RariMe — a MetaMask Snap
With the rollout of MetaMask Snaps on September 12th, ConsenSys have allowed developers to build wallet extensions that address the specific needs of their communities. As one of the only identity-focused initiatives selected for the launch, Rarimo is proud to have provided a solution to one of the major issues plaguing the digital identity community: wallet fragmentation.
With RariMe, MetaMask’s 100 million users can now store and manage identity credentials alongside their crypto. This is an entirely new identity function for MetaMask and has transformed the wallet into one of the first ever in Web3 to hold both digital assets and identities in a single location.
Prior to RariMe, if a newcomer wanted to join the on-chain identity space, they would have had to set up a new, identity-native wallet. Not only did this process create a significant barrier to entry, it siloed identities, making them difficult to integrate with the rest of Web3. To execute a transaction that required proof of identity, for example, users had to switch back and forth between their identity and crypto wallets.
Rarimo has also embedded two game-changing features into RariMe. Firstly, users are able to instantly generate privacy-protecting ZKPs for every credential in their wallet. Secondly, RariMe makes every credential it stores instantly and fully multi-chain. Credentials only need to be issued once and can then be used interchangeably on any dApp across Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, and Avalanche. Again, this significantly reduces friction, saving users from creating and juggling different credentials for different chains.
As Christian Montoya, the Senior Product Owner of Snaps, highlighted during last week’s Rarimo x ConsenSys Twitter Space, Snaps was specifically designed to drive interoperability. Though RariMe is the only Snap bringing portability to the digital identity space, an impressive number of MetaMask’s 34 Snaps enable users to connect to blockchains outside the Ethereum ecosystem. Take Zion, which allows users to directly manage Bitcoin within the MetaMask interface, without having to wrap tokens, or Starknet Snap allows users to deploy accounts, make transactions, and interact with smart contracts on Starknet.
The Rarimo Community is particularly excited to watch as Snaps helps Web3 to become a seamlessly multi-chain world. As Christian stated during the Spaces, the beauty of Snaps is not just that it facilitates new MetaMask features, but that dApp developers can leverage these features to build new and unforeseen use cases. RariMe has been designed to support dApps seeking to leverage the privacy-protected, multi-chain identities it holds. If you are a developer with an idea in need of support, you can contact Rarimo at [email protected].
If you’d like to test out RariMe for yourself, it can be downloaded from the Snaps Directory. You can also read more about it in this Rarimo blog post. RariMe has already been integrated with Rarimo’s Proof of Humanity (POH) plug-in which can be used on Galxe and Decentraland, and following the 20th of September, will also be available on Zealy and QuestN. More information about POH, which allows users to prove that they are humans rather than bots, is available in Rarimo’s POH blog post.
Token 2049 — DeSoc Unleashed’s panel
At Token 2049 in Singapore, Rarify Labs co-founder Lasha Antadze spoke at DeSoc Unleashed’s panel: Empower BUIDLers to Scale Web3 Social Towards Mass Adoption.
The discussion underscored that the Web3 Socials community is deeply aligned in its broader goals. In answer to host Blockcast’s Jenny Zhang question ‘What are the biggest problems in terms of storage, infrastructure, networks, and scaling in Web3 socials?’ all six panelists reflected, in one way or another, on the need to provide a service that both rivals the seamlessness of Web2 while, in the words of Derek from Mantle, delivering a USP that only blockchain can provide.
Derek went on to highlight blockchain’s ability to support incentive mechanisms that align the interests of users and protocols as one such USP. This argument resonates with the Rarify Labs team who have spoken at length about how the portability that Rarimo facilitates will collapse the attract/extract model that defines centralized socials. In Web2, once a platform achieves a powerful enough network effect, users cannot leave without risking exclusion from their communities. At this point, platforms no longer need to worry about offering attractive terms for their users and instead begin to extract revenue from them typically in exploitative or unfair ways, such as, by exploiting their data.
It is part of the Rarify Labs’ philosophy that ownership of digital identities includes ownership of personal data, and during the panel, Arweave’s COO Sebastian emphasized the ways in which users will be able to monetize the data associated with their digital social identities, auctioning it, for example, on secondary markets.
As Bryan, from Particle Network, underscored, however, users will only engage with Web3 socials if there is an intuitive onboarding process. We were particularly excited to hear both Bryan and Wei highlight one of the issues that we hope RariMe has helped to ease; sign-up friction.
RariMe, however, is of course only a solution to one of many challenges that developers across the digital identity and decentralized social space are working to solve. The companies represented alongside Rarify Labs at Token2049 are all doing vital work to further the ecosystem. The discussion can be watched in full here, and more about our co-panelists can be learned from the links below:
Host:
Jenny Zheng, Blockcast
Co-Panelists:
Derek, Head of Ecosystem Research, Mantle
Wei Duan, OSS Community Manager, Next.ID
Sebastian Campos Groth, COO, Arweave
Bryan, Growth Manager, Particle Network
Neil, Advisor, BubbleAI