Gravatar for ADA Wallets

Problem

Hashed public key based wallet addresses are not human-readable and do not offer personalization.

Solution

A personalisable avatar associated with a wallet that can be used for transactions. Provide an API that is easy and secure to use.

Completed outcome

Download report

Total to date

This is the total amount allocated to Gravatar for ADA Wallets.

$87,700

Total funds requested

Distributed: $87,700

Remaining: $0

Complete

In progress

To be completed

2.5K

Total votes cast

₳401M

Votes yes

₳47.7M

Votes no

About this idea

A personalisable avatar associated with a wallet that can be used for transactions. Provide an API that is easy and secure to use.

Experienced team of software engineers and Plutus pioneers.

How it works

Using the gravatar application users can create a Gravatar for a payment address from their wallet.
A gravatar will have a unique username. In addition it will have an optional display name. For example, a username can be emily.sang@ada the display name can be Emily William Sang. Another example, for a restaurant can be tacobell2165@ada with the display name Taco Bell - Staton Island 1281.
Users can set privacy setting for their gravatars whether to show their display name or not.
The gravatar can be shared in the form of username@domain or a QR code.
A registry of gravatar to the payment address is maintained by the gravatar application.
Users can search by gravatar ids on the gravatar registry's website and by the display name depending on the privacy setting. Third party dApps and apps can integrate the gravatar service via APIs.
The gravatar registry will provide a lookup for searching by username.
Payments that are initiated to a gravatar will be received at the payment address used for creating that gravatar.

Personalization

Users choose their own username.
Gravatar will support different themes. Imagine it to be like cards that have different designs. Say a formal look and feel for official purposes, sporty aesthetics for friends, with logos for businesses.
Users can create multiple gravatars for the same wallet by using different payment addresses.

Security

Gravatar uses only publicly sharable payment addresses and an optional meta data like display name, logo etc for building the registry. No private or sensitive information relating to the wallet or the user is required.

Use cases

For individuals, as a user-friendly payment address to received ADA. No hassle of dealing with public key hashes.
For businesses, an identifiable payment address for their customers.
In general, human readable addresses for every wallet. Transacting in crypto does not have to feel peculiar with the hashed addresses anymore. This would be one step closer to a world where everyday transactions can be done using ADA.

Challenge Fit

From the challenge setting, success is explained as follows:

"Liveliness. Happy energized developers making money and achieving their goals, mutual help, collaboration, and a shared feeling of success. A feeling of unexpected innovation happening "on it's own". A wide variety of resources are provided for developers allowing them to focus on business value they can generate and not on infrastructure."

Gravatar for ADA Wallets emerged as a concept when specifying the functionality of the Win-Win Dispute Resolution Marketplace ( https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Win-Win-Dispute-Resolution/368353-48088 ). In conversations with developers of other projects we identified a need to put faces to addresses. This project fills that gap. One such example is the GameChanger Wallet ( https://gamechanger.finance/ ), but we are sure most dApps will eventually utilize Gravatar for ADA Wallets or a similar API.

As an open API, the project fits right into the Developer ecosystem challenge.

Similar solutions

Unlike other proposed solutions in the space ( i.e. https://adahandle.com ), Gravatar for ADA Wallets allows for a wallet to have multiple identities.

Team

Meet the team that will be working on this project.

Our team site ( https://winwin-team.web.app ) has additional information on each team member incl. LinkedIn and/or Github links.

Ganesh N.

Professional Software Engineer for over 8 years
Plutus Pioneer
Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering
Has lead development of large scale applications
Experience in the financial services industry

Matthias Sieber

Professional Software Engineer for over 20 years
working on Liqwid through MLabs
Plutus Pioneer
Cardano Ambassador
Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member

Eli Selkin

Professional Software Engineer for over 5 years
Plutus Pioneer
Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
MS in Computer Science, specializing in Machine Learning
ML architect

Victor Corcino

Energy Industry Engineer for 6 years
Member of the first Catalyst Circle as Community Advisors representative
Catalyst Veteran Community Advisor and Proposal Mentor
Co-creator of AIM Community Tools (CA/vCA Tools, Voter Tool)
BSc Chemical Engineering and MSc Chemical Engineering and Software Development
Specialization in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
PhD candidate, researching the field of Machine Learning applied to Computational Fluid Dynamics

David Bradley