Let’s say you’re launching a new dapp and you want to give something to each unique visitor’s wallet as an incentive to check out your new thing. How do you prevent users from generating a new wallet, taking on a new identity, and getting another handout? The ideal solution is a 1:1 mapping between humans and their identity-tied wallets, but there are some major hurdles to overcome before we can realize the value of decentralized IDs.

One major consideration is account management: Who should have the ability to generate and recover accounts?

On the side of the fully-independent ‘I’ll do it myself, darn it!’, we’ve seen the results of self-custody: a post-it stuck to the side of your coworker’s monitor, a password stored in a .txt file on a shared computer, and a slew of other ways for funds and identities to become lost and stolen.

On the other side of the spectrum, centralized authorities like governments and organizations have a history of leaking sensitive data. The rate of incompetence and mismanagement is hopefully lower, but the impact of any failure is potentially catastrophic. Also, a dependency on a centralized agent isn’t a generally accepted part of the web3 ethos…

A prerequisite for a decentralized ID is the non-centralized custody of a user’s private key, the input (or, in this case, the set of inputs) that generates the user’s account. If neither self-custody nor managed custody is the solution, how could private keys be better managed? Something in-between: a system that enables individuals to generate and recover their accounts, with security checks, without ever exposing the private key.

Before crypto-UBI, smart contract voting, and 1:1 human-wallets for all of our dapp needs, a hybrid self-custody and recovery solution must be developed.

Here’s a pitch: a private key deterministically generated from (biometrics + a validated recovery seed). Wait, wait! This sounds much scarier than it is! The idea is just that you’re always carrying around a password that you can’t lose, something that can’t be easily stolen. A solution that allows you to access your funds even if your memory fails you and your management system gets deleted by a tornado.

Imagine a standardized solution that allows people to input physical markers that are distilled to always generate the same set of wallets, similar to HD wallets. When recovering an account, there would be separate air-gapped processes to sample your physiology and produce a set of values that would form the private key of ‘you’. Each step of this process would require an additional input of ‘something you have’ or ‘something you know’ to prevent would-be gene theft. These additional inputs of passwords or recovery tools could be outsourced to a collection of centralized agents with redundancy, resulting in a robust, fault-tolerant, and secure self-custody solution.

If implemented correctly, this enables a set of wallets that the average person can access and recover- wallets that are nearly impossible to forcibly acquire, impossible to forget, and impossible to lose access to. Sign up to vote on your city council’s smart contract election, join your company’s DAO to get automated token distributions, and generally go nuts without worry. I’ll swing for the fence and add that AI tools may be a critical element to enable the classification and standardization of transforming biometric data into deterministic machine-readable primary keys.

Love it? Hate it? Scared of needles? Me, too...

But not nearly as scared as the thought of losing access to my most important private keys or relying on a nation-state to govern my interactions with society.