AMA interview with DPlus: Web 3.0 Self-Sovereign Identity

11 min readMar 21, 2022

On February 18, 2022, AstroX team was invited to give an AMA to DPlus(formerly “DfinitySZ”) community about what we are building. Many thanks to the DPlus community for their support, and look forward to working with more communities in the future to build Web3 ecosystems together. Below are the AMA transcripts provided by DPlus community.

From a data perspective, interoperability is an unimaginably great change for Web 2.0. One address account can natively log into thousands of applications at the same time, and the high-value behavioral data generated by these applications is recorded under one account, which is managed and controlled by the user.

AstroX Me solves the problem of the high barrier for the majority of Internet users to enter Web3 by providing products with self-sovereign identity. Without compromising the security of the user’s self-sovereignty, ensure the excellent user experience, allowing the users to truly control their own identity, assets and data. We are pleased to participate in the 6th AMA of DPlus.

AMA Review

Q1：What problem is AstroX Me solving?

Brutoshi: Just a brief introduction, we are a technical product-oriented team, and this year is the 5th year of blockchain development. We have a background in both big internet companies and startups, in the gaming, social and fintech sectors respectively. We started to focus on Dfinity last year, and in June AstroX was officially launched and soon became the first technology team in Asia to receive an official Dfinity grant.

AstroX Me solves the problem of the barrier to access into Web3 for the majority of Internet users by providing a self-sovereign identity product. Without compromising on the security of the user’s self-sovereignty, we provide a good user experience that allows the user to truly control his own identity, assets and data.

At this stage, we will first address the high user experience barrier of II identity products in the IC ecosystem and the confusing standards of third-party wallets.

In addition, Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is different from DID (Decentralised Identity), which is a technically standardised concept, and it can be said that SSI includes Decentralised Identity, which is a subset of the former. Different DIDs have their own scope of application and SSI is more focused on the user, which will be compatible with different DID standards.

To take a potentially ‘inappropriate’ example, there is a well-known skier at the Winter Olympics, because of some controversy over her nationality, who is hypothetically using a Chinese passport in China and a US passport in the US. From an SSI perspective, this is perfectly fine, as long as she controls her passport holder, she can use two different identities in different systems. AstroX Me is the “passport holder” for Web3 World users.

Q2: What kind of product AstroX Me is?

Brutoshi: At the end of December last year, the AstroX team released its identity protocol product — — ME Beta version

http://beta.astrox.me/

It uses the browser’s WebAuthentication technology, and IC Canister signing capabilities to enable authentication binding of multiple devices, allowing computers and phones to act as hardware wallets, and allowing users to be free from the pain of helper management. Within the on-chain Canister, this is all written using smart contracts, and users have an on-chain hosted identity as well as a smart contract wallet. ME also introduces popular Web3 products such as Metamask/WalletConnect from the Ethernet ecosystem, facilitating access to them from outside the ICP ecosystem.

Q3: Why did AstroX Me choose to be built on IC and what kind of empowerment can IC bring to AstroX?

Brutoshi: Our technical team was familiar with ethereum development before approaching IC development, and we have been making developer tools for other Layer1 public chain (Zilliqa/Harmony/Polkadot) since 2018, such as SDKs and smart contract related toolchains, so unlike other Web3 developers who mostly focus on business (contract) development, our technical accumulation is on top of the infrastructure.

So IC launched main-net last year and we immediately saw the huge capacity improvement and the infinite possibilities of availability of IC in the Internet infrastructure.

From AstroX ME’s product perspective, to expand on this specifically:

1) ICP allows the use of a lightweight Webassembly (Canister) to run on its application layer, while allowing front-end resources to be packaged together in the canister and loaded via the http protocol. This means that you do not need to use a separate storage or host system to run the site or load resources. As a result, we find that some of the capabilities that were originally used under the Web 2.0 technology stack can have the opportunity to be run through the blockchain in this form.

2) ICP uses Chain Key technology for public key verification, the underlying layer supports two elliptic curve algorithms and generates X.509 certificates over the Https protocol. These strong cryptographic engineering capabilities of ICP make it possible for our ME product to be implemented, nice and secure.

3) ICP’s underlying layer will also support ECDSA threshold signatures, using this feature to extend the existing identity to smart contract wallets that support multi-chain signatures including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and to send transactions outwards on IC.

Q4: What functions of AstroX Me have realized?

Brutoshi: A complete self-sovereign identity product should consist of three parts: Device Login, Identity Management, and Asset Management.

AstroX Me currently supports multiple device logins, Yubikey, native identities (including facial fingerprint biometric IDs) of I phone, Android, Windows , and especially MetaMask’s Ether wallet. There will also be support for Email verified logins in the future t, as well as logins for traditional internet social methods (GoogleID, etc.).

In the identity management panel, users can easily manage multiple identities and integrate multiple wallets, which they can switch between at will.

For asset management, in the current Beta version, we have bundled the user’s official NNS wallet so that the user can transfer payments to ICP. Other types of wallets will be integrated in the future, including a standalone Canister smart contract wallet that AstroX is preparing to develop.

Q5: What facilities does AstroX Me offer to ii/Internet Identity users?

Brutoshi: DFINITY team launched Internet Identity in May 2021, it is so original and also is a core feature of IC.

However, some usability issues were soon discovered as well, with more community feedback, such as:

II anchor is a self-increasing number that is very easy for users to forget and tends to disappear on the client side with a browser reset.
II provides a different Mnemonic Phrase to mainstream hardware wallets and users cannot back up directly to existing hardware wallets.
II only supports web-side DApp authentication, and does not support direct authorisation for other terminals such as iOS/Android applications
II does not support cross-sign-in, e.g. mobile browsers cannot login to DApp applications on desktop browsers and must be bound to the desktop browser first.
The Principal ID obtained from II authorisation is calculated by the application and the user’s anchor, and the user needs to log in to the application each time to gain access to their data.

AstroX Me has made a number of improvements for this purpose, such as the addition of support for more login methods, as mentioned earlier, such as MetaMask login, and the use of username login for AstroX Me, which is more in line with the habits of Internet users. On account recovery, support for hardware wallets has been added. In addition to the web SDK, AstroX Me supports for mobile and more terminal SDKs for other developers to integrate and use.

Q6: What kind of application scenes does AstroX Me provide for IC eco-applications?

Brutoshi: AstroX Me acts as an infrastructure to connect users to IC eco-applications, we act somewhat like MetaMask and WalletConnect (the standard plug-in for Web3 login development) for the Ethernet ecosystem, enabling various dapp application scenarios.

On top of this, the AstroX Me identity service can also provide additional data value.

To give a recent example, on February 1st, 2022, ME and ICNaming co-hosted a domain name giveaway, which involved users completing a registration and login with ME, connecting with NNS’s and authorising the reading of pledge information after user authorisation, and receiving a domain name of the corresponding length through the calculation of values, with some additional small activities that allowed users to receive a domain name of the specified length for free. Over 1,000 domain names were given away during the campaign. This use of users’ on-chain data to calculate reputation has eliminated the industry’s bots grabbing whitelists or “Chat all day “ for whitelists (also a kind of Sybil Attack).

A number of IC eco-projects have now approached us to collaborate in a similar way.

Q7: What problems did you encounter while building AstroX Me?

Brutoshi: Technically, there are still a lot of challenges and pitfalls. Webauthn is not compatible enough, especially for devices without biometrics, so we are trying to integrate different login methods to lower the user threshold, for example, we have completed the MetaMask integration. It’s also a process to improve the functionality of Canister and we don’t have past experience to draw on when we do contractual upgrades.

There are also challenges at the community level. As a technical product-based team, we have kept a low profile and have not done a lot of publicity and promotion.

For example, in the case of the ME and ICNaming co-branded domain name giveaway, it generated a lot of retweets on Twitter and Discord and many users flocked to it, including some advanced users with a lot of ICPs and a lot of pledged hours, while some IC community members questioned the security of ME’s need to obtain users’ NNS rights and a handful even doubted our motives. We did a lot of explaining on this point, and later decided to take the campaign offline early.

We reviewed the situation and found that, on the one hand, there was still little interaction with the global community, so the launch was just like somewhat “roaring across the horizon”, and the users had psychological concerns about NNS licensing to a product from a relatively unfamiliar team. The second aspect is that we could have done a better job on the process and safety tips.

It needs to be explained that there are points that rely on official II product to improve, such as having better granularity of permissions so that we can calculate voting power by only getting read access, etc. We have recently met with the II team , together with the CTO of Dfinity Foundation, to discuss this, and we have agreed that a new and improved version will be available in the near future. The domain event will also continue at that time.

Q8: Which step has AstroX Me come so far?

Brutoshi: As I mentioned earlier, in less than two months after launch, we have over 8k registered users and 13k devices tied to the app. We expect to see more user growth as the product is refined and integrated with the eco-projects.

The mobile app is under development and will be launched in the near future, with the Android version expected to be released first and the IOS version taking some time to transition through the review process.

We are also in the process of interfacing with different IC eco-projects, so you will see more and more ME logged in IC eco-projects in the future.

Q9: What eco-applications are AstroX Me interested in?

Brurtoshi: AstroX Me is a consumer-facing infrastructure product that will support all kinds of eco-applications, even other wallets and identity products. the AstroX team developed an SDK for mobile development last year and is currently using it to build mobile applications for products including Distrikt. We believe that future IC products will also make extensive use of the mobile infrastructure and we are fully committed to supporting the mobile ecosystem.

Q10: What is the roadmap for AstroX Me going forward?

Brutoshi: We’ve talked about our product plans quite a bit earlier, and this quarter we’re focusing on refining the AstroX Me user-side product and user growth.

In addition, we are also building a new self-sovereign Canister product, which I have just spoiled a little bit, but I’ll leave the details here and talk to you when we launch the product.

Community Question

Community Question Q1: What is the relationship between Internet identifify and AstroX Me?

Brutoshi: AstroX Me can be interpreted as being the same type of product as Internet identifify, currently AstroX Me relies on some of the features of Internet identity but improves and enhances on that. In the future we will have our own canister for identity management.

Community Question Q2: Does AstroX Me only support NNS wallets right now?

Brutoshi: The Beta version currently supports the NNS wallet, with more wallets to be integrated in the future, including a standalone Canister contract wallet that we have in development (which relies on the official opening of the Canister signature feature).

Community Question Q3: I would like to ask, when the display page of authorising AstroX Me is Add New Device, is this new device a local one?

Brutohsi: Yes, this is stored locally and securely, not through AstroX’s own backend, so you can rest assured.

Community Question Q4: What is a similar project to AstroX Me on the Etherchain? Is there an example of a project that we can refer to, so that we can use it and understand it first?

Brutoshi: At the moment AstroX ME is similar to MetaMask + WalletConnect.

Community Question Q5: 1. If Dfinity officially (and I mean if) unifies the wallet standard at some point in the future, will there be no demand for our product (in the IC space) at that point?

2. Is the Astrox team prepared for this? Or does the team have any idea of the official attitude in the future? Thank you.

Brutoshi: That’s a good question. Firstly, I think we can refer to the development of Bitcoin and Ether wallets, and the II team has made it very clear that there will be multiple identity systems for Dfinity; secondly, as a decentralized network, the wallet standard should be in the protocol cryptography layer, and different projects have a lot to offer in terms of user experience, security and so on. We will follow up with a new version on line to address the security concerns of users.

Community Question Q6: AstroX Me and ii/Internet Identity are both used as dids, what are the advantages of Me versus the official ii?

Brutoshi: You are welcome to experience Me yourself. According to the community feedback, users who have used Me really like it as it works well quite smooth .

Community Question Q7: Can AstroX Me’s technology allow nns wallets to integrate with ethereum and btc wallets? Or does the nns wallet directly support storing ethereum and btc wallets and supporting transfers?

Beutoshi: ICP’s underlying layer will soon support threshold signatures for ECDSA so that it will be possible to send Ether and btc transactions via Canister. Whether the official will have to do the functional integration itself depends on the roadmap of the nns wallet team. Our understanding is that there will be a public service that ecological projects can participate in building, and that AstroX ME will have end-to-end support for BTC and ETH in the future.

Sharing a technical planning diagram we did internally (BTC/ETH integration), in the future there will also be BSC, SOL, AVAX integration for various networks.

Community Question Q8: Can you tell us the current size of the AstroX team?

Brutoshi: There are currently 10 members, 8 full-time posts, basically all industry veterans.

Community Q9: Are there any plans for IC to combine WBTC Ledger with direct integration of BTC to solve the high Gas and low TPS of the native network, does AstroX have any ideas or thoughts on this?

Brutoshi: We already have some plans, which are still under internal pre-research, we can wait for the next AMA to share with you.

END