The latest CityCoins Builders Showcase highlighted Namespaces, a project bringing decentralized identities to CityCoins.

Namespaces comes from core team members Louise Ivan and Friedger. As Growth Lead with the Stacks Foundation, Louise has helped grow the Stacks community to over 100,000 members across 32 countries.

Now Louise turned his attention to decentralized identities through his project Ryder, the world’s first “social wallet.”

Anonymity, and the control, security, and privacy that it lends users, is a pillar of Web3. But crypto doesn’t have to be completely anonymous—it can be pseudonymous. This new era of the web gives users the freedom to choose, grow, and shape their identity.

It’s clear the Ryder team knows names. Now, via Namespaces, they’re bringing the benefits of decentralized identities to the CityCoins ecosystem.

Identity is opportunity

Pseudonyms are big business in Web3.

The Ethereum Naming Service (ENS), which offers identities for the Ethereum network, has provided 1.15 million names to over 400,000 owners. It boasts 500+ integrations and counting.

The Bitcoin Naming Service (BNS) is still nascent, with 42,000 names and 100,000 contract calls, but it too is growing rapidly.

There are four billion email users worldwide (and growing 3% every year). As more people join Web3 and seek to adopt pseudonyms, decentralized identities will become increasingly important. This is why services like Ryder and Namespaces, which let people buy and claim their preferred community handle, are so vital to build now (particularly for cities that wish to lock down their CityCoins identities, handles, and other important identity assets).

Louise, Friedger, and the Namespaces team anticipated this need and moved to meet it.

An identity layer for a city

Chosen identities reinforce and deepen collective affinity within communities.

This is a central aspect of NFTs. When a collector buys a token, the first thing they do is make it their profile picture.

Chosen pseudonyms provide a central identity to be used across the entirety of a person’s Web3 activity.

Decentralized identities also offer a range of utility:

• Users can secure different identities for various purposes: one public, one private, one for holding, another for investing, and so on.
• For governance, perhaps having a CityCoins identity could enable you to vote on community proposals.
• When representatives have public identities, community members can review their voting history and determine where their priorities lay, encouraging transparency and accountability.

Users can be rewarded for using their identities. Cities open a new revenue stream by selling identities tied to their CityCoin. Identities offer a foundation on which to build reputation. As time goes on, more and more uses for chosen decentralized identities will emerge.

Stay updated and give input

Namespaces aims to launch in late July 2022.

If you’d like to learn more, you can watch the entire Namespaces Builders Showcase.

The project is still under construction, and community feedback is helpful. Join the CityCoins Discord server to learn more and offer feedback.

For more updates, follow @Ryder_ID.