Personas

Identity is a hot topic when it comes to online communities.  The ease with which someone can be multiple people is amplified when all it takes is creation of a new account under a different alias.

We don't believe that is a bad thing.  Yes, it has challenges when considering things like collusion and Sybil attacks; however, we believe people should have the option to create different Personas of themselves to use in different communities.

This is really no different than how many people act in the physical world.  Everyone has a true self, but it is made up of the many facades they put on at any given time.  In one setting they may desire to portray someone completely different than they would in another.  It may be exhausting to keep all those identities separate, distinct, and compartmentalized; but nevertheless people do it.

The advantage people have online with Catalyst is that they can create and manage all these different Personas in one place if they so choose.  As the platform runs on NEAR Protocol, every Persona is a NEAR account and every NEAR account is associated with a unique decentralized identifier (DID) on Ceramic network.

People can create a managing Persona on Catalyst and then create sub-personas that belong to that managing Persona.  Sub-personas can use all or part of the data associated with the managing Persona or be completely unique.

As they are managed on Catalyst and are completely decentralized through NEAR/Ceramic, any changes to their data on Catalyst results in a change anywhere that Persona is used.  

It's a simple matter for applications to retrieve Persona information associated with a NEAR account name or it's DID and this functionality is built into the community aspects of the Catalyst platform.

In easy to understand terms, Personas allows you to create and manage multiple digital identities in one place and then use them in the digital communities of your choice.  Combined with the reputation mechanisms in Catalyst, you are able to build up robust digital Personas through provided information and attestations based on participation and interactions.