Proposal for ENS verification of twitter .eth usernames

It does not make any difference what we expect Twitter to do or not. As an influential DAO, if we think this is something we would favour, we should make our well-documented and detailed proposal to them.

It may or may not be implemented, fully, partially, who knows. But the ENS DAO providing a design on how it should be done is important. It sets the bar, and advances the discussion.

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:thinking: hmm very true!
It’s likely that I’m just a hesitant and overcautious person.
The proposal process and this DAO in particular is very professional and should be able to have enough influence, so why not give it a shot!
I do think that not only is this a great idea, but it’ll be an eventual necessity.

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Eventually, it’d be nice for this to happen. I think hashtag crypto users can benefit from the .eth username and the checkmark greatly! It’s a sign of commitment.

This is also about protecting our .eth brand, in the sense that it has to be something people trust.

Protecting the .eth brand and minimising misuse, is not just about technical decisions but also about proactively reaching out to places where it’s often used, and propose the right way to use it. Twitter is such a case where .eth is (relatively) widely used, and it may also be used in a malicious way.

A well-thought and well documented proposal can also serve as a guideline for other services who would like to implement something similar.

Given the current traction of ENS (450k+ domains), convincing Twitter to prioritize this would be a huge uphill battle. I’d wait until:

  1. Twitter becomes more deeply involved in web3 (in progress) and has resources for product integrations of this nature

  2. ENS has more traction so this becomes more interesting to Twitter (will happen over time)

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In my mind, it’s not about convincing Twitter.

It’s about opening the conversation. Having a few (maybe/probably more in the future) thousand twitter users know that this is a thing they should expect from Twitter. About getting a few hundred articles on it, a few thousand retweets. And probably getting a response from Twitter (that they think about it, they don’t like it, they would need some piece of infrastructure from us in order to implement it, etc.).

We already know that Twitter is working on some kind of NFT integration (official sources). Why not open this now, instead of waiting for a year or two? Twitter is a big company, even if they liked it, and they wanted to implement it, it would take many months before it was done. Why not put it in their radar now?

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真的,太好了,学习。真的,太好了,学习。

I support this proposal – it goes hand in hand with NFT pfp verification that we know they’re working on.

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I agree with moving this forward. I believe that it would be beneficial for all and does no harm to anyone. Waiting to open up a discussion about this with Twitter is NOT a good idea in my opinion. This would be a great initiative for the ENS DAO to take. It would be a nice step in pushing the adoption of web3 protocols.

This is what we call a win-win-win.

A win for this DAO, a win for Twitter, and a win for the users.

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I am full in too, anything we can do to make it a little harder on scammers is a good thing to do.

Hey!

I worked on a big portion of the backend for the NFT pfp verification project that is soon going to launch. I think there’s a lot of leverage here and I’ve been brainstorming what the best possible integration could look like here as well. Would love to get everyone’s thoughts on this.

Since ENS names are already ERC-721 tokens, we could theoretically utilize the existing infra being built to also provide validation of ENS names on the site

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Hi Hamdi, this is great news!

I think that the basic thing is to decide what exactly will be authenticated using an ENS name.

  • username (for example @foo.eth). This is great, but I think most people wouldn’t want to abandon their existing twitter handles (and maybe a dot is not allowed, I’m not sure)

  • name. This is easier. In this case, if you want to set your twitter name to foo.eth, you will have to prove you own the corresponding ENS domain.

  • Just a link/badge. If you prove you own an ENS domain, you can display it in your profile with the ENS badge and the .eth domain next to it.

Some other considerations:

  • Will Twitter have to periodically check that I still own the domain? (How are they going to do it with NFTs?)
  • Will/can they support subdomains like bar.foo.eth?
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It will be so attractive if Twitter accepts its own “blue check” verifying system with ENS partnership to provide verify Twitter accounts of eth domain name holders. It would be great and would gain more people to ens ecosystem

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Yes, it would! However, we have to keep in mind that the semantics are not equivalent and this will probably cause confusion.

  • Twitter blue checkmark = Verified Person/Organisation
  • ENS “checkmark” (or whatever this would be) = Verified ownership of ENS domain.

For example, if I verify johndoe.eth this does not mean that I am the famous person John Doe, and a blue checkmark next to it will confuse most twitter users. Especially if John Doe is already verified as @johndoe12345 on twitter.

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What would seem plausible and a good idea is if your twitter name is foo.eth and you own foo.eth, they could show a ENS checkmark or icon next to it.

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@hamdi, since you are aware of the internals of Twitter and an ENS delegate, could you please advise on how it would be better to move this idea forward? I’m open to working on a draft, but any feedback to make this more useful and targeted, would be great.

Adding to @vrypan’s precious observations:
The main thing would be to find a way for twitter to do this that doesn’t go in conflict with it’s blue verification badge. Let me show what I mean:


If we suggest this, I think would be a straight no, since it visually competes with the twitter verification badge.

Maybe, something like this would work better, though there are ux/ui issues that should be considered:

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A simplified blue or black ENS icon would compete less with the Twitter badge. An additional to profile field could also work. Users would link their wallet through the profile editor. Their primary ENS name would then populate next to the join date with a gray ENS icon and thier dot eth name. This is less visible, but will seem less like an attempt to co-brand or an overt endorsement.

There is no precendence for similar integrations(?), so this is a big ask.

This :point_up_2:. There is mutual interest here. The DAO and core team could legitimately lend expertise in an effort to onboard Twitter into Web3 and Web3 Identity verification. By offering value to Twitter, instead of asking for an integration, they may be more likely to integrate ENS or SIWE anyways.

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With the launch of the NFT project, there will be an existing twitter account <> wallet relationship that we can leverage.

There’s two ways I can think of on how one can prove ownership of an ENS name.

  1. Through the ENS record metadata which can bypass the wallet linking process
  2. The wallet mapping above. Where an linked account implicitly proves ownership (via the corresponding NFT or querying the contract directly) .

There’s a lot of great ideas here in how a verified ENS name can be rendered in the UI. I don’t think would be the primary concern and the product/design teams would have feedback on this

This is definitely true. Extending ENS name verification support isn’t the biggest endeavor/problem. This would already implicitly work after launch for NFTs if folks set the ENS ERC721 as their user avatar. But we should think about how ENS can also add value back to the platform (doesn’t have to be Twitter specific, but a value add for any “web2” ). Some random ideas

  • Could an ENS name easily translate into an immediate twitter account? Making it easy to participate in conversation
  • Should web2 platforms explore domain-specific resolvers i.e .twttr that can plug into the web3 ecosystem
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Would like to bump this discussion here, as twitter already supporst NFT profile picture.

I believe an ideal future would be to use ENS as the use handle and display name on Twitter (with verification by Twitter).

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