Take a selfie ➡️ Generate your identity ➡️ Mint into NFT ➡️ Use it on Taraxa

Blend is the first NFT Passport Engine and protocol on Taraxa for Web3.0-based digital identity creation, management, and utilization in the ecosystem. The difference from the legacy digital identity representation on Web 3.0 is that Blend directly creates a complete and ultra-realistic virtual version of the Taraxa user (just like a digital copy) and embeds all the digital identity data into an NFT-based passport. This means that each of the users on Taraxa now has a 3D digital representation of themselves fully on the Taraxa blockchain, managed in a decentralized way with full ownership via NFT technology. The digital identity creation process is also designed to be user-friendly with a low entry barrier, which just requires the user to upload a simple selfie of themselves, and Blend’s advanced deep learning AI core will perform the digital identity reconstruction fully on the cloud. Users just have to finally mint their digital identity into an NFT passport using our protocol, and then they are ready to utilize it around different DApp projects in the ecosystem. Users just have to connect their wallet containing the NFT Passport to the DApp, grant access for the DApp to use the Passport, and the DApp will fetch any related digital identity info from the Passport’s metadata:

1. Imagine a blockchain game in which you can turn yourself into the game character and interact inside the metaverse. With NFT Passport, which has your complete face data embedded, you can easily achieve this. A blockchain game application can simply fetch your digital identity via the NFT Passport metadata and do the rendering work.

2. Imagine a metaverse-concept social application. Users can mint an ERC-5773-based NFT passport as their digital identity. This is because ERC-5773 can be used to permanently attach different formats of assets to the NFT passport. Users can not only store their own 3D data of their digital identity, but they can also bind their social media posts (images, texts, videos, etc.) to their NFT passport and carry them around.

3. Imagine the user’s NFT Passport is a profile in Web 3.0. By utilizing dynamic NFT implementations such as composable, multi-assets, and emotable, users can have a profile that is compatible with different DApps projects, achieving the concept of DApp-Agnostic. With these characteristics, developers can introduce more creative applications with the NFT Passport.

4. ZK-based identity applications are very popular in the blockchain space, while using user face data as an identity proof is relatively new to these kinds of applications. NFT Passport can achieve it as all the identity data of one user is permanently embedded into the NFT Passport.

Blend's digital identity creation ability is powered by our university research team's own advanced AI core, utilizing the latest deep learning 3D reconstruction technology. It is able to take up only a single selfie from the user as input and directly generate an ultra-realistic 3D digital copy of the user. The AI core is hosted and running on the cloud, being the heart of the whole NFT Passport Engine, and is distributed as an API together with the Blend NFT Passport Engine for Taraxa developers to easily integrate into any DApps project on Taraxa.

Blend is the first NFT Passport engine and digital identity protocol to implement the RMRK NFT 2.0 standard, introducing dynamic features to the NFT Passport and extending its possible use cases. NFT Passport has now achieved storing complete user digital identity, binding multi-format assets or arbitrary data permanently (ERC-5773), attaching inventory catalogs for equippability and composability (ERC-6220), as well as allowing users on Taraxa to react with emojis to it (ERC-7409). 

Digital identity data is considered sensitive data and should be stored in a confidential way when making it fully on-chain on the public Taraxa network. Blend solved this by leveraging blockchain-based encryption mechanisms (decentralised multiparty computation (MPC) and threshold secret schemes (TSS)) by encrypting the 3D data of the user before minting it into an NFT using Lit; hence, even the NFT Passport is accessible on chain, but only the owner of the NFT Passport has access control to decrypt the digital identity data, having maximum ownership. The user is also able to grant access to a Blend-powered DApp so that the application can utilize the digital identity data when the user connects their wallet. 

Blend is able to achieve 10K times cheaper when creating a single digital identity and minting it into an NFT passport on Taraxa with a super low gas fee benefit. This is compared to expensive Web2.0 products that can achieve digital identity creation abilities, such as Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest Pro (future releases). Plus, Blend only needs 1 minute to create a single digital identity, the NFT Passport, which is super fast. The advantages of the cost and speed of the engine allow Blend to scale and be accessible to everyone in the Taraxa ecosystem, making 3D digital identity possible in blockchain applications.

In the Web2.0 era, tech giants are the one to store our digital identity and access to all those sensitive data, which is a major concern related to data privacy and ethics. Now, Blend in the Web3.0 era able to store the digital identity as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) on Taraxa, while having all the data packed and hosted on a decentralised storage like IPFS, giving full ownership to the owner of the digital identity NFT Passport. We control our own data!

Our team deserve a pat on the back 🎊! We are the first to introduce advanced AI backed digital identity engine and protocol on Taraxa, introducing the concept of NFT Passport on Taraxa.

Blend is building up the early AI sector in the Taraxa ecosystem as we know that our next generation digital identity, the NFT Passport, has broad applications in different sectors (such as blockchain gaming, social applications, NFT-extend applications, etc.) in the Taraxa blockchain. Our team is tackling a large market in the space and speculating a bright future for powering different DApp projects in the Taraxa ecosystem. The launch of Blend will redefine how Web3.0 DApps will be designed and developed on Taraxa. We will continue making our business model simple; we will provide dynamic API subscriptions for projects, starting at as low as $0.05 per digital identity. What do we consider Blend a success? Our team wanted to successfully launch Blend as a plug-and-play solution on Taraxa and get ready for mass adoption. This is also a focus that we are focusing on right now!

✅ Stage 1:

• Research & Experiment
• Engine Setup & Testing
• NFT Passport Implementations
• Prototype Building

✅ Stage 2: (WE ARE HERE RIGHT NOW)

• Hackathon Submission
• Community Feedback
• Talent Recruiting
• Go-to-market Action

Stage 3:

• Model Improvisation (V2)
• API Distribution System
• Documentation
• Beta Launch

Stage 4: (Approx Q4 2024)

• Model Improvisation (V3)
• Engine Optimization
• Taraxa Mainnet Preparation
• Public Launch

We had perform an alpha testing during the hackathon period to gain market traction and feedback from the community. We had gained lots of positive feedbacks and comments for improvements, as well as requesting early waitlist slot from our team.