🆔Persistent Identities & Sybil Resistance

Sybil Resistance refers to the ability of digital systems such as a blockchain network, to prevent a type of attack where an individual attempts to take over the network (or game an economic set of incentives) by creating many fake identities, known as a Sybil attack. By being resistant to these attacks, the system ensures that no single entity can gain disproportionate influence or manipulate the network or incentive structures.

zkKYC primitives enable Sybil resistance by increasing the cost of creating fake identities and ensuring one-person-one-account correspondence without disclosing personal data. Sybil resistance is crucial for DeSoc (Decentralized Society), as it prevents manipulation and allows for the modeling of complex social and political institutions on-chain, enhancing decentralized systems' effectiveness and social composability. It is important to note that no economically viable mechanism can be expected to reliably prevent Sybil attacks at all times. Fake and stolen identities can be leveraged just like they are in many web2 applications. It is our belief, however, that DeSoc primitives do provide a potential solution.

By achieving a mild form of Sybil resistance through zkKYC, Galactica Network enables the modeling of non-trivial social and political primitives and institutions on-chain, such as quadratic voting, funding, and Persistent Identities. Thus, zkKYC can be thought of as a mechanism to merely bootstrap Sybil resistance to values far beyond those of permissionless blockchain protocols. The strong form of Sybil resistance, however, comes from persistent identities generating their immutable web3 footprints through protocol lifetime.

Persistent Identities are on-chain personas (not necessarily humans) characterized by their long-term Web3 footprints that allow social, economic, and political institutions to operate within the Galactica Network. They consolidate each user's diverse Web3 activities into a core identity that is both verifiably calculable and consistently anonymous, while also promoting continuous growth in the heterogeneity of their accounts. Galactica Network's zkKYC design will ultimately allow users to fuse their actions and interactions into a verifiable reputation metric that unlocks new use cases not yet possible within the greater web3 landscape. To learn more about Galactica Network zkKYC design refer to this paper

Due to the perpetually increasing complexity of a Persistent Identity as it interacts with the protocol, the cost of a Sybil attack on Galactica Network will only grow with time and overall use of the network. This is because identities become more robust as the user records their actions and interactions on-chain. Over time, their identity begins to reflect its user's true behavior and intentions, making it increasingly difficult for potential adversaries to create a large number of fake identities that can match the authenticity and verifiability of a real Persistent Identity.