Verifin - Legal Ownership Attestation for Digital Assets

What is Verifin?

You can call it "Crypto Title Registrar", "on-chain CA", or "legal identity oracle"!

Followed by the collapse of FTX Exchange in 2022, the digital asset community is paying increasing attention to the compliance and integrity in the blockchain world. We wish to contribute a sustainable and trustable Web3 ecosystem by establishing a zero-downtime and decentralized platform for digital assets owners to make cryptographically-secure and publicly-verifiable attestations to confirm their ownership to digital assets, and map their legal identity to the on-chain world.

Architecture Summary

Leveraging Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and existing public key infrastructure (PKI) systems (Hongkong Post eCert / Estonia eID / RNS.id), individuals / VASPs could voluntarily register their title and legal identity in the smart contract without a single trusted 3rd party (TTP). Once registered, the public may query the Registrar smart contract, to get such affirmations:

Mr John Smith (PKI UID: xxx) has access to all assets in wallet 0x..., the last time when cryptographic proof of ownership was generated at mm/dd/yyyy

Crypto Exchange ABC (Business Registration Number: xxx) has access to all assets in wallet 0x..., the last time when cryptographic proof of ownership was generated at mm/dd/yyyy

Besides on-chain attestation generated with EAS, the attester will also be required to sign a designated message with PKI personal key, for legal identity verification. The validity of such affidavit signed with PKI key will be validated on-chain and the correctness of identity binding (i.e. PKI certificate for the attester) will be checked by decentralized nodes (legal identity oracle feeds) connected to Verifin smart contracts.

Usecase

🤔Wait! People are thinking about privacy and untraceability, why some may wish to disclose the linkage between wallet and legal identity?

Proof of Reserve (PoR) for Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP)

Besides proving they are recording the liabilites to clients correctly using Merkle Tree, VASP also need to show that they are in possession of a private key which could unlock sufficient cryptocurrencies. In this scenario, a verifiable wallet ownership attestation to link reserve wallet with the legal entity of the VASP is necessary.

Proof of Wealth for Off-Chain Activities

After proving legal ownership to digital assets and providing satisfactory evidence to link legal identity with wallet address that one claims to own, the person may his/her digital asset holding as proof-of-wealth for off-chain activities, such as loan application, net-worth valuation, even legal litigation.

Digital Asset Insurance

In the underwriting phase of digital asset insurance, investigation about the exact amount of digital assets owned by the client, and whether the insured private key exists & actually controlled by the client is a crucial for insurance firms.

Counterparty Identification

In cryptocurrency transactions (e.g. Web3 VC transfers stablecoin to a DeFi project team as investment fund), the sender could be tricked to transfer tokens to an adversary. With Verifin, if the recipient has registered the wallet address in the title registrar, future senders may check whether they are sending to the desired party by querying Verifin on-chain database, which reduces social-engineering attacks on crypto transfers.

Demo Video

Make an ownership attestation

Query an attestation record

Demo Site

Verifin

Example address to query: 0xf146bD73ce79f26b4FE9fd62e140D84C1E6207B1

Deck Slides

Verifin Tech Deck

Screenshots & Features

Ownership Browser

Example Record

Print Attestation Record

New Attestation Screen

New Attestation Detail Filling Screen

EAS Attestation & PKI ID Token Signature Screen

PKI ID Token Digital Signature Utility Python Programme (developed for Hongkong Post eCert Holders)