Identity is the anchor of the coordination layer. Before trust can be earned or relationships can be drawn, there must be a stable answer to a simple question: who is this participant?
The problem with logins
In the application-centric world, identity is a side effect of an account. You exist inside an app because that app created a row for you. Leave the app and the identity is gone. The next app starts you over — new profile, new history, new zero.
ORYN inverts this. Identity belongs to the participant, not the application. It is created once and resolved everywhere. Applications read it; they do not own it.
What an identity is
An ORYN identity is a persistent presence with a stable address on Base. It is not limited to humans — the coordination layer treats five kinds of participant as first-class:
People
Individuals who build, contribute, and govern.
Projects
Teams and protocols with their own onchain presence.
Communities
Groups that coordinate around a shared purpose.
Assets
Tokens, NFTs, and objects that participate in the graph.
Agents
Autonomous software actors that increasingly act onchain.
Profiles
Every identity can carry a profile: a participant-controlled set of attributes, links, and proofs. Profiles are the human-readable surface of identity — the part an application renders — while the underlying identity is the durable, addressable root.
The registry
Identities are anchored in the ORYN registry — the Phase 1 deliverable. The registry is the canonical place to create an identity, attach a profile, and resolve an address to a participant. Because it lives on Base, any application can read from it without asking ORYN for permission.
Portable by default. An identity created in one context is immediately legible in every other ORYN-aware context — there is no re-onboarding at the border.
Why identity comes first
Reputation needs something to attach to. The graph needs nodes to connect. Identity is the substrate both depend on, which is why it is the first primitive ORYN builds after Genesis. Get identity right — persistent, portable, participant-owned — and the rest of the coordination layer has somewhere to stand.
Open questions
- How should identities for non-human participants (assets, agents) be created and controlled?
- What is the right balance between portable profiles and participant privacy?
- How do recovery and key rotation work without reintroducing a central authority?
These are active research topics. The first track, Research #001 — Identity Systems, explores them in the open.