Text records are commonly used to publish profile information, such as a user’s name or social media handle. A long-standing problem with this setup is that this information is often displayed as part of the user’s “profile” without any way to verify if the information is actually correct.
Some of this information can be verified on-chain or by using cryptographic proofs or other methods. For some types of information, however, using a trusted authority to attest to the truthiness of a statement is the best and/or only option. A good example is ownership of a Twitter/X account. Only X can say who owns an account, so this information can not be proven cryptographically and relies on X as the authority.
If you trusted someone to talk to X on your behalf and verify ownership of an account, you might consider them an acceptable authority as well.
Since starting work on ENSIP-27 and attaching metadata to ENS names, we have been working on a solution for how to best publish these attestations to ENS names for quick and easy verification of text record data. Earlier this year we launched a proof of concept implementation, specifically for proving ownership of social media accounts, detailed at atst.me.
We have now submitted a draft ENSIP to formalize this method: ENSIP: Text Record Attestations by jmacwhyte · Pull Request #85 · ensdomains/ensips · GitHub
This ENSIP is focused solely on allowing entities to attest to the veracity of data published as a text record under a specific ENS name. Work on solutions to verify other aspects of ENS names are still ongoing (such as Vedant’s post here)