Passport is now part of human.tech

TL;DR

• V2 of Identity Staking is a revamped mechanism that empowers Passport users (and the larger community) to improve their Unique Humanity Score and verify their human identity by staking GTC.

Remind me again: what’s Identity Staking?

Big picture: Identity Staking (or ‘ID Staking’) involves users locking up a certain amount of cryptocurrency tokens to authenticate and validate their digital identity within a decentralized network. It serves as a sort of security deposit by staking those tokens for a pre-set period of time (for example, 90 days), after which they’ll be returned, unless the user's identity is found to be fraudulent.

Identity Staking can either be done on one’s own identity (self-staking), or you can stake on other known users (community staking). Passport.xyz now has enhanced options for both.

Why did you update the ID Staking experience?

First and foremost, enhancing Passport’s ID Staking experience serves our mission to offer users an ever-increasing number of ways to quickly and easily build up their Unique Humanity Score. We want to serve as wide of an audience of unique humans as possible, but not everyone is comfortable with some of the optional verification methods within Passport, such as Biometrics or KYC. Making improvements and reducing fees related to our ID Staking app means that users can still build up a significant amount of points with the ID Staking Stamp, while not participating in Stamps they are uncomfortable with.

Beyond that, we had 3 main reasons for this new release:

• User feedback on L2 Optionality. Our users increasingly want to minimize gas fees via L2s, so now you can also stake on Optimism or Arbitrum. (But you can still stake on the Ethereum mainnet, for those of you who prefer to hold their GTC on L1.)

• Improved Sybil Defense. Our team is always working to keep pace with Sybils and other bad actors to keep our ecosystem secure and trustworthy. To that end, we’ve introduced the “slashing” mechanism, which will uphold network integrity by penalizing malicious actions, thereby increasing the Cost of Forgery for a Passport.

• Increased Score Weight on Community. In addition to a user getting points for others staking on their identity, now users will also be rewarded simply for staking on others, incentivizing growth of our trust graph.

Our goal is to promote behaviors that are challenging for Sybil attackers to replicate, thus enhancing the security of our network. Concurrently, these criteria are structured to make the staking experience more engaging and beneficial for legitimate community members, contributing to a more robust and interconnected ecosystem.

Okay, how does it work?

The below video walks you through the process — and if you need $GTC or want to bridge to Optimism or Arbitrum, here’s a guide.

What’s next?

Go give V2 a try! And if you have questions, check out our support documentation.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be following up here with a deep dive into Community Staking and more on how “Slashing” works to de-incentivize Sybil accounts and other bad actors.