Proof of People

Meeting people in real life at conferences or hackathons can lead to meaningful collaborations and friendships. Unfortunately there is no perfect way of recording the mutual connection that was just built in between the individuals. People try to stay in touch for example by exchanging Telegram contacts or follow each other on Twitter. This might lead to scattered collections of friends across several social media channels which themselves do not really do a good the job of preserving meetings. These tools were designed with communication in mind, less for building up a curated friends collection.

Proof of People (POP) is a web3 social collection platform that allows for a straightforward exchange of contacts in real life by scanning a simple QR code. POP is build up like a sticker album, that lets you collect other people´s profiles if they agree to be your friend. Friends then can access further information about each other, browse each others friends and even record and share common moments. That way a valuable social graph is built, of course all on chain.

POP uses sponsor technology by Polygon, ENS and The Graph. Here is how it works :

1. Users can sign up at the POP platform by connecting their Polygon compatible wallet and importing their ENS user data creating their individual profile. This brings up a UI offering to add friends and if available listing their existing friendship they have collected so far. On the backend only one ERC-721 contract for simplicity. We DO NOT push user to create his own profile. All the data is fetched from the ENS and is stored nowhere but the frontend.

2. Each connected profile can be further explored. For example we could see which friends we have in common, what moments we shared or if we hold the same POAPs or achievements. To achieve this we use the API of The Graph which allows us to optimize blockchain queries to get only data we need. Futhermore, The Graph opens doors for protocol enhancements, like constructing mutual connections and fetch complex data structures for analytics.

3. Adding a new friend is easy, just click the “QR code” icon and a QR code is presented which your new friend can then scan. They can even add a “moment” NFT that is also shared in your and their profile - that is especially helpful for sharing selfies and fun picks that are taken on-site. A central ERC721 contract on Polygon does all the heavy lifting: we are just providing basic contract as an NFTStorage. All the magic happens in the graph indexer and UI client - “magic box” function creates profile connections from the plain list of profile-related NFTs. a. We use The Graph to determine NFTs that were send to us or that we sent to others. Whenever an unknown profile NFT is sent to our wallet this produces a incoming pending friend request displayed in the UI. b. If we accept the request our profile nft is sent back to the sender which completes the new friendship.

We think the ease of use, low cost and the streamlined slim solution using blockchain and ipfs is one of the strong points of the project. And of course we have been looking for a solution for recording irl friendships without workarounds ourselves and can´t wait to use POP at the next event.

Our further plans include:

• Moments are shared NFTs that friends can send each other.
• Minting “group-spreading” NFTs: Each member of a group receives the identical looking NFT. Holder can then use the NFT to access a group chanel.
• Allowing institutional partners to offer achievement NFTs that people can then claim in real life.