WordPress, Web3 and Ethereum: What The Whole World Is Missing

I have been a long time user of WordPress. At least 15 years. Sure it’s buggy sometimes, and getting a multitude of plugins to work together can be a nightmare sometimes, but when you need to put a website up quickly, with advanced features, it really can’t be beat. It’s like the Swiss army knife of website building. In fact, I setup the very first iteration of Caches in about a week. The “Login with Ethereum” and anonymity features took longer, but I had a fully featured social network/community website up and running in less than a week without coding a single line myself.

That’s WordPress’s true power, plugins. Plugins extend and add value to the WordPress platform beyond measure. I doubt anyone would use WordPress for much other than a personal blog if it wasn’t for the huge catalog of plugins, themes and community support. So, without plugins to accomplish tasks, WordPress loses much of its value for website builders.

A Failure to Understand The Value Proposition

When I started building Caches just a little less than a year ago the majority of the plugins for WordPress in this emerging space could be found under the search term “cryptocurrency” or “crypto” and the bulk of these plugins were just price tickers, or charts pulled from API’s. The next largest group were Payment plugins to use with WooCommerce and others. Again, just API front ends. Most were focused on Bitcoin and few stayed updated to keep up with newer versions of WordPress. When the NFT craze of 2020/21 hit, some developers added plugins for WooCommerce to create NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.io or Looksrare.org. Many of these have also fallen by the wayside, or abandoned by their authors to work on more profitable plugins. I don’t blame them.

If you look at it from the outside it would appear that Web3/NFTs/Crypto plugins aren’t profitable. The high’s and lows of crypto make the income from such plugins unpredictable. You could devote a year or two and develop a great NFT marketplace plugin with a full theme and the works and then the fad is over and you spent all that time on a product that no one is excited about anymore. Total bummer.

I think the WordPress community failed to see the true power of Ethereum and NFT’s though, and the real “product” behind ERC based NFT’s. This isn’t their fault though, few really do. Most think Ethereum is a “cryptocurrency” like Bitcoin and less than that might know they have these JPG’s called NFT’s. I can see how that mistake could be made, but the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is an entire community owned and operated infrastructure underneath it all, and community run development, and IMHO there’s one feature no one has really tapped into yet.

Ethereum’s Most Underrated Feature

Identity and “Login with Ethereum” is by far Ethereum’s most underrated feature. It allows you to create a single identity, and login to websites like Caches without providing an email address, or creating an username and password. It’s mostly anonymous if you want it to be. You can also keep money in this wallet if you want, as well as NFT’s, POAP’s or anything else available in the Ethereum ecosystem. In a world of sophisticated hacks, account data theft, and more, users need to remain anonymous when signing up for things. The old email/password combination is no longer sufficient security for protecting our online identities.

Ok so anonymous account creation isn’t that novel, I mean … Apple has Sign in with Apple that sorta does the same thing right? There are a few differences however. Apple creates a random email address for you and forwards it to your email to hide your email address, but they don’t hide your name. Also, Apple’s sign in is proprietary and operated by a private company and so they control it absolutely. Login with Ethereum does away with email and password combination and replaces it with “signatures” to authenticate that you own that wallet or account.

This removes a tremendous liability from website owners in the event of a hack. Storing customer data is quickly becoming a liability in today’s day and age. Ethereum enables you to provide secure, anonymous authentication without the need to store any sensitive customer data. That is a powerful enough feature alone, but automatic and anonymous account creation isn’t where the real power lies, the real power is in the Tokens in your wallet. Things like NFT’s and POAP’s.

The True Power of The NFT

While everyone else is focused on the price, or even the picture attached to an NFT, the real power is in identity. Having an Ethereum wallet, to which only you have the key to unlock, can be used to verify someone’s identity. Like PGP signatures on email for example. When NFT’s or POAP’s are placed in someone’s wallet they can be used to identify people and to prove they are who they say they are.

For example, my EVMavericks NFT in my wallet is #374. My community knows that, and without ever giving them ANY personal information, I can prove I am the person I say I am online and in the real world, just by signing a simple message to my Ethereum wallet containing that NFT. They can view that signature on the blockchain from anywhere in the world and know for sure that they’re speaking to the real JBMaclemore.eth. It’s a unique, un-copyable, un-censorable identifier for me.

With the right integration with websites, this wallet could be a single sign-on identifier for me across multiple sites, and it could bring me instant credibility on completely new platforms. This can also be used to reduce spam and bots on community sites without resorting to paying Twitter and turning over a bunch of personal information to them for a “blue checkmark” to prove your identity. Think about that. NFT’s are your “blue checkmark” across the entire Internet, no matter where you go. Pretty powerful huh? I could also see this being used in situations where you need to put value to an opinion given to you online.

Wouldn’t seeing a “Certified Nurse” NFT 👨‍⚕️ issued by a respected medical facility or a state government authority be a huge relief to see on an online WebMD recommendation in the comments section? Sure it would. So, NFT’s can also help us identify qualified people in this vast ocean of websites, bots and information. Website owners can then promote qualified peoples content/opinions to the top of the endless stack of comments and provide a better experience for their users.

This will be EXTREMELY valuable in a world dominated by AI generated content. I can’t stress that point enough. It will soon become very difficult to tell the difference between, a knowledgeable well qualified opinion, and some conglomeration of opinions spit out by a Chatbot that sounds good but may miss some nuanced detail that can result in an injury. I mean … a 14 year old parading as a Doctor on your website could be a terrible liability for you.

NFT’s Build And Foster Communities

Remember when I said I was EVMaverick #374? Well there were over 1,000 EVMaverick NFT’s minted. There won’t be any more minted ever again. These NFT’s were given to community members that contributed to the growth and prosperity of the very popular /r/ethfinance subreddit over several years. This NFT bonds us all as a community, no matter whether we’re on Reddit, or Discord … or even on Caches. No matter what platform, or what display name I signed up with, I can identify myself to my community anywhere on the web thanks to that NFT, and they can identify me.

This has huge benefits for building, not only localized communities like Caches or ETHFinance, but it also helps bridge communities. Each of us are a part of dozens of different communities online. Hobbyist communities, car club communities, developer communities, maybe even religious communities or political communities.

The problem is, you don’t own your identity at any of them. The website owner does. Your identity on any one of those sites can be taken or lost. All your reputation, credit, friendships, all of it. Also, your identity often doesn’t transfer between communities, websites, and platforms. You could be arguing with a really good friend from your car club forum over at your favorite political forum without ever knowing it because they didn’t use the same username across multiple sites. What a tragedy. What a great opportunity to bridge communities, lost. What a great way to humanize and relate to this person I’m fighting with, lost.

This can also encourage and incentivize engagement and contribution. When you can look out at a sea of usernames in an online community and spot a friend from somewhere else, it can be a HUGE relief. With that little NFT, I can easily spot people online from my community of EVMavericks that I can reach out to for help, or to collaborate with, or whatever. I can find people I can trust in an increasingly untrustworthy world. These 1,000+ people are my community no matter where I go online. That’s the dream anyway. Currently there aren’t a lot of products that support this very unique and very valuable feature of NFT’s. I hope the WordPress community decides to embrace it however.

POAP’s Build Reputation

POAP stands for “Proof of Attendance Protocol.” They are similar to NFT’s, and they even use the same ERC-721 token standard, except they have extra meta data requirements for the details of the event you attended. POAP’s are less about identity and more about your experiences. Think of them like the T-Shirt you buy at a concert. It’s a token, a little proof that you saw Van Halen in ‘88 because you sure as heck don’t remember it, am I right!? Wooo! POAP’s can be given for all sorts of experiences. For example, the ETHFinance community issues one for every “Daily Doots” Podcast we do. So you can get one for free every week you listen to the Podcast. You can view all the POAP’s I’ve collected for events I’ve attended online. They don’t hold any monetary value, it’s just a sort of “I was here!” kind of thing. For now at least.

POAPportunities

POAP’s could be used to prove your skills or credentials as well. If you were issued a POAP for every successful feature submission to the WordPress code repo that made it into a release version, you could prove you know how to hack on WordPress without the need for a resume. Just sign a message on your wallet that contains all your “skills” POAP’s to prove you know what’s going on. Cool idea right? There is a huge opportunity for LMS plugins here. Having an Ethereum wallet login, and being able to automatically issue POAP’s to a students wallet for course completion is a huge opportunity! In fact I had hoped to do this here at Caches but none of the current LMS systems provided anything like that. ☹️

POAP’s can be digital badges that prove course completion, and they could be used to gate the next lesson in the course, all verifiable on the public Ethereum blockchain. Combined with gamification plugins like GamiPress you could create an awards, earnings and reputation system that spans across every WordPress site online. Instead of having those GamiPress awards only tied to that one site or community, they could be redeemable or valuable at sister communities as well, enabling more communities to bond, share and exchange value with each other. Points, ranks and awards could be issued as POAP’s.

Learning sites built with Ethereum web3 technologies could even accept course work from other sites as prerequisites, or use that to incentivize to switch from a competitors learning site. It could even be used to replace the antiquated Gravatar system in place now. You own your identity. It’s secured by the blockchain, and you can take it and your credentials with you everywhere online.

WordPress and the Web3 Future

If you start digging in on this idea you’ll find it is in it’s infancy, but it is very much a working setup. There are EIP’s (Ethereum Improvement Proposals) to further expand the features, and I would absolutely love to see the WordPress community involved in this. There are a ton of talented developers and engineers in the WordPress and Ethereum communities and I believe the idea of owning your identity is a good one that needs to be developed further.

Together I think it’s possible to bring this idea, this concept, to everyone online. WordPress is in a unique position to capture this new world of value that empowers users, incentivizes distribution, inclusion, collaboration and community. If you dig below the surface, I think you’ll find that both the Ethereum and WordPress communities goals are aligned. Ethereum provides the necessary technology and infrastructure to enable all of this, and it’s a public utility, free for anyone to use. They both share common core values of freedom of expression, freedom to own your value … and with your help, I hope the freedom to own your identity too.