DAOrayaki Reserach |Proof of Humanity: HUMAN and MetaMask Integration

9 min readSep 26, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount： 200 USD

Category: Proof of Humanity, Democracy Earth, Kleros, Identity Verification, Sybil attacks, Universal Basic Income (UBI), Universal identifies and sovereign identities, Certification systems and reputation, PoH consensus, Side chains, Better Funding Mechanisms, Quadrating Funding, Quadratic Voting, Certification and Reputation Systems, Sybil-Resistant Airdrops, Yield Farming, and NFT Distribution, Anti-Spam Tools

Contributor：Jones, julie @Daorayaki

Chinese Version: https://daorayaki.org/proof-of-humanity/

Brief Overview About Proof of Humanity

Proof of Humanity (or PoH) is a social identity verification system for humans on Ethereum. PoH combines webs of trust, reverse Turing tests, and dispute resolution to create a sybil-proof list of humans. There are all sorts of amazing use cases and reasons to be on the PoH registry but for now, let’s dive into first.

Background

Remember the movie I, Robot? It’s a bit of an oldie, but one that makes it easy for us to see what it’s like to have robots as the main workforce of our species. Mostly, we are drawn to the teaching it leaves behind about our humanity and the importance of our identity. Although at present, robots are not that sophisticated, it would not be strange to think that in the future they will develop a highly advanced artificial intelligence that will surpass us, by far, in some activities.

For all the differences between regular applications and DApps, they suffer from the same nuisance: bots. While developers have created ways to limit bot activity, there has been nothing in the blockchain and crypto worlds to prevent DApps from being overrun by malicious bots. Also, beyond investigative purposes, forms of artificial intelligence or programmable mechanisms have been used to duplicate an identity, which is worrying for our security. Several solutions have been developed (captchas), but there is no doubt that there is still a long way to go to protect humanity from the advance of technology. Therefore, a digital identity test to certify that we are human would be a good initiative. Indeed, it is and it is for these reasons, Proof Of Humanity created a HUMAN Protocol API within Memask wallet. Ethereum is the most used blockchain for DApps; MetaMask is the most popular wallet within that chain. That’s why the team went with both of them. In this article, we will talk about Proof of Humanity, an ingenious identity verification system in Ethereum.

What is Proof of Humanity? PoH

Proof of Humanity, or Proof of Identity, is a humanity or social identity verification system for humans developed on the Ethereum blockchain with collaboration from Kleros and Democracy Earth.

According to them, it is a system and a dApp that combines social verification with the sending of videos or images to create a list/registry of verified human identities and therefore resistant to Sybil attacks.

In Sybil attacks, an attacker can contaminate a distributed system by creating a large number of identities that appear to be independent and use them to gain disproportionate influence, alter routes or modify redundantly stored content. Therefore, Proof of Humanity aims to create this public registry so that it can be used in a variety of existing and new applications that need identity solutions.

Proof of Humanity is an identity registry on Ethereum, aiming to tackle the “double human” problem: a type of fraud in which one person registers into a domain multiple times, pretending to be various distinct, independent entities. Similarly to the “double spend” problem, solving this challenge unlocks a world of unprecedented possibilities. It enables the creation of decentralized democracies (without the need for a centralized membership authenticator to ensure each person can only vote once), and Universal Basic Income cryptocurrencies (without a centralized membership authenticator to ensure each recipient can only receive their UBI once).

Proof of Humanity is already materializing those possibilities: it has created the first democratic DAO on Ethereum, and the largest Basic Income experiment using cryptocurrencies to date, with a monthly allocation to each member of the registry, currently valued at ~170 usd. It is also a key component to platforms like Gitcoin, which enable decentralized funding of digital publics goods with Quadratic Funding.

This is a highly experimental project and the years ahead will involve enormous amounts of learning — requiring that the team working on it is comfortable with some degree of uncertainty. However, it is also an extraordinary opportunity for someone wanting to have a big impact.

What would be their uses?

According to Kleros, there are many useful cases for the use of the humanity test and today we will tell you about some of the most interesting one:

UBI or Universal Basic Income

Universal basic income is a periodic payment program developed by Democracy Earth and Kleros. This income is given to all people in a population on the sole condition that they prove they are human. Through the test of humanity (PoH), a universal and fair distribution can be realized. The only condition is to be registered as a verified human. If you have demonstrated that you are a human, the project will reward you with 1 UBI token per hour. This is something we could take advantage of, since even Emanuel “Manu” Ginobili, former Argentine basketball player, was encouraged to register on the proof of humanity platform on April 21 of this year to receive his UBIs.

Universal identifiers and sovereign identities

Through PoH, the accounts associated with it can be a universal login method. For this reason, it would not be necessary, in any app or dApps, to enter our data every time we want to log in. On the contrary, users could be recognized quickly without the need to register.

Certification systems and reputation

With PoH, if they wish to review our information to find out, for example, our titles or credit rating, they can do so quickly through the data we provide to the platform. Therefore, instead of requiring extensive paperwork, from a first glance at a badge on our individual profile, they would be able to tell.

Side chains secured by PoH consensus

Side chains could be secured by Proof of identity with the principle that 1 person equals 1 vote. Consequently, it assumes an honest majority of humans contributing to dispute resolution. In this case, it would work similarly to PoA or authority testing, which is based on the reputation of the validators.

Innovative DAO frameworks

DAO frameworks and apps using the PoH registry to check the “humanity” of voters can experiment with truly democratic systems ( 1 person = 1 vote_ and innovative preferential or quadratic voting features for which Sybil-resistance is required. For example, the UBI DAO will be based on a governance system such as this one in order to better account for the voices of every community member. A similar system could be added as a plugin to common DAO tools such as Colony, Aragon, or DAOstack.

Better Funding Mechanisms

By extending the concept of Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism, one can create new mechanisms for endogenous community formation. Quadratic funding is a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organized ecosystem of public goods. Citizens make public goods contributions to projects of value to them. The amount received by a project is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received.

This mechanism requires accounts to be Sybil-resistant as splitting one’s funding across multiple accounts increases the amount given to the target project. And Proof of Humanity allows for this Sybil-resistance. Proof of Humanity can be an important piece of infrastructure to bring into reality some of the innovative governance ideas explained in the book “Radical Markets”. For example, quadratic voting.

Certification and Reputation Systems

Various certifications or reputations points (such as creding scoring) could be added to PoH profiles. Registered individuals would select the certifications they want to be made public. These could be confirmed by central entities or through a curated registry and displayed as a badge on the individual profile.

Certifications can include:

- Country of citizenship

- Degrees and professional certifications

- Skills (for example “experienced Solidity developer” badge which could be assessed by looking at open source code published by the individual)

Sybil-Resistant Airdrops, Yield Farming, and NFT Distribution

Airdrops are a popular way to distribute tokens. However, even when requiring different forms of identification (telegram accounts, passports), those airdrops were typically Sybil-attacked. This led to a switch toward airdrops proportional to the user balance of a specific coin and lock drops (where users need to lock some coins and receive tokens proportionally). Those techniques, despite being Sybil-resistant, benefit users already having a high amount of crypto-holdings.

Proof Of HUmanity will allow Sybil-resistant airdrops where participants will each be given the same amount of coins. The same method can be applied to Sybil-resistant yield-farming (UBI token accrual, for example); to ensure gift NFTs are not hoarded by a small minority, or to ensure free subscription schemes are not abused.

Anti-Spam Tools

Systems often use captchas (small exercises testing user capacity to analyze an image or a sound which are hard to complete for AIs) before allowing a user action in order to prevent spam. There are wasting user time and do not prevent spam from a determined user who would be willing to spend the time to solve them (or outsource the solution). People in the PoH registry could be allowed a number of captcha-free interactions (potentially high enough such that they never have to fill a captcha). Users spamming the system could get temporarily or permanently banned. And they would not be able to just create a new account in order to evade the ban.

How can I become part of Proof of Humanity?

To be part of the list, you must be registered on the Proof of Humanity (PoH) platform. This can also be done by going to the Proof of Humanity app with your Ethereum address at hand.

Then, as we can see in the image below, your profile will go through certain phases:

- Sending data (Submitted).

- Guarantee phase where you expect a guarantee that the payment for the registration has been made (Vouching phase).

- Challenge, where users can question the validity of your profile through Kleros.

- Officially Registered.

-Pending deletion, if after one year you do not renew your account.