Encointer Protocol
The Encointer protocol provides a decentralized proof of personhood. It ensures that:
- only humans receive a basic income
- every human can only receive it once (per community)
How it works
Encointer leverages the fact that every person can only be in one place at one time. Participants attend regular physical ceremony meetups with small groups of randomly assigned people. Because all meetups happen simultaneously around the world at local high sun, no single person can attend more than one.
Successful attendance earns reputation, which serves as proof of personhood. This reputation is used to:
- Issue community currency income (one income per ceremony per person)
- Vote on community governance proposals (one person, one vote per attendance)
- Claim faucet drips (one drip per attendance per faucet)
- Produce anonymous proof-of-personhood credentials via ring-VRF signatures
Protocol components
- Ceremony cycle — The three-phase cycle (Registering → Assigning → Attesting) that drives periodic meetups
- Reputation — How attendance is tracked and how reputation lifetime works
- Community identifiers — How communities are identified by their geographic location
- Democracy — On-chain governance with adaptive quorum biasing
- Community treasuries — Democratically governed community funds
- Reputation rings — Anonymous proof of personhood via ring-VRF
- Offline payments — ZK-proof-based transfers without internet
- Threat model — Security assumptions and attack analysis
Architecture
Encointer runs as a common good parachain on Kusama, inheriting the security of the Kusama relay chain. The protocol is implemented as a set of Substrate FRAME pallets. For testing, the same pallets run on standalone testnets (Gesell).
The formal definition of the protocol can be found in the whitepaper.