Kusama Proposal: New Registrar

Dec 21, 2019 3 min read

1. Background

1.1. Address book

Building your network of trust with the Address book looks like this:

This would look as follow:

Figure 1. Sample with a random account

Unfortunately, this solution does not benefit from others' due diligence and also does not help reinforcing the trust of an account on the Polkadot/Kusama Network.

Later on came a new feature allowing account owners to define a nickname for an account. It did not take long for impersonators to show up pretending behind someone else. The setNick extrinsic has been phased out very shortly after its introduction.

This is a good example of what an experiment on Kusama can look like and we can actually thank the impersonator to quickly demonstrating that the solution was not viable.

1.3. Identity

As an answer to the problem, a new module as been introduced:

The identity module is not (yet) a decentralized solution but a rather centralized one with onchain records. A registrar checks every identity and provides a level of trust as onchain record.

The solution, beside requiring work from the Registrar is OK as long as you know and trust the registrar.

2. The Proposal

I am making this proposal on my blog, a platform where I can manipulate and change content as I wish which may not be ideal for such a proposal. For this reason, the following proposal will not benefit from a nice formatting, instead, it will show the proposal itself signed from the 'Chevdor' account currently part of the council and reasonably verified by the Registrar. Anyone will be able to verify the signature and intergrity of the proposal using the Polkadot.js UI.

The accounts address is DbF59HrqrrPh9L2Fi4EBd7gn4xFUSXmrE6zyMzf3pETXLvg and you can use this address to check the signature in the Polkadot.js UI.

Account used to Sign

DbF59HrqrrPh9L2Fi4EBd7gn4xFUSXmrE6zyMzf3pETXLvg

Proposal

CONTEXT:
Trustless systems are based on the property that no one needs to trust a single
entity. A single entity can only be trusted up to a certain level and no single
entity can garantee to be flawless.

PROPOSAL:
I am proposing the registration of a second independant registrar in order to
increase the number of independant sources helping in validating identities
on the Kusama Network.

The new Registrar will be operated by the following account:
Fom9M5W6Kck1hNAiE2mDcZ67auUCiNTzLBUdQy4QnxHSxdn
Short id: 58BHT

Signature

0x965e7e7b5ec4a5f710a31590088cd14c8d9ac404a651acf7a6d82efa302132505594258b3a8a60f470333448f6e7ac9905c8a1095c659a1d8731da380d29ed01

3. Don’t trust, verify

You can verify the content of the proposal as shown below:

4. Supporting the proposal

You may support this proposal simply by linking this post in Riot in the #kusamawatercooler and other social medias.

5. Submission

This Proposal is submitted to the council.

The motion proposal is #35:

Wilfried Kopp aka. Chevdor

Building Blockchains & Decentralized Solutions

I build decentralized solutions and tooling to support them. I am developing Smart Contracts and dApps on Ethereum and developing tooling for Substrate (Polkadot & Kusama). I love Rust! I am using Docker extensively and above all I like efficiency. GPG Fingerprint 15AF C574 D3F9 F1C3 CCDD E31E 2DCE C4DC 506E 6475.