In 2021, NFT projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club showed the world the power of owning digital assets in your blockchain wallet. We believe the next thing you’re going to own is your digital identity.
Introducing Nifkey
Nifkey is an NFT that bridges your Twitter profile and reputation to the Ethereum blockchain. You hold your Nifkey in your wallet and can bring both your username and reputation with you to any dapp (decentralized app) or smart contract on Ethereum.
The benefit of linking your Twitter profile to your wallet goes in both directions.
- Wallet → Twitter
- Dapps will now know the Twitter identity associated with a wallet. When you look at someone’s wallet on OpenSea, Foundation, or elsewhere, you can see who owns it. Anywhere you see an ETH address or ENS today, you could see a verified link to a Twitter profile.
- Twitter → wallet
- Find a user’s wallet(s) by searching their Twitter username.
- Find all the Twitter usernames of people who own an NFT collection.
- Prove that you actually own the NFTs you’re using as your Twitter profile picture.
You can also look up other Nifkey holders’ wallets by their Twitter username and dapps and smart contracts can query Nifkey data on-chain to resolve Twitter usernames to wallet addresses.
Isn’t Twitter doing this?
Twitter is building a way to verify your NFTs on Twitter (web3 → web2), Nifkey is a way to verify your Twitter on the blockchain (web2 → web3). We think the latter is more powerful because by bringing Twitter data on-chain we unlock composability, interoperability, and data sovereignty.
Holding your identity and reputation in your wallet is a powerful primitive for dapps who will no longer have to ask Twitter for permission to read your data. It allows smart contracts and dapps to know social context beyond your wallet address and ENS name.
- Username - a recognizable identity
- Followers - signal on quality, reach, and importance.
- Account age - to filter spam and bots.
- Verified status - high signal of importance.
Nifkey for developers
Since Nifkey data lives on-chain, developers can use Nifkey in their smart contracts or dapps without the user taking additional action. No need to tweet your address for faucets or connect your Twitter for an NFT drop.
Make your dapps more human
Eventually we see every dapp integrating Nifkey in the same way dapps are integrating ENS. By putting a social profile next to a wallet, it makes web3 and dapps feel more human. You can know who is minting your NFT, who is contributing to your crowdfund, and who is writing that Mirror article.
Make your NFT drops sibyl-resistant
An NFT project could require a Nifkey in order to mint. One wallet, one mint doesn't mean anything if wallets are free to create. However, if the contract requires that the user hold a Nifkey corresponding to an account older than three months with 100+ followers it would be much harder to game the system.
Twitter social graph meets web3
The other benefit of requiring a Nifkey to mint an NFT is that the project would immediately and automatically have a way to foster their Twitter community – they can simply look at the intersection of NFT and Nifkey holders. #apefollowape could be automated for every project as part of the mint.
Nifkey vs. ENS
Some of what Nifkey does is already accomplished by ENS. While we love ENS and are excited by its continued adoption and development, we don’t think it needs to live alone as the only identity system and namespace for web3.
Platform changes require identity bridges. Email login played a big role in web2 and phone numbers are an important growth and reachability aspect of any mobile app. We don’t believe that this is the end state but rather a necessary step along the transition path as people build up more native reputation and context on-chain, zkp technology improves, and more people are onboarded into web3 applications.
Build with us
We built Nifkey because we think the ecosystem needs bridges. We see Nifkey evolving into a community owned and developed public good.
The Nifkey paradigm can be expanded to bridge any web2 identity to web3, including Github, phone numbers, email, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and more. If you’re interested in building one of these, we'd love to support you in the process.
There are a ton of cool projects that could be built on top of Nifkey, here are just a few we’re particularly excited about:
- A feed of NFT purchases of people you follow on Twitter who own a Nifkey.
- An NFT collection owner explorer: all the accounts who own a Punk or an BAYC.
- An airdrop site that allows you to airdrop by Twitter username.
- A react component that pulls the Twitter profile picture for a connected wallet.
- A chrome extension that replaces wallet addresses with Twitter handles.
- A smart contract that gates usage based on how many Twitter followers you have.
Mint your Genesis Nifkey today.
We soft launched Nifkey two weeks ago and the response from the community has been great. Hundreds of people sent us gm tweets to get early access and many of them have already minted their Nifkeys.
Today we’re excited to open up Nifkey even more by releasing 1,024 Genesis Nifkeys available for anyone to mint at nifkey.xyz.
Onward
This is just the start. If you’re interested in building on top of Nifkey, please reach out on Twitter (@nifkey_xyz) or join our Discord (link). Our smart contract allows for more than the frontend exposes (feel free to snoop around 😉) and we’re excited to work with developers, collaborate with other projects, and learn from others to build out a robust identity web3 ecosystem.