How will Ethereum Authentication Service (EAS) become the universal standard for certification?
What is the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS)? Why is there a need for an on-chain attestation system? And how does it work? This article will discuss the importance of attestation infrastructure for the development of Web3, starting from the demand.
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What problem does EAS aim to solve?
Web3 lacks an authentication mechanism to establish trust.
Existing proof mechanisms in Web3 are imperfect.
Introduction to ESA product design
Proof template: Providing structure for various proofs.
Submitting proof: The subject submits the corresponding data.
EAS aims to become the standard.
The difficulty of widespread adoption for EAS
Let’s first look at a real-life example. If you go to a night market today, what kind of stall would you choose to transact with? Generally, it would be a store you often visit, a stall run by a familiar owner, or a recommended restaurant from a colleague. It might also be a business with a long queue or one that has photos of TV interviews displayed. The likelihood of the average person making a purchase is usually low if the stall is empty, dirty-looking, or if they have never been there before.
In fact, the above events can be summarized into an important conclusion: trust is crucial for commercial transactions to occur. Trust can be established through personal connections such as having been there before, receiving recommendations from friends, or knowing the owner. However, if there is no existing connection between the two parties (e.g., when a customer chooses which food stall to eat at), trust usually comes from external attestations, such as the number of people in line or photos of TV interviews displayed. However, such attestations are relatively lacking in Web3. Web3 products are all on the internet and do not have the same government guarantees (consumer protection laws) or platform policy protection (e.g., consumer protection regulations of a certain e-commerce platform) as Web2. Therefore, it is difficult to have a diverse, long-tail business ecosystem, and it is more likely to see the phenomenon of the rich getting richer, such as Lido or Aave having a much higher TVL than their peers.
The lack of trust in the industry mentioned above is due to the lack of external attestation mechanisms, or more broadly, the incomplete infrastructure for personal attestation. On the internet, it is difficult to trust strangers with uncertain backgrounds because both parties lack a way to prove their identities.
Recommended reading:
Introduction to Proof of Personhood (PoP): The difficulties in the development of digital identity so far.
Although that is the case, many projects and technologies have already been attempting to provide attestation mechanisms for Web3. For example, Worldcoin uses iris recognition to ensure that addresses are linked to biological features, and POAPs use NFTs to prove that participants have attended events. However, these practices have their drawbacks. The former has high verification costs and controversies, while the latter has low verification costs (the subject does not need to submit any data), making it difficult to serve as strong evidence.
In order to provide a widely used attestation mechanism for Web3, EAS is implemented using two sets of contracts:
Template contract: Allows the issuing authority to specify the verification data requirements.
Attestation contract: Allows the subject to submit the necessary data for attestation.
EAS aims to establish a standardized method to simplify and streamline the attestation process in the industry.
EAS Operating Framework
(Source)
The EAS team believes that identity fundamentally comes from the accumulation of an individual’s past to future, rather than a one-time check. Doctors verify your date of birth, the government verifies your passport, teachers verify your grades, schools verify your degree, and employers verify your employment history. There are countless examples. At every step in life, from birth to career, there are attestations, and it is these small clues and attestations that weave the structure of each person’s identity.
The team believes that a complete attestation mechanism should allow anything to be recorded, from small transactions or event participation attestations to driver’s licenses and educational qualifications, all using the same system. Therefore, EAS is designed as a universal attestation system.
EAS provides attestation providers (issuers, verifiers) with a set of templates (schemas) to define the content related to the attestation process, including UID, issuer information, and the information that the subject needs to provide.
Once the structure of the attestation process is determined, the attestation process itself becomes simple. The subject only needs to fill in the data according to the format and sign it with their wallet. They can also choose to record the attestation on-chain or off-chain based on their needs and importance. The former is more rigorous, but the latter is cost-free.
Recommended reading:
What is Attestation? Why is it a key infrastructure for real-world use cases in Web3?
The design of EAS is simple, including the backend behind the template, which is just a few lines of code. The team’s goal is to become a universal standard for attestation for future applications, serving as the attestation standard for all application scenarios.
EAS’s goal is to become the standard for attestation formats.
(Source)
When all attestation formats are standardized, it can enhance the composability advantage of Web3. For example, in the future, if a concert wants to open a ticketing event, it can incorporate different attestation units to ensure eligibility, such as driver’s license attestation, fan attestation, or non-fake account attestation. And this will rely on the foundation of standardized attestation.
From the above design of EAS, it can be seen that the most difficult part of becoming a standard is convincing the majority to adopt it, which requires a certain level of influence.
The EAS team members come from the Ethereum core developer community, so legitimacy is not an issue. However, whether the market accepts and adopts it on a large scale is still unknown and is a crucial aspect to consider when looking at decentralized identity (DID) projects.
Attestation
DID
EAS
ethereum
PoP
Proof of Personhood
