stanford and Berkeley.

Head of Engineering: Yige Liu. Engineer at Meta. Educated at Stanford and University of Michigan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/yige-kristina-liu/

Chief Operating Officer: Becka Ruan. Product Manager at Meta, Consultant at Splice. Educated at Stanford and Berkeley.

Chief Product Officer: Jesse Lusa . Product Manager at Northrop Group. Educated at Stanford and Duke.

Proposal ask

20,000

Justification

[Detailed justification of why you’re asking for the amount, the higher the dollar figure, expect more detailed scrutiny]

We have three partners, and a customer waitlist of 20. We are a team of talented engineers and builders, however, in order to serve this major need in the web3 community quickly, we need to move fast. We will use the proposed finances to employ contractual engineers, security auditors and designers over the next 6 weeks to build our MVP, gather data/ insights on the initial Proof Protocol, and serve our outlined designed partners.

Solidity Engineers: $11000

Designers: $2500

Security Audit: $6000

Subscription to landing page hosts, team Notion, team email server: $500

Metrics for success

Users

Users in Major DAO 1: 1000

Users in Major DAO 2: 1000

Users in Major DAO 3: 750

Other Test Users: 250

Early network effects signal:

Grow customer waitlist to 30 potential partners looking to get access to the Proof Protocol.

External links

2

We’ve met the team and were impressed by the strong team and the innovative ideas. Also, the team had experience with various DAOs.

The grant is approved. Thanks.

3

project funded and please see tx hash (Harmony Blockchain Explorer)

4

Hi @conoromeara - Looking forward to this project. We’d love :blue_heart: to see weekly updates on this thread here, to keep the community posted on this proposal’s progress!