Register Your Persona

Your next decision is whether or not to register your Persona.  After setting your seed phrase, you'll see the following screen:

As shown, there are several reasons why you would want to register your Persona.  First and foremost, not registering means your Persona is going to be difficult to find.  It will require you to supply your DID to an application so they can look up your information.

Maybe that's what you want - and in that case, just hit no thanks to continue.  You can register/unregister at any time (and with no transaction fee) using the Manage Registration link in the hamburger menu (top left).

Anonymity is both a feature and a curse of blockchain technology.  Sometimes, particularly in communities or other social applications, there are benefits to being able to create a persona, accumulate reputation, and be "known".

The beauty of NEAR Personas is that you can be/create as many personas as you like - one per account.  You can then interact in communities using whichever persona you've built for it.

The downside of that is more of a social/community issue and it revolves around Sybil attacks.  One person can create several accounts/personas and pretend to be many people in a community.  In a DAO where voting occurs, that could give someone an unfair advantage in getting proposals passed.

Thus, NEAR Personas has a verification mechanism built in whereby personas can seek verified status (think of the blue checkmarks on Twitter).  There are two roles built into NEAR Personas - admins and verifiers and a verification process (currently manual) enables us to do some homework and confirm people are who they say they are.  This is very much in its infancy - but we're aiming to put a more robust system in place.

At any rate, registration is the first step to verification.  It's highly recommended that you register your Persona to get the full social benefit that NEAR Personas provides across multiple applications.