We’re at an inflection point in our growth.
The attestation layer is quickly evolving as a critical piece of infrastructure for trust online and onchain. Its significance has the potential to be on par with foundational elements like ENS and the EVM, which have been instrumental in shaping the trajectory of our ecosystem.
Together as a community, we’ve already accomplished so much. The narrative and attention around attestations is rapidly growing.
EAS is being adopted by industry leaders like Optimism and its Superchain ecosystem, Gitcoin Passports to improve sybil resistance, Guild for greater community access and control, builder communities like Devfolio, and other prominent builders throughout the ecosystem.
The growth has been exponential and it’s clear to us that EAS as a public good extends beyond any single team. As such we have been thinking about what the future of EAS should look like.
So what’s next?
Credible Neutralityis the commitment of a system to operate without favoring any participant, agenda, or outcome. It's a promise that the platform's operations are transparent, unbiased, and free from external influences.
In order to maintain the trust and confidence of builders developing on EAS, it’s vitally important that EAS remains a free-to-use, permissionless, and open-source public good into the future.
The integrity of a widely used attestation layer is paramount, and this is why we are announcing our plans to make sure that EAS continues to be a community-driven, credibly neutral protocol layer.
Why Credibly Neutral?
Imagine a future where a foundational attestation layer serves as the bedrock for our critical systems and daily interactions. It's a world where governments use it to issue digital IDs, where the origins of intellectual property are safeguarded, where financial status is validated, and where knowledge and trust networks continuously evolve. This layer empowers decentralized social networks, and onchain voting, simplifies loan processes and manages title transfers, and enables boundless possibilities resulting in millions of attestations made regularly.
If such an attestation layer was not credibly neutral, the governance system that controlled it could start attaching fees to the core protocol, find ways to disenfranchise applications that may have been built on top of it over time, or favor some applications over others and put them at an unfair advantage. We further believe that token-based governance models for this layer would be inappropriate as a safeguard for credible neutrality.
The token model does not solve the scenario where a well-funded entity or monopoly could buy a majority of the tokens and capture the governance of the protocol. Thus undermining the very essence of decentralization and trust in the attestation layer.
Credible neutrality isn't just a nice to have; it is essential for the success of this layer.
Our next steps
In the coming days and weeks, we'll be engaging with core contributors and thought leaders in the community to lay out our plans regarding credible neutrality, and ensure that the integrity of EAS is safeguarded far into the future.
If you resonate with our vision of a credibly neutral, open-source attestation layer, we want to hear from you. Your insights, expertise, and passion will shape the future of EAS.
The EAS team.
Get In Touch With Us
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/eas_eth
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Read more: EAS’s Purpose