Abstract — A coordination layer is only as strong as its notion of identity. This track studies how to give people, projects, communities, assets, and agents a single portable presence on Base, and what it takes for that presence to be durable without a central authority.
Motivation
Application-bound identity is the root cause of fragmentation. When every app mints its own accounts, nothing a participant builds in one place follows them to the next. We ask: what is the minimal, portable identity that every other primitive — reputation, graph — can safely build on?
Questions
- What is the canonical representation of an identity that is cheap to resolve and hard to forge?
- How are identities for non-human participants — assets and autonomous agents — created and controlled?
- How do recovery, delegation, and key rotation work without reintroducing a trusted intermediary?
- Where is the line between a portable, useful profile and participant privacy?
Approach
We treat identity as an addressable root on Base with an attachable, participant-controlled profile. The root is durable and minimal; the profile is rich and revocable. We study existing naming, attestation, and account-abstraction designs and evaluate each against four tests: portability, resistance to forgery, recoverability, and privacy.
| Unit of study | The participant identity and its resolution path. |
|---|---|
| Feeds primitive | Identity (Phase 1 — Registry, Profiles). |
| Evaluation | Portability · Forgery-resistance · Recoverability · Privacy. |
Identity must be owned by the participant and resolvable by any application — created once, legible everywhere, with no re-onboarding at the border.
What it unlocks
A portable identity is the substrate the rest of the coordination layer stands on. Reputation needs something to attach to; the graph needs nodes to connect. Settle identity, and both become possible.
Status
Open. This research informs the Phase 1 registry. Findings and drafts are published in oryn-docs as they mature.