1. Create a new NEAR account using “vSelf onboarding” 
2. Sign in with NEAR 
3. Claim NFT badge

vSelf Instruction

vSelf Meta AMA Recap

<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*nfJ57AI7cuDklIFIovpFJg.png"></figure><h4>Recap AMA <a href="https://vself.app/">vSelf</a> &amp; <a href="https://twitter.com/near_insider/">NEAR Inside</a>r.</h4>
Intro from vSelf CEO Tatiana:
In vSelf, we are developing a cutting-edge platform for growth hacking and community engagement that utilizes Web3 technology and, currently, NEAR protocol. We are incredibly passionate about the potential of Web3 to revolutionize the data market and transform the way customer data is managed and created. The project’s focus on fundamental concepts such as privacy, data ownership, and security is crucial to its success.
The vSelf product has taken a new turn and now focuses on growth management and community engagement. Can you tell us more about this evolution and new vision?
At the beginning of our journey, our aim was to create an application where people can maximize the value of personal data and collect all the history of interactions with platforms, dApps, and web3 communities, building their own web3-personas. While researching this topic for about a year and trying several pilots, we discovered a huge opportunity to change the very way data is being created.
We see the power of brands to create new ethical and privacy-conscious business processes in areas like loyalty, customer relationship management, and social media marketing. All the interactions with the customers can be direct, avoiding intermediary software, and automated with significant improvements in data quality and integrity. vSelf turned into a two-sided platform where our partners can launch their campaigns in a web3 manner. For example, they can distribute referrals or create loyalty rewards using SBTs (soulbond tokens, i.e., non-transferrable digital certificates). This step-by-step will build up a better customer 360.
<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*FwhXB2qdvdoDzkTd6KejYA.png"></figure>What are the main user-facing features of the vSelf product at this stage?
We have an identity application called vRanda, where users have profiles with blockchain-stored data and where all their benefits are collected. It is different from standard loyalty accounts or linktree-like pages: it is the first plug-and-play app where users can fully own their profiles, switch with them between platforms, and share the data with explicit consent with different apps, products, and ecosystems.
How can Web3 enhance customer relationships compared to Web2?
Better engagement and mass adoption have been fundamental problems since Web1. From the utility perspective, Web3 can change how data is being distributed and how companies approach the digital world. It can be seen as an evolved concept of the “Internet of people”: data (and value associated with it) should not be trapped in big-tech clouds and CRMs but serve to build digital identities and empower the true contributors. Now we have instruments to build decentralized economies reflecting real complex social structures.
Another important aspect is culture. It is critical to avoid applying particular methods simply because they have been used in the past. Look at how advertising and marketing have been set. In many cases, it doesn’t reflect the spirit of the new generation who want to express their position and vision with their consumer choices. They want to “vote” with their money. Web3 can provide a powerful representation for users that bring value to brands through feedback, user-generated content, and engagement. It gives rise to the next level of community, what we call a metacommunity. It is a community of brands and a big vibrant ecosystem of customers that have their own say, representation, and reputation.
<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*1sph7zZs4PTDx0jj0b9hZA.png"><figcaption>vRanda: personal space with user-owned data, achievements, and history.</figcaption></figure>What is the recent progress in terms of partnerships and use cases?
We have recently begun collaborating with various small and medium-sized enterprises that operate on a community-driven model, such as local service providers and fashion brands. One of our most exciting partnerships that we are preparing to announce is with TripMap, an ecosystem of cannabis industry brands. To assist these brands in managing benefits for their customers and enhancing cross-pollination between audiences, vSelf has developed a loyalty tool. We are thrilled to be a part of this innovative and dynamic industry.
Our research and development efforts are primarily aimed at simplifying the user experience and interface. We consider the needs of new users who may be unfamiliar with managing wallets and passphrases. Previously, we had a fast-track onboarding process, and now we have introduced SBT claims that can be made on the go without authorization. This feature makes it easy to use our services without any obstacles, while still providing the option to upgrade to a full NEAR account later on.
vSelf team is working on key initiatives in the product roadmap:
<ul>
<li>Ambassador programs for referral campaigns: to reward and acknowledge active contributors to the community’s growth.</li>
<li>Templates for common quests in social media: for example, to combine different actions on Twitter and Instagram that partners want to verify and reward.</li>
<li>Customized gamification: popular activation mechanics enhanced by brands’ identity and esthetics.</li>
</ul>
We invite you to follow us on social media and be the first ones to get our updates:
<ul>
<li>
vSelf Official: <a href="https://vself.app/">https://vself.app/</a>
</li>
<li>
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/vself_meta">https://twitter.com/vself_meta</a>
</li>
<li>
LinkedIn: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/vself/">https://www.linkedin.com/company/vself/</a>
</li>
</ul>
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vSelf: presenting a new vision for web3-powered customer relationship management

<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*cBPHWumFjo5jqHZ_4RcD0w.png"></figure><a href="https://vself.app/">vSelf</a> is a web3 identity wallet with rewards for data sharing. It provides a platform to issue and collect digital certificates, building personal provenance and digital personas out of them. In the previous pieces of the interview (see <a href="https://medium.com/@vSelf_Project/part-1-vself-nearity-ama-recap-project-concept-strategy-3a0d227f54cc">Part 1</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/@vSelf_Project/part-2-vself-nearity-ama-recap-technical-features-of-the-platform-df06b9d7a9cf">Part 2</a>) with Nearity team, we covered general ideas behind vSelf, our vision, and the tech stack of the platform. In this piece, we focus on the business model and market strategy of the project.
I read on your website that vSelf is the place where the Web3 world makes history, which sounds very interesting. Can you explain in more detail the purpose and original concept of your project?
We’re creating a complex toolbox to bring ownership over personal data to the users. However, it is important to educate users on how to protect their data and to operate with this level of self-sovereignty. It is not a frictionless process for the general public, I would say. The first step in our road map includes a lot of education about SSI and collaborations with web3 projects.
Step by step, using the reward systems, using gamification mechanisms, we will teach the community how to evaluate the data they’re storing about themselves: the digital provenance that can be kept in vSelf wallets. Only then can we talk about the ethical data market when we have tokenomics and pricing. We can call it the final ultimate goal of vSelf: gateway for data monetization. What would make history is basically to reverse the model we’ve been living with last 15 years, where lots of web2 platforms seem free for us, but actually, we’ve been paying with our own privacy and our sovereignty.
Creating an ethical data market seems to be at the core of your project, which is something everyone can appreciate. I also see that you are creating a platform for people who believe in the right to self-sovereign identity. This is something extremely innovative and creative. I really admire this project’s way of thinking.
It really will require the whole community to do so because, as I mentioned, we need to help each other and put the maximum effort into explaining all the complex concepts. E.g., web3 and its relation to privacy, or what are the tools available for use. Or why these tools are better than the ones that we had in Web 2. How it is really working — it’s still not the easiest thing to grasp. I think only together, being in places like the NEAR ecosystem, we can do that.
Can you share your plans to release Early user NFTs? What is the feature of this NFT?
We actually prepared a claimable link to show how our mechanics around digital certificates work. The whole platform that we have released so far is based on a non-transferable NFT standard. It can be used for anything like NFT rewards, POAPs, kudos, etc. Further on the road, we will release more different types of badges and membership symbols for activities with our partners. We definitely will use these badges to help collaborate inside the NEAR ecosystem, e.g., to simplify airdrops for membership badge holders.
How do you assess the value of an NFT?
It’s an exciting trend in web3: we came across too many use cases around art as NFTs or any collectables as NFTs. But we forget about the diversity of different use cases where this technology, which is, first of all, a data standard, can get more utility. One of the use cases that I already mentioned is proof of attendance. It’s also rewarding. It’s kudos. It’s any fact that you can record about the audience for any organization in web3 that can be marked in this form (as NFT). In this sense, the value is this business utility, the business proposition. It can be premium content or gated community access, or anything like that. It’s not the same value type as we are used to on the marketplaces with direct monetization.
How is the data value calculated? Is our sensitive data exposed? How are profits divided?
This is an epic question, and the fair answer would be we don’t know yet. We will figure it out in the very last stages of our development. First, we need to grow the history on the wallet side for our users big enough to be able to monetize it properly. In the meantime, the reward will be some perks or some privilege accesses from partners on the basis of collected data. But we do have very good examples of proper tokenomics for data markets. One of the best examples is Ocean protocol, and I think we can go in a similar direction.
I really hope that by the time we will finish with the verifiable credentials part of the platform and personal provenance management, we’ll be able to partner with data marketplaces. It’d give more diversity and more detailed and advanced tokenomics. That’s where the price estimate should come from. In the data markets, one of the essential things is to define the demand for the data and also the rarity of the data. How valuable, how unique is something that you’re proposing? From a personal standpoint, it’s a complex question, right? Because you’d think that your data is unique anyway, but it doesn’t scale as other commodities do. It does rely on the network effect. The more similar classes of profiles and comparable units that you can combine with other users, the more expensive it gets. That’s how the price of data sets works in terms of how valuable it is for businesses. And there’s also a long way to go for personal data compared to protocols for enterprise one. Shortly put, if there are third-party marketplaces with mathematically proven tokenomics, they definitely will be our first choice on the way.
There is also a privacy aspect. In vSelf, we work on the privacy ZKP-based layer and want to develop it further. That’s also going to be an obstacle towards a simple evaluation of data sets on the personal side.
But the issue is that while creating your project, you normally do it with the mindset probably of a tech person. In the long run, how easy is the user experience will be? Did you develop it with the mind of making it easy for interactions for normies coming in from the traditional web 2 space?
Great question, and the short answer is yes. That’s the first thing that we had in mind when we were coming together to build vSelf. One of the first things we thought about was making it fun, making it accessible. It doesn’t have to be positioned as a blockchain project. It can has blockchain and web3 under the hood. You’re not really thinking about all the tech that is coming into your iPhone when you’re using one, right? You’re just using the last mile that you need, and here’s the same.
But there is a compromise between security and usability that we need to overcome. That’s our main goal for the upcoming half of the year. We try to keep it secure and teach people how to interact with it. For example, you can check out our onboarding page. We’re still keeping it open, so if anyone doesn’t have a NEAR account yet, we’re subsidizing it for the community. So you’re just opening the web page, choosing your desirable new name, and that’s basically it. That’s one of the things we’ve built straight ahead at the very beginning of the MVP stage. We want people to just simply join it, copy and paste the passphrase and start using the app without a need to pass like a course on web3.
However, we think it’s necessary to understand the benefits of web3 at least on a high level. So far, it’s really hard to value the difference that web3 brings when it’s less comfortable to use compared to the Facebooks and Instagrams of the world. This industry already has billion-dollar companies behind that utilise tons of users’ data to make the user experience that smooth. So that’s something, unfortunately, that we will have to explain to the users why it’s not as UX -friendly as these companies and where this coming from. But yes, we’re trying to make it less painful when possible.
Partnerships are always an important factor for every project; the partnerships you guys doing are great ones. So how can we individually benefit from it?
The value of the partnerships that we’re building can be split into two categories. One is where users come to our platform to issue not-transferable NFTS as POAPs, kudos or other rewards. There, the benefit is simple: if you love the community that you’re a member of and you’re really interacting with it, then you’re going to benefit from having this history, like reputation.
For example, with Human Guild, we used simple gamification, where people would come and play games that are part of the HG, and get the NFT badge showing that they were there physically, offline. Later, they can do a different badge, e.g., for a series of Twitter spaces. This collection of badges can be for access management to their private content or to white list for games in the guild. So that’s the benefit.
Another aspect of our partnerships is technological, where we develop something new and cool for the ecosystem together. The benefit of it is to open doors for more projects to become privacy-focused and user-centric. We’re going to see what will grow out of it. For a final user, it’s sort of a derivative benefit, but still, I would say it’s important.
vSelf is also going to be open source. So once we’re done with privacy-preserving tools for DAOs, it’s going to be accessible to the whole community. It’s essential to share what you’ve achieved.
Do you intend to attract non-crypto investors to your project? Because the quantity of new investors attracted by a project determines its success. What tactics do you have in place to create non-crypto knowledge so that you may invest in your community?
That’s something I would agree and disagree with: how the question is stated. I would also say the quality of new investors matters a lot. And yes, we do really look forward to attracting attention from the non-crypto community. One of the mottos is to bring the benefits of the blockchain world to the general public. That’s why we’re pushing tokenization in the traditional crypto sense to the last stage of our road map. Only when we need the entrance to the data market, we will issue tokens or even maybe going to use the NEAR-native one.
In the meantime, vSelf is going to have the traditional monetization model with subscriptions for services in the wallet and Web 3 studio. That’s why the strategy for investment is also web 2.5 friendly. It doesn’t have to be a crypto project to help people to take care of their privacy and their personal information. It should be more inviting for regular users. So yes, in this sense, we really look forward to collaborating with people who value technology but who are not sceptical about what web3 is bringing. We look for people with experience in delivering these products to a broad market.
Can you share some of the partnerships you have formed with existing blockchain foundations recently?
One of the earliest partners is Human Guild, who supported us from the very beginning. Our MVP was built on their grant, and they were one of the first users of our platform. Another great project we’re integrating with is Mailchain. It allows communication channels between different web3 profiles. Another one to mention is DAOcubator and the community around them. It might be interesting to utilize this feature of personal provenance for contributors and projects in web3. A big use case for us is talent hubs marketplaces for P2E projects. We discuss an exciting plan with Trooper, which is a marketplace for gamers where they can find context to monetize their skills and join teams to leverage their web3 engagement.
Can I earn a passive income from your project? What are the benefits of holding tokens in the long run?
We’re not launching our utility tokens yet; it’s not on our short-term plan. We work on the information representation and certificate side of things. It’s more about history, achievements, and anything you’ve done in the web3 space rather than something that can be traded or have a direct monetary value. But it can serve as a tool for DeFi platforms or places where you can earn passive income. It can simplify KYC/KYB procedures. So if you’re migrating from platform to platform, trust towards yourself is going to grow if you have this history of involvement.
See <a href="https://medium.com/@vSelf_Project/part-1-vself-nearity-ama-recap-project-concept-strategy-3a0d227f54cc">Part 1</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/p/df06b9d7a9cf">Part 2</a> in the previous articles.
vSelf Official page: <a href="https://vself.app/about">https://vself.app/</a>AMA: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/AMANearityvSelf">https://tinyurl.com/AMANearityvSelf</a> Follow: <a href="https://twitter.com/vself_meta">https://twitter.com/vself_meta</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Nearity_org">https://twitter.com/Nearity_org</a>
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PART 3. vSelf &amp; Nearity AMA recap: business aspects

<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*pc1ssMuPSsXDZSB57AKg9A.png"></figure><a href="https://vself.app/">vSelf</a> is a web3 identity wallet with rewards for data sharing. It provides a platform to issue and collect digital certificates, building personal provenance and digital personas out of them. In the previous <a href="https://medium.com/@vSelf_Project/part-1-vself-nearity-ama-recap-project-concept-strategy-3a0d227f54cc">part of the interview</a> with Nearity team, we covered general ideas behind vSelf, our background and vision. In this piece, we focus on questions of tech stack, privacy, and security.
Why did you choose NEAR chain? Why did you choose that chain to build your project?
Besides the low environmental impact, it’s one of the blockchains that proposed cheap and fast transactions, which we do need when we’re talking about human-facing applications. We want the general public to access functions like collecting the history of interactions in the form of non-transferable certificates. That’s significant data throughput. vSelf shouldn’t make it expensive.
The second factor is the sustainability of the ecosystem: whether NEAR is going to operate in the long run. We dug deep into the core protocol to understand how reliable it is and looked at the blockchain implementation itself and all the team skills. In this sense, NEAR is simply amazing, as you have these Olympic-level developers working on the core project. Besides, the community is growing, and NEAR is inviting the best contributors.
The third factor is it’s super friendly. It’s one of the things that I pay attention to, especially being a female founder, knowing how some of the IT or crypto communities can be not very inclusive. And with NEAR, it was all the way around: people were helping. E.g., the Human Guild supported us starting from the first hackathon. That’s multiplying and expanding, so for everyone who is still choosing the network — NEAR is an excellent way to go.
Do you plan to be multichain?
Totally. That’s our plan. I would even say blockchain agnostic. Because eventually, you need to control the keys for your identity wallet. Then, we’re going to add multiple sub-identities inside it, i.e., the keys of any chain you want inside it. But, growing the platform, we’re going to start with NEAR, and then we will add Polygon, Aurora, and Ethereum networks. After, we will see what is on demand.
Security is the main centre of the platform. Recently, many large platforms have been compromised by hackers and caused a lot of losses to their users. How is your security system safe from hackers?
In general, when we speak of data breaches of a large scale, it happens mostly to centralized companies. Because, specifically, users don’t own their data or assets. It’s stored with a single point of failure either in terms of architecture or access management. We are engineering a new kind of data management protocol. Everyone should be in charge of their own keys and keep all their data encrypted at all times. This way, no single point of failure exists by design.
Currently, we’re in MVP stage, and we do have weaknesses where the system can fail. But we will improve upon our solution in the future. Also, there is another aspect to what we are working on right now. We’re collaborating with people from Cypherpunk Guild and working on privacy-enhancing governance solutions for DAOs and guilds. We’re thinking of applications like funding and DeFi, which is another thing that can be preserved better from hackers and attacks. It is important not to have any sensitive data that can be traceable on the blockchain, in plain sight, with identifiable human-readable names that we’re using. And often there are the same as ones on Twitter or other social networks. This is an additional layer that will help us to prevent any significant losses, I would say.
Tell us a little bit about security. Have you done an audit of the platform? Are the smart contracts error-free? What are the test results?
Well, we are web3-native projects, so we’ve been thinking a lot about all security layers starting from secure and private storage and content delivery network. Security is never perfect, but we try to do our best on the engineering side. For the audits, we reach out to the NEAR community to check the smart contract side. We are an open-source project, and we are open to public scrutiny. Also, we do plan to do some penetration testing and pass certification. Until that time, we won’t leave the beta stage. We will keep you posted on security audits, of course. That’s the plan.
What are some of the sustainability plans for your project?
If sustainability here means the general impact, it is the motif why we’ve chosen NEAR: because it’s one of the carbon-neutral blockchains and generally minimizes their negative effect on the environment. And also, we’re super interested in using digital identity principles to make a reputation in web3 multidimensional. What I mean by that is to incorporate not only skills and achievements into profiles but also impact and contribution towards projects with good cause. ReFi is also a big application here. We aim to help this area to bring more attention to public goods projects, more traction, and maybe even more funding through correct reputational mechanisms.
Please could you tell us about the safety and security measures?
I guess we can summarize again. The main thing is that we build as web3-natives, so all the pieces of our architecture are built and glued together with thinking of high-end technology and privacy and safety. The only layer that we do have centralized and vulnerable is the communication layer, mostly like content delivery networks and integration between the backend and Unity application that we have. That’s something that we are working on. Second, we are involved in the <a href="https://gov.near.org/t/near-wallet-builder-group-wbg/29175">wallet building group</a> that we is active in the NEAR ecosystem. The wallets that are built on NEAR are helping each other to guarantee the best service for their clients and to prevent possible failures.
See Part 3 in the upcoming article.
vSelf Official page: <a href="https://vself.app/about">https://vself.app/</a>AMA: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/AMANearityvSelf">https://tinyurl.com/AMANearityvSelf</a> Follow: <a href="https://twitter.com/vself_meta">https://twitter.com/vself_meta</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Nearity_org">https://twitter.com/Nearity_org</a>
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PART 2. vSelf &amp; Nearity AMA recap: technical features of the platform

<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*DyXpiEqm-ThQsYTaNZxM5g.png"></figure>Landon (Nearity): Hi guys, I'm Landon, the Community Builder of Nearity. We update the latest information on Near about the ecosystem, analyze data, analyze projects, provide instructional content, and support users on how to use web3 tools and integrate into the ecosystem. Welcome to a wonderful AMA with <a href="https://vself.app/">vSelf</a>!
Can you tell us about yourself and introduce vSelf project?
<a href="https://vself.app/">vSelf</a> ( Tatiana, CEO and Ilya, Architect): Thanks for the introduction! I'm Tatiana. I'm the CEO of vSelf. And here's Ilya with us on this Twitter Space— our blockchain architect. We're here to talk about the project we're building: a web3 identity wallet. We started with the NEAR ecosystem to create a tool that will connect organizations and users through a trustful communication channel. vSelf creates a space to record personal provenance and brings ownership of the personal data back to the users.
What is the goal of your project?
<a href="https://vself.app/about">The ultimate goal </a>is to make this self-sovereign identity (SSI) wallet happen in reality. We see a lot of conversation and discourse around censorship, deplatforming, and the threat of big tech to occupy our personal data going around. FAANG-like companies know about us more than we do. But it's still a long way to go to reverse this model and take these digital personalities back. At the end of our road, we see ourselves sort of Metamask but for SSI and a gateway to the ethical data market eventually. That's the big vision.
That's a noble cause. Who doesn't want ownership over their personal data these days? Creating an ethical data market would make things easier for everyone and take a lot of stress off people's shoulders. We are happy to hear you guys have such awesome goals.
Thank you, that's what we all need — not only in web3 but web2 as well.
What is the difference between vSelf and other wallets in the Near ecosystem? Tell us about some of the outstanding features of your project.
The main feature is that we’re not a traditional wallet for crypto. We’re focused on credentials. In the background, we’re developing a toolbox for verifiable credentials on NEAR. One can think of it as complex and verifiable digital documents. That’s, I guess, our main distinguisher among other wallets.
<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*IE-wBKJycP9L6in-pxH3Pg.png"></figure>I was just kind of curious. I wanted to know where did you get the inspiration for this project, vSelf?
Most of our team has known each other for quite a long time. With three of our devs, we worked on the previous blockchain-based project, where we were developing an e-government platform for low-level democracy to automate transparent feedback about what’s going on in the communities.
When COVID started, we switched to the healthcare industry to help collect feedback already in this area. Then, we saw how IT systems operated in real life and how identity management was handled in Web 2 platforms. We noticed there was a huge gap. In our minds, we were already in the crypto world where people were transferring massive amounts of money with low fees and using Metamask and things like that. In reality, it was a lot of friction to add any type of data into the system or to prove something about users.
We started looking at what’s going on in the identity field. Besides, we were following the SSI movement and W3C standard for quite a while. The question was how the results of almost 20 years of work on digital identity look right now. What are the applications? Many of the existing solutions focus on only very strict use cases, for example, KYC in the form of verifiable credentials or something like a university diploma. Our hypothesis was that it’s not the most fun and fast way to bring this technology to mass adoption. It was kind of rigid and skeuomorphic, as many people call it, structure that imitates the same traditional business process but with web3 or with blockchain.
Our team invited my old friend Inga, who’s our CTO now, to collaborate. She, besides being a computer scientist like myself, spent many years in game development. She’s experienced in gamification and making things fun and shiny. We decided to put our expertise in blockchain together with her vision of how it can be done fast and fun. And here we are, building vSelf for the last almost a year.
Let’s mention the ideology behind vSelf as well. We are proponents of the cypherpunk movement. The idea of self-sovereign identity is crucial for the future, where, as cypherpunks imagined, we will have true freedom of speech and censorship resistance. It’s a natural right for everyone. In this vision, reputation is of utmost importance for the community, for the society of the future. So when we imagine vSelf, we imagine it to be a virtual self, like literally our counterpart. Almost a piece of the body.
Many projects are just clones of existing ones, and an analogue of an existing one is created. Do you have different and creative qualities from those who look like you?
It’s still a relatively small market compared to the traditional one and to everyone who we can call competitors in Web 2. For example, if we’re talking about authorization, we can compare ourselves by sign-in with Facebook and sign-in with Google. And guess where you’re going to have more users.
There are a lot of projects in web3 that work in decentralized identity and work on similar topics. I think the knowledge and education that they’re bringing to the public is already a good thing for us. The decentralized identity field is in the early stage, and it is going to be a lot of space for all of us. We’re all going to have some niches.
Eventually, we’ll figure out how we can leverage portability because one of the things we didn’t talk yet is the importance of portable digital identities. There is no sense in having a self-sovereign identity without being able to transfer your reputation, your success, and your provenance between platforms and later between chains. One of the things we’re working on is the ability to mix, for example, your POAPs or your certificates from hackathons from Polygon, Etherium, and NEAR and create this multidimensional web3 CV. The more identity platforms exist, the better for us. Users will judge which one to choose: e.g., whose ethics or traction is better suited for them. And maybe they will stick with us, maybe with some other project.
I think one of the issues that Web 3 communities face is the fact that projects and products are too technical for an average person to comprehend. Simplicity is key to having a large audience. How vSelf employ a more simplistic user interface to make things easier for newbies?
Amazing question. Yes, we will. And that’s the power of what some people call Web 2.5: we do have this strategy of onboarding without any complex issues, like saving 12 words in the passphrase. But we do need to introduce some level of sovereignty even in the very first stages. If you sign up with e-mail, like we used to with the NEAR wallet, you will have to have either something like Magic links or a social recovery mechanism.
At the very least, we need to teach users to stop asking their IT providers to save their personal data on their side in a centralized manner. Also, onboarding, in our case, is something that we want to unite with training. We’re developing a simple intro course and looking to partner with a metaverse to engage more users.
Another thing that we’re trying to achieve is to go further with bloggers and influencers and suggest using reference systems through NFTs. It’s not a complex technology, it can be a simple and fun tool to interact with the audience. It can be substituted for loyalty programs when you send your personal codes to, e.g., YouTube or Twitter streams, things like that.
Do you have any plans to market your initiative in countries or regions where English is not widely spoken? Is there a local community where they can learn more about your project?
We are super small so far: it’s only the beginning of the journey. When we raise the volume and get more funds, we’re going to be able to expand to different communities. But there is a lot of open source initiative behind us. If anyone is willing to pick up the educational part and start building on top of what we are creating, feel free to do so. And we’re always welcoming and friendly towards such people. So the answer is yes, at some point. And if you want to speed it up, hit us up.
See Part 2 and Part 3 in the upcoming articles.
vSelf Official page: <a href="https://vself.app/about">https://vself.app/</a>AMA: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/AMANearityvSelf">https://tinyurl.com/AMANearityvSelf</a> Follow: <a href="https://twitter.com/vself_meta">https://twitter.com/vself_meta</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Nearity_org">https://twitter.com/Nearity_org</a>
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PART 1. vSelf &amp; Nearity AMA recap: project concept &amp; strategy

🚀 Welcome to the vSelf blog! In the upcoming articles, we will discuss how we build a Web3 identity wallet, which ideas lie on the basis of it, and what our users and partners should know about the decentralized identity field. Our goal is to bring the benefits of the blockchain world to the general public and make web3 products more inclusive and user-friendly. One of the first steps is to share our knowledge and expertise, breaking down complex concepts.
<h4>💚 What is vSelf</h4>
<a href="https://vself.app/">vSelf</a> is an Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solution built by a collective of values-driven individuals and proponents of the open web and self-sovereign identity (SSI) movements*. vSelf (virtual self) goal is to guarantee full ownership over personal data to the users. We see ourselves as open-source software with DAO-governed cloud infrastructure for business logic and data management.
<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*JlXybyJx9-xhUaVxY5ELcg.png"></figure><h4>👁️ The Problem
</h4>
Our digital life is dominated by big tech companies, which is convenient on the user experience level but leaves us with very low to no rights to our personal data and account. Users have to manage multiple profiles, and each of them can be censored or de-platformed. Some of these issues are resolved in the web3 and crypto space. However, tools like Metamask are uneasy (and not that much fun) to use for the general public.
<h4>👍 vSelf Solution</h4>
We build an identity-as-Service platform with gamification where users can :
<ul>
<li>manage personal data and credentials,</li>
<li>choose which information to share with businesses and institutions,</li>
<li>get rewards for activities and, eventually, form a new ethical data market.</li>
</ul>
vSelf includes a wallet for users and a web studio for organizations. For the latter, we provide instruments for compliant data collection, analysis of trends, and incentive settings.
<h4>✅ What is ready for you to try
</h4>
We have released our beta version of the products (web/mobile/contracts), so we could onboard people and be exposed to public scrutiny. We are rolling out a small set of features that we have guessed would be most beneficial to the user at the moment.
For whom:
<ul>
<li>DAOs, guilds, communities</li>
<li>Talent hubs, accelerators, hackathons</li>
<li>EdTech projects, educators</li>
</ul>
Why:
To increase engagement and provide verifiable provenance.
<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*ZKUPiti4WGKxsazkJIw0cw.png"><figcaption>vSelf Identity wallet</figcaption></figure>How:
We have built mobile&amp;web apps that engage with the users, guiding them through the activities set up by organizations and immediately rewarding them with non-transferable NFTs.
<ol>
<li>
<a href="https://vself.app/onboard">Onboarding</a>. Free simplified onboarding for users new to web3: the application will register a NEAR account with a chosen name and help to save a secret mnemonic phrase.</li>
<li>
vSelf Persona. Personal web3 profile page, where users can show the collected NFTs as well as usual links to projects and social media accounts. Important to notice that one can only display tokens for which we can verify one’s ownership.</li>
<li>
vSelf Web3 Studio. Organizations and individuals can set up a custom collection of non-transferable NFT rewards (e.g., POAPs, kudos, or SBTs) with provided images and descriptions. Every collection can be distributed using either claim links or QR codes for mobile applications.</li>
</ol>
vSelf provides the ability to authenticate using a community-curated list of wallets native to the NEAR ecosystem (so we don’t actually manage users’ keys at the moment for security reasons).
<h4>🙏 Behind vSelf</h4>
We are a team of blockchain enthusiasts: researchers, coders, and entrepreneurs, who decided to team up to build a new kind of infrastructure and software so we could bring the world of self-sovereign identity a bit closer. We have been bootstrapping the web3 scene since 2021. It was great luck to encounter the NEAR community, especially the Human Guild. Their hackathons, grant programs and friendly approach helped us to maintain pace and develop our ideas into tangible products. Besides, our vision for the future and libertarian values are totally compatible with the NEAR management and community mindset.
💜 The future is near; see you all there! At the moment, all our services are free to use, so we invite you to give them a shot and become part of our community. Please feel free to reach out to us on social media and follow us on Twitter.
Twitter: @vself_meta
Telegram: <a href="https://t.me/vself_townhall">https://t.me/vself_townhall</a>
LinkedIn: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/vself">https://www.linkedin.com/company/vself</a>
P.S. We aim to provide our community members with a secure and user-friendly front end, our developers with convenient and well-documented SDKs, and our investors with a transparent and scalable economy. We will appreciate your feedback and time, as we plan to reward our early testers/adopters should we succeed.
*In the upcoming articles, we will describe SSI and open web movements in more detail.
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check out our training programme on how to use the app

check out our training
programme on how to use
the app