Group Verification / New Group Creation for ENS domains

matthewdowney commented 2 years ago

Hi there,

I hope this isn't too out of place / beyond scope, but I wanted to propose a mechanism for verifying Ethereum Name Service domains for group verification in a similar manner to verification for DNS.

For example, I own the mjd.eth domain and would like to be able to use the group id eth.mjd.

Ownership of that ENS domain can be verified by:

Checking the registrant for mjd.eth (you could also interact with the ENS smart contract directly to look up the registrant address for a specific domain).

Having the registrant sign a message "clojars " with the same key that registered the address. E.g. I signed "clojars mjdowney" with the key that I used to register mjd.eth:

{
"address": "0x10459a52094b4dd18320378df3bb2b8d0e81234a",
"msg": "0x636c6f6a617273206d6a646f776e6579",
"sig": "5ea4eb8ae6d6ee3bf725b5796e7964425a17969850c134ebe651f4bf5fc462fe3c61d41453894f69ec7e1f79dc65dd3839aaade9ebb7833e8ad182c214c03be81b"
}

Checking (e.g. with this tool or this one) that the signature is valid.

What do y'all think? Is granting group id based on ENS registration desirable, and if so, is this mechanism workable?

tobias commented 2 years ago

Hi @matthewdowney. Apologies for the delayed response, we've been thinking about this a bit. I appreciate your thoughtful proposal, but the answer is "not right now" for the following reasons:

we feel like the DNS and repo verification options give quite a bit of flexibility
supporting ENS would impose extra work on our volunteer admins
I don't want to encourage the use of any proof-of-work blockchain for environmental reasons (though I understand that ETH is moving to proof-of-stake, which may change my opinion)

matthewdowney commented 2 years ago

Hey Toby, I totally understand. Thanks for considering it!

matthewdowney commented 2 years ago

Hey @tobias , no pressure here, but wanted to check if ETH's completed move to proof of stake affects this decision. Thanks!

danielcompton commented 2 years ago

@matthewdowney I don't know a lot about this space, but what's to stop someone creating a .eth TLD in the future which is just a "regular" domain, not an ENS domain? How would you envision handling name conflicts? Or would you add some prefix to ENS domains to separate them?

matthewdowney commented 2 years ago

Hey good point! I mistakenly thought they had registered .eth with ICANN but I understand from this medium post that they have not, and that it's only a future goal.

Fwiw Brave browser's strategy includes rules which recognize .eth domains, and it's gaining steam as a way to point to IPFS content, but it's always possible that ICANN decides to give .eth to Ethiopia (currently .et).

clojars / administration

Group Verification / New Group Creation for ENS domains #169