• Spruce will work towards decentralized identification and web sign-ups using Ethereum wallet accounts.
• Some popular web services like OpenSea and Gitcoin have implemented these solutions.

Tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple have largely dominated user account creations across multiple platforms worldwide. As a result, these giants track our digital footprint across the web along with our identities.

Needless to say, we are at the mercy of these centralized identity providers. By leveraging the power of blockchain, Ethereum is trying to completely change the rules of the game. By using the Ethereum blockchain, it aims to make sign-ins completely decentralized. Thus, users can access web services directly using their Ethereum account instead of using the accounts offered by big corporations.

The Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum Name Service (ENS) has put forward a Request for Proposal to sign-in with Ethereum. The Ethereum ecosystem caters to millions of monthly active wallet users. These users sign in using their cryptographic keys for matters like financial transactions and community governance.

These digital wallets are extremely secure and holding billions of dollars worth of assets. Besides, the secure digital wallets will also help to sign in to Web2 services.

Ethereum Foundation accepts a proposal

Several players had submitted their proposals to the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum Name Service (ENS). However, Spruce emerged as a clear winner for this proposal.

Spruce, the open-source software company, has been focusing solely on decentralized data and identity. Besides, Spruce has already started working on this project while delivering the “best practices survey, user research, specification draft, and reference implementation”.

Spruce has also built several crypto native tools helping users manage their identity and data across platforms. This includes its recent implementation of EIP-712 signing in Rust. In the official announcement, Spruce noted:

We look forward to applying our years of experience in decentralized identity to this work. We will be working closely with the teams at EF and ENS, ensuring that development will happen in the open, ample consideration is given to existing bodies of related work (existing implementations, EIPs, OpenID, IETF, W3C, etc.), and that the final result will be friendly to implementers while remaining vendor-neutral.

Spruce further added that some popular web services like OpenSea and Gitcoin have implemented these solutions. They allow users to establish their web sessions using their Ethereum wallets. This allows for low friction and passwordless authentication all at the same time.

As a larger goal, Spruce aims to standardize the entire workflow allowing millions of Ethereum users to create a digital identity that they can have full control upon.

This is an important initiative as the digital ecosystem expands at a rapid pace. Spruce serves the whole idea of decentralization that gives users absolute power over their digital data.