Forging the Gateway

The Future of Credentials and Reputation

Introducing Gateway

Gateway is a decentralized protocol for creating, consuming, and displaying verifiable credentials to serve as a basis for an interconnected web and portable reputation. Historically, credentials have been fragmented and controlled by large centralized entities. This infringes privacy, stifles innovation, and fractures reputation. Web3 has opened the door to a web where consumers own their assets and data, resulting in a Cambrian explosion of disruption in finance, art, music, and non-profits. However, to ensure the long-term success of the future of Web3, we must allow individuals and organizations to build up their identities beyond all the noise of on-chain transactions. This is where Gateway and its credentialing system hope to bridge the gap. 

What Are Credentials and Why Should You Care?

At the most basic level, credentials represent a statement or claim about a subject (can be a group, a single person, or an entity) made by an issuer (can also be a group, person, or entity). 

These powerful attestations function as building blocks of your professional and personal identity. These building blocks provide context on you as a person, and your competencies, serving as important proxies for your reputation. In an increasingly digital world, credentials are synonymous with creating your “persona” online. While you may not realize it, physical credentials are already ubiquitous and depended upon in your everyday life, and they are slowly making their way into your digital life as well. 

Here are some of the most basic examples of credentials today:

Much like lego blocks, credentials can be combined in many different ways to award new ones. For example, look at all the individual claims that go into earning a driver’s license:

Since any particular claim can be considered a credential, the use cases and applications are far-reaching. University degrees, KYCs from banks, credit scores, or even recommendations from peers can be used as credentials. These claims can be used to unlock new opportunities, provide you access to certain privileges or simply act as a confirmation of personal information such as your birth date. 

Ownership Vs. Authenticity

To be considered a credential, it must be a verified claim. This means that we must be able to trace it back to the issuer with absolute certainty. If we cannot do this, there is no assurance that the credential is authentic. For this reason, credentials are currently controlled by large government agencies and corporations. Storing the data in their respective database allows them to confirm that you indeed are the person who this claim is about. For example, as a verified user on Twitter, that “credential” is stored in Twitter’s database. I must log in with my username and password to access that credential on Twitter’s website. Similar themes apply to most digital credentials which are fully controlled by the issuer (usually a large centralized organization). 

Unfortunately, this has some major repercussions: 

1. Your Data = Corporate Leverage. Your data can be accessed by whoever pays money for them, completely without your consent (even recent events like Peiter Zatko’s claims on Indian Government placing an agent within Twitter). Proprietary data also creates entrenched winners who are able to achieve scale because they know more about you and your preferences than the rest of their competitors. 

2. It results in only a few large issuers that can afford to maintain security at the scale of the data. The average person cannot run a server that maintains all the data of every claim they have ever made about another group/entity/person. Think about how many valuable credentials we are losing out on - I would love to have a credential from Balaji Srinivasan. 

3. It makes the world so much more inefficient. Applications and organizations are only as powerful as their own data now. Chances are if I do KYC at one bank, the process will be very similar for another bank, yet I am forced to repeat it.

Until now, there has been no way of enabling ownership while ensuring the security and authenticity of the credential. However, in this perfect storm that is Web3, Gateway will enable the next generation of credentialing - You own, others consume, and we facilitate, all while being secure and decentralized.

The Gateway Solution - End-to-End Credentialing Protocol

Within Web3, organizations are attempting to build reputation by receiving/issuing NFTs to users or simply keeping data associated with a user on their centralized database (same problem as Web2). While NFTs are one part of the equation, that solution is largely unscalable as it does not preserve any user sovereignty over what they affiliate with their identity and limits advanced condition setting such as revokability. It also encourages fragmentation since all chains will be looking to issue credentials natively on their chain, limiting potential cross-pollination.  

This is why we are building Gateway, a decentralized credentialing protocol for organizations/applications and individuals to issue, receive, and consume verified credentials. Applications and individuals using Gateway can natively issue custom credentials based on whatever parameters they decide - whether it be on their application, off-chain from sources like Twitter, or even based on on-chain conditions. Others can then consume this information to build more custom credentials, scoring models, or access points. Now teams will be able to build more context around their community members, customers, and even employees. This will lead to a better experience on dApps, more meritocracy in core functions like governance and hiring, and hundreds of applications we at Gateway have not even thought of yet.   

One application we are excited about building is a native web3 resume and, in turn, a professional reputation. Key functions like hiring and sourcing talent are contingent on vetting for explicit accomplishments or skills. For this reason, employers often rely on “large” credentials like college degrees which may not be the best indicator of a person’s competency for a particular role. In the “future of work”, we at Gateway believe that hiring should be based on your abilities and skillset. We know others in the Web3 and Web2 agree, making us even more excited to provide the infrastructure to populate more granular credentials such as verified recommendations, bounties, hackathon wins, and new and unique professional credentials to give better insight into a person’s true capabilities. 

Roadmap

Our first product - the Gateway Network - is up and running! We are currently in private beta and working with some wonderful partners to get their community members and users credentialed. We are integrating more and more data sources every week to be used as eligibility requirements. Some we already support include Snapshot, token holding on a variety of chains, meeting codes, and even custom quizzes. We have also enabled Linkedin Style professional connections by leveraging Cyberconnect. Now you can curate your professional network in a truly decentralized way. Additionally, all of the credentials you receive will be stored on Ceramic Network to give you full ownership and rights over the data.

Some other exciting things we have in the pipeline: 

1. On-Chain Parameters: Soon you will be able to set conditions based on on-chain events to automatically issue credentials once it is met. Working with early-stage partners on this now - reach out if this is of interest!

2. Reputation Models: Create your own scoring models based on the credentials that a user holds on Gateway. These scoring models can be used for token-airdrops, loans, job applications, etc.

3. SDK/API: We are rolling out our SDK in the coming weeks to allow applications to build credentialing using custom conditions.

What Does This Mean for You?

Professionals

We recognize that web3 can be a confusing place. In the world of pseudonymity and fully remote work, it seems harder and harder to build a name for yourself. We hope to make your journey a little easier by empowering you with the ability to earn, control, and display your credentials.  We even have free minting on Polygon currently to help you get started!  

The more organizations and applications that utilize Gateway, the more unique credentials you will be able to earn. Additionally, we are soon launching peer-to-peer credentialing to allow anyone to become an issuer. 

Create your profile now on Gateway and see what credentials you can already earn!

Organizations

If you are interested in rewarding your community and helping build portable reputation, please reach out to us. We are working with organizations across the spectrum to help them engage their communities, find talent, create reputational scoring, or just give them fun rewards. If any of these use cases appeal to you or you have any new ideas you would like to try, we would love to have you join the cohort of some of the most talented organizations in Web3!

Enter the Gateway!

Gateway Beta: https://www.mygateway.xyz/

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gateway_xyz

Join Our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/bxTaYsJ6WD