Introducing NEAR Personas

Adding personality and individuality to extend the social utility of NEAR Accounts.

NEAR’s account system – with human readable names and innovative access keys - is a thing of beauty.  NEAR's focus on usability enables us to build applications that behave like people expect them to and abstract away some of the more blockchainy and cryptography parts of it.  

This focus not only makes it very simple for someone new to crypto to create and manage their accounts but is also relevant to what we're doing here with NEAR Personas.  Human readable account names with cryptographic underpinnings like bob.near or alice.near allow people to establish decentralized digital identities (DIDs) without even knowing it. NEAR enables a dimension of personality at the outset while also preserving the ability to remain pseudo anonymous if desired.

NEAR Personas takes that human readable account name a step further and registers a link between the NEAR account and a Decentralized Identifier (DID) on Ceramic.Network.  This enables people to add personality to their NEAR accounts (avatars, skills, other info), own and manage their data, allowing it to automatically synch anywhere their persona is being used.

NEAR Persona's Mission

Give NEAR users the ability to create a rich persona (profile) for their NEAR account and any application on any network the ability to display and/or utilize the persona information people provide to enhance the social, reputation, and identity characteristics of their app. 

The Vision

We use the word personas to refer to what is traditionally known as an account profile on most web sites today.  We have a dream of changing how people build, manage, and control their personas and how applications use that information.  With NEAR Personas, we are giving users ownership of their data and making applications consumers of it.

Nobody should need to make duplicate personas every time they want to interact with a new application of website.  NEAR Personas gives people the ability to manage their persona in one place and any changes made automatically synch anywhere that persona is being used.  That means you decide when and for how long information displayed in your profile is accessible. You can easily change it at will and not have the massive burden of going to every application or website you use to make the same change.  Change once, change everywhere.

With the basic persona building capability of Near Personas operational - we will incrementally introduce improvements and other identity related features with an initial focus on reputation and community interactions.

Welcome to the world of Personas.