Re: Status List 2021 Questions

I think you're diving into a very interesting and important topic here, Daniel. 

Before writing smart contracts for our use cases, we always think about what kind of data we really need to write to the chain for the use case we try to solve. This is actually very much encouraged by the EVM and how the fee system works on Ethereum. Storing data and making big transactions can get costly very quickly. We try to be as respectful and therefore cheap as we can. In the end, we have to pay for it.

I also feel like I need to talk about why we chose Ethereum: One can’t deny that this is the most reputable EVM-blockchain out there, with a big community and good development tools around it. It’s the best tool for the particular issue we tried to solve for a non-human identity use case, especially because we can quickly architect and build a solution with various management features on a single network with already available tools. I personally have a few gripes with it regarding how PoS works and the cult around Vitalik. But that’s off-topic and does not harm our revocation method at all, as it’s still better for our use case than some centralized StatusList2021.

To this point, no other revocation method we've seen so far allows us to easily create revocation lists in a decentralized registry-like setting. We can easily create revocation lists in the namespaces (ethereum addresses = did:ethr) of issuers on our platform, revoke, batch revoke, add delegates to lists, change list owners, and even do meta transactions, so customers could keep control over their keys. It was also important to us to have a kind of fail-safe to revoke a whole list itself in one go, so we are never stuck with unrevokable credentials due to insane costs.

Now on possible future congestions and costly txs: This is a very real issue indeed, as we saw this already happening with the NFT-craze and the crypto kitties dApp before. As you might already know, most blockchains struggle with this. Bitcoin made, IIRC, the usage of L2 solutions for scaling as one of the first blockchains with the Lightning network. We can now observe the same thing happening in the Ethereum community with L2 networks like zkSync that use zkRollups for anchoring a big number of L2 txs in a single L1 tx. We plan to deploy the registry on zkSync in the near future to get independent on high L1 fees.

If you have some other great ideas on how to accomplish such a registry in a better way, feel free to send us a mail. We’re always open for great ideas.

-PB

Received on Tuesday, 11 October 2022 12:08:40 UTC