On-Chain Identity, Judgements, and Registrars

Account Identity

Cere provides a naming system that allows participants to add personal information to their on-chain account and subsequently ask for verification of this information by registrars.

Setting an Identity

Users can set an identity by registering through default fields such as legal name, display name, website, Twitter handle, Riot handle, etc. along with some extra, custom fields for which they would like attestations (see Judgements).

Users must reserve funds in a bond to store their information on chain: paying a fixed fee for plus some extra CERE per each field beyond the legal name. These funds are locked, not spent - they are returned when the identity is cleared.

These amounts can also be extracted by querying constants through the Chain state constants tab on Cere Explorer.

The procedure to set and clear identities is explained in detail here.

Format Caveat

Please note the following caveat: because the fields support different formats, from raw bytes to various hashes, a UI has no way of telling how to encode a given field it encounters. The Polkadot-JS UI currently encodes the raw bytes it encounters as UTF8 strings, which makes these values readable on-screen. However, given that there are no restrictions on the values that can be placed into these fields, a different UI may interpret them as, for example, IPFS hashes or encoded bitmaps. This means any field stored as raw bytes will become unreadable by that specific UI. As field standards crystallize, things will become easier to use but for now, every custom implementation of displaying user information will likely have to make a conscious decision on the approach to take, or support multiple formats and then attempt multiple encodings until the output makes sense.

Judgements

After a user injects their information on chain, they can request judgement from a registrar. Users declare a maximum fee that they are willing to pay for judgement, and registrars whose fee is below that amount can provide a judgement.

When a registrar provides judgement, they can select up to six levels of confidence in their attestation:

• Unknown: The default value, no judgement made yet.
• Reasonable: The data appears reasonable, but no in-depth checks (e.g. formal KYC process) were performed (all the currently verified identities on-chain).
• Known Good: The registrar has certified that the information is correct (this step involves verification of state issued identity documents, and at the moment no account has known good identity, with the exception of registrars).
• Out of Date: The information used to be good, but is now out of date.
• Low Quality: The information is low quality or imprecise, but can be fixed with an update.
• Erroneous: The information is erroneous and may indicate malicious intent.

A seventh state, "fee paid", is for when a user has requested judgement and it is in progress. Information that is in this state or "erroneous" is "sticky" and cannot be modified; it can only be removed by the complete removal of the identity.