What is Peer Mountain?
We propose a decentralised and self-sovereign trust management ecosystem for individuals and digital entities, where they can create their own versions of digital trust and manage trust relationships without revealing unnecessary private information.
Peer Mountain uses NFTs and permissionless oracle services to create an ecosystem where users claim ownership and have full control over their cryptographically secure identities, without the need for a central trusted authority. It is an end-to-end application ecosystem, an open marketplace where entities can define, create, exchange, consume and re-use transferable and verifiable trust tokens in the form of NFTs.
Peer Mountain NFTs provide the proof of ownership of an identity proof. ‘Identity’ can represent a different aspect in each different use case.
Peer Mountain is built from the ground to serve the three main components in a digital trust ecosystem, claims, proofs and validations in a flexible way. It provides:
- Consumers with a secure wallet for their self sovereign identity documents and an integrated interface to interact with the marketplace
- Service providers with identity verification tools to continuously and reliably verify identity documents
- Trust providers with attestation engines to create portable and interoperable trust verifications
In the Peer Mountain ecosystem, a claim (assertion) generated by a wallet address is approved by a trust provider and the attestation that is generated by the trust provider is bound to that wallet address in the form of an NFT. The NFT can then be used as a proof of attestation, which can be exchanged and reused as needed.
Peer Mountain is
- Fully customizable to match the needs for an endless variety of use cases, both from the perspective of the end consumers (user interface) as well as the service provider
- Self-sovereign, where a digital entity (individuals, organisations, IoT objects) is in full control of its digital identity, which takes the form of an NFT, enabling private and selective disclosure of information.
- Adaptable and flexible. Scenarios that can be realised on the Peer Mountain ecosystem are countless. Trust providers can define the type of attestation they provide on the ecosystem. Service providers can define what type of trust they require. Consumers can search for the attestation and purchase the NFTs they need, to be presented or transferred to the service provider.
- Peer-to-peer and trustless. There is no trusted entity or centralised authority in the ecosystem which can control or manipulate the trust relationships. All communication between the entities are signed and verified by cryptographic means.
- Transparent, since NFT mint and transfer transactions are public, traceable, and permanently stored on the blockchain.
- Spam-resistant, rewarding honest actions and penalising the counterfeit actions financially.
- Efficient, not only in terms of technology but also because trust tokens can be used multiple times, eliminating the need for separate identity verification for each interaction.
- Builds trust through reputation, where more verifications on the ecosystem will improve the trustworthiness of the trust provider.
Peer Mountain Ecosystem Components
The ecosystem consists of the following actors and components:
- Trust Contract, which is responsible for minting the NFTs. Trust Contract functions are only accessible by the Cashier Contract, which adds a layer of control and security for minting new NFTs. Trust Contract binds a wallet address or a list of wallet addresses to an attestation in the form of an NFT.
- Cashier Contract, which is responsible for managing the payments in the ecosystem and balances of the entities. The Cashier contract is “greedy” and will not give a receipt for any transaction that isn’t paid up front in full. The on-chain payment transaction serves as proof of the payment and can be consulted by any participant at any time by referencing the blockchain records to validate that they have been paid for the service.
- Ethereum PeerMountain ERC-20 Contract of the fungible native token of the ecosystem.
- Attestation Engine, which is the trust-less orchestrator that coordinates the communication between on-chain and off-chain components. Ecosystem can consist of an arbitrary number of attestation engines.
- Attestation Provider (Trust Provider), which is the entity which performs verifications on the assertions. Any number of different attestation providers can be included in the ecosystem to provide different types of attestations.
- Service Provider, which is the entity that requires identity verification or any type of trust to provide its services.
- Consumer, which is the entity that needs to provide its identity or any type of trust token to receive a service from a service provider.
- PMTN tokens (on Ethereum) and rPMTN tokens (on RSK) the native token in the ecosystem which are used as the means of payment. They are the governance tokens of the ecosystem and will receive the pay-out from infrastructure payments.
Where do we stand now and what’s next?
The proof of concept work is completed. Within the scope of proof of concept,
- An attestation engine (Peer Mountain node) runs as a node.
- Attestation providers can register to the ecosystem and define the attestations they support, where each attestation type is represented with a different NFT type.
- Individuals can download the Peer Mountain mobile application to reach the ecosystem and purchase NFTs of the defined types.
- To represent the scenario of an attestation process, a dummy timestamping service is created as an attestation provider.
- A software library is implemented which can be used by attestation providers to participate in the ecosystem.
The following components are implemented:
- Trust Contract and Cashier Contract, running on RSK testnet,
- Attestation Engine, with a local storage of the definition of NFT types and registered attestation providers
- A mobile application for Android devices, which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store as a test application,
- A software library to be used by attestation providers to be integrated to the ecosystem,
- A trivial attestation provider for a timestamping service.
Token listing, initial adoption and community testing are the next steps as well as deployment of the first use case, KYC3 liveness verification.
Follow us, get in touch and contribute
https://github.com/PeerMountain/Docs
https://www.linkedin.com/company/peer-mountain/
Telegram: @PeerMountainANN