Scalable notary infrastructure and Filecoin verified deals for app developers

[andrewxhill]

If you don't know about the Verified Clients concept, here is a good starting point: https://spec.filecoin.io/algorithms/verified_clients/.

When reviewing the plans for verified deals on the Filecoin network, we noticed a few different use-cases that an initially slow verification procedure would hinder. As verification advances, of course, friction will be reduced, but we were interested in finding reasonable solutions for the following use-cases from the onset of verified deals.

• Mobile wallet app developers. In this case, the developer would like to make it easy for the wallet owner to gain a small quota of verified deals for storing data on the network.
• Application developers. Any consumer app that would like to avoid forcing their users to manually go through the verification steps may be interested in this verification form.
• Hosted wallets. App developers may want to map one wallet to one user in these cases, but again, not need to verify each user's wallet address separately.

In each of the cases above, a developer may be willing to use their credibility to ask for verification and then use their in-app checks to ensure real users are storing real data with verified deal stats. People are already building those use-cases above with Powergate, so we see it is essential to find ways to support them on their missions.

Back in December, we applied to become a Notary on the Filecoin network. Our application differs from most others. We are proposing to build a notary that makes it possible for an app developer to become verified but provision their verified deals off to their app users. It does this through a multisig setup that you can read more about in our application. It will build off initial work done by Keyko that you can review here https://github.com/keyko-io/filecoin-verifier-tools.

As we begin to kick off our Notary services' development and roll-out, we wanted to open up the discussion to the community of builders, miners, and aspirational Filecoin users to ask for some input.

• Do you expect to use verified deals in your applications?
• Are you waiting for easier verification?
• Do you have ideas for features you need from such a service?
• For Hub developers specifically, are you hoping to use these services?

Keep in mind, if you need a few verified addresses, the application for DataCap (https://plus.fil.org/) is operational today! If you want to know more about the specifics of our notary setup, see our application and verifier tools.