Building a Decentralized Identity Ecosystem, Together

The Optimism Collective is building a better economic engine that fuels positive-sum games, and decentralized identity is central to that goal. Decentralized identity not only unlocks democratic governance and innovation, but also empowers individuals to have greater control over their finances and participate in the global economy on their own terms.

It's been four exciting months since announcing how the Optimism Collective is experimenting with attestations and reputation data to power the Citizens’ House, where community members participate in a one-person-one-vote system based on Collective contributions, and we're thrilled to share the ecosystem’s progress thus far:

Iterating towards decentralized identity

Since the launch of the AttestationStation, the Optimism ecosystem has been iterating towards  decentralized identity:

• Over 500,000 attestations issued on OP Mainnet: Since December 2022, pioneering teams like Otterspace, Clique Social, Flipside, and RociFi have issued more than 500,000 attestations. There’s a variety of reputation data now onchain and available to experiment with. AttestationStation has also been integrated into Sismo and Guild.xyz, enabling communities to use this reputation data for personalized experiences and access control.
• Attestations for Retroactive Public Goods Funding 2 (RetroPGF2): In March, the Optimism Collective leveraged attestations to identify the badgeholder voters responsible for distributing 10M OP tokens to 195 ecosystem projects. The results of RetroPGF2 were also posted as attestations, creating an onchain record of the outcomes.
• AttestationStation upgrades to the EAS standard: As we work with collaborators in the ecosystem to enable decentralized identity and reputation, we’re excited to share that we’re upgrading the AttestationStation to conform to the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) Standard. This means developers can use one common standard for making attestations that interoperate across the Superchain and Ethereum Mainnet.

AttestationStation upgrades to the EAS Standard

As we move towards a multichain, cross-chain, and Superchain future, Optimism and EAS are on a mission to bring permissionless attestations to developers across the Ethereum ecosystem.

Attestations are important building blocks for building trust online. The challenge is that there is currently no base layer for any entity to make attestations about anything. Solutions are fractured, making it difficult for individuals to manage their identity in a decentralized and secure way. To iterate towards the future, the AttestationStation has been upgraded to the EAS Standard. Having one common standard allows developers to create more seamless and secure experiences for their users and open up new opportunities for innovation in the decentralized identity space.

To get a glimpse of what’s possible with attestations, visit the interactive tutorial and explore the identity docs.

Launching the OP Mainnet contracts with Bedrock

The upgraded contracts using the EAS Standard are live on OP Goerli and you can start experimenting with them today. The upgraded contracts will be available on OP Mainnet following the launch of Bedrock.

If you’re a previous user of the AttestationStation, you can continue using the AttestationStation v0 contracts but it's recommended you migrate to the upgraded contracts.

Building the decentralized identity ecosystem together

We're excited to continue iterating with builders in the Optimism Collective to allow for decentralized identity use cases to emerge in the ecosystem.

The most significant way to help is by creating experiences that enable people to signal contributions to the ecosystem that can be used in governance, DeFi, social, and gaming. Visit optimism.io/ideas for inspiration or view requests for proposals to participate in our decentralized identity efforts.

We encourage you to explore the potential of attestations and if you're already using AttestationStation, we'd love to hear your feedback and collaborate on building a decentralized identity as a public good.

Join us in shaping the future of decentralized identity together!