Decentralised Identity

In web2, You use your email all the time to for signing up on various platforms.

Drawing parallels, In Web3 world, your crypto wallet will be your unique identifier across various platforms hence creating a history unique to each person, which is readable. This history makes up your Decentralised Identity.

Unlike web2 profiles, decentralised identities are backed by hard evidence: a permanent, timestamped record of a person’s accomplishments, contributions, interests, and activities to date.

You are free to take this proved Identity with you through out the cyberspace and your lives. Hence bringing the virtual and physical worlds closer to each other.
We see a transition from

Temporary profiles here and there → long-term reputation building

Proof of being interested in something before the world

The major gain from public histories is that : it would be possible to "prove" that you were early to a trend or active in a project before it took off — like, say, being into Taylor Swift before she was popular or meeting and supporting Elon Musk when he was still thinking about Tesla.

Recording People's off-chain activities to on-chain Identity

Active recordings

Proof of Attendance Protocols (POAPs),

They enable organizers to produce tokens that attendees can collect as the "proof of attendence", This is an example of active recording.

When people claim these tokens, they’re purposely recording a “life event” on-chain, making it a part of their digital identity.

Similarly, people might make active attestations of other people’s skills(mentors can help the kids), character traits, or accomplishments by sending them tokens(hello NITO);
These claims can be verified through peer review or an assessment of activities on-chain.
(This idea is one of the core principals of Ignito. Professionals/Mentors can send token to any of the kids they interact with)

Passive recordings

When a person’s wallet interacts with apps or sites, information about those interactions might be recorded passively.
Say, if your wallet were attached to Discord and you earned server badges, those badges could be added to your on-chain collection.

On-chain reputations x Your Educational History

I believe, on-chain reputations could enable an internet-native education score that would unlock a variety of educational use cases, including issuing loans for higher-ed, Scholarships, referrals and opportunities while giving more granular insights to your journey.

On-chain systems are easily portable across borders making international education more accessible.

Currently, it is difficult to decipher who is a subject-matter expert and to recognise and reward them. With decentralised identities that track contributions across the internet, we will be better able to gauge how early someone was to a topic or trend and how much value someone is contributing to a subject matter.

Imagine a version of LinkedIn in which a your educational history is populated based on automatically tracked and verified projects, thus enabling direct, blockchain-mediated recruitment. This might be a far-fetched application but crypto has the ability to come up with a solution.