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Setting Up an Account Identity

Phala Network provides a naming system that allows participants to add personal information to their on-chain account and subsequently ask for verification of this information by registrars.

After your identity is added, it can be used in many applications in Phala or Khala ecosystem. For example, in Secure Worker, this will help you attract delegators to trust and vote for you.

Setting an Identity

Users can set an identity by registering through default fields including:

  • legal name
  • display name
  • website
  • Twitter handle
  • Element handle

You can also add extra custom fields to which you can attest. Personalized fields are elaborated in the judgements section.

Users must reserve funds in a bond to store their information on chain:identity_reserve_funds, and identity_field_funds per each field beyond the legal name. These funds are locked, can not be spent - they will be returned when the identity is cleared.

These amounts can also be extracted by querying constants through the “Chain state constants” tab on polkadot.js/apps.

Getting Started

  1. To get started, head over to your My Accounts tab of Phala/Khala (Switch to “Phala/Khala Network” -> “Accounts”).

Each field can store up to 32 bytes of information, so the data must be less than that. When inputting the data manually through the Extrinsics UI, a UTF8 to bytes converter can help.

  1. Click the gear icon next to your account and select “Set on-chain identity”.

A popup will appear, offering the default fields.

Adding Custom Fields

To add custom fields beyond the default ones, use the Extrinsics UI (“Developer” -> “Extrinsics”). Select submit the following extrinsic “identity” and in the field to the immediate right “setidentity(info)”. To submit a raw transaction, first click “Add Item” and add any field name you like. The display name also must be provided; otherwise, the Identity pallet would consider it wiped if you submitted it with “None” selected. Every time you change your identity values, you need to re-submit the entire set of fields: the write operation is always “overwrite” and never “append.”

Note that custom fields are not shown in the UI by default.

The rendering of such custom values is, ultimately, up to the UI/dapp makers. In the case of Polkadot{.js} , the team prefers to only show official fields for now. If you want to check that the values are still stored, use the Chain State UI to query the active account’s identity info:

It is up to your own UI or dapp to then do with this data as it pleases. The data will remain available for querying via the Polkadot API, so you don’t have to rely on the PolkadotJS UI.

You can have a maximum of 100 custom fields.

Format Caveat

Since fields support different formats, from raw bytes to various hashes, a UI has no way of telling how to encode a given field it encounters.

The Polkadot{.js} UI currently encodes the raw bytes it encounters as UTF8 strings, which makes these values readable on-screen. However, given that there are no restrictions on the values that can be placed into these fields, a different UI may interpret them as, for example, IPFS hashes or encoded bitmaps. This means any field stored as raw bytes will become unreadable by that specific UI. As field standards crystallize, things will become easier to use but for now, every custom implementation of displaying user information will likely have to make a conscious decision on the approach to take, or support multiple formats and then attempt multiple encodings until the output makes sense.

Judgements

After a user injects their information on chain, they can request judgement from a registrar. Users declare a maximum fee that they are willing to pay for judgement, and registrars whose fee is below that amount can provide a judgement.

When a registrar provides judgement, they can select up to six levels of confidence in their attestation:

  • Unknown: The default value, no judgement made yet.
  • Reasonable: The data appears reasonable, but no in-depth checks (e.g. formal KYC process) were performed.
  • Known Good: The registrar has certified that the information is correct.
  • Out of Date: The information used to be good but is now out of date.
  • Low Quality: The information is low quality or imprecise, but can be fixed with an update.
  • Erroneous: The information is erroneous and may indicate malicious intent.

A seventh state, “fee paid”, is for when a user has requested judgement and it is in progress. Information that is in this state or “erroneous” is “sticky” and cannot be modified; it can only be removed by the complete removal of the identity.

Registrars gain trust by performing proper due diligence and would presumably be replaced for issuing faulty judgements.

To be judged after submitting your identity information, go to the “Extrinsics UI” and select the identity pallet, then requestJudgement. For the reg_index put the index of the registrar you want to be judged by, and for the max_fee put the maximum you’re willing to pay for these confirmations.

If you don’t know which registrar to pick, first check the available registrars by going to “Chain State UI” and selecting identity.registrars() to get the full list.

Requesting a Judgement

Requesting judgement follows the same process regardless of whether you’re on the Khala or Phala networks. Select one of the registrars from the query you made above.

This will make your identity go from unjudged to “waiting”:

At this point, direct contact with the registrar is required - the contact info is in their identity as shown above. Each registrar will have their own set of procedures to verify your identity and values, and only once you’ve satisfied their requirements will the process continue.

Once the registrar has confirmed the identity, a green checkmark should appear next to your account name with the appropriate confidence level:

Note that changing even a single field’s value after you’ve been verified will un-verify your account and you will need to start the judgement process again. However, you can still change fields while the judgement is going on - it’s up to the registrar to keep an eye on the changes.

Cancelling a Judgement

You may decide that you do not want to be judged by a registrar (for instance, because you realize you entered incorrect data or selected the wrong registrar). In this case, after submitting the request for judgement but before your identity has been judged, you can issue a call to cancel the judgement using an extrinsic.

To do this, first, go to the “Extrinsics UI” and select the identity pallet, then cancelRequest. Ensure that you are calling this from the correct account (the one for which you initially requested judgement). For the reg_index, put the index of the registrar from which you requested judgement.

Submit the transaction, and the requested judgement will be canceled.

Phala & Khala Registrars

  • Registrar 0:
    • Marvin Tong
    • Contact: [email protected]
    • Account: 42McARWf3FMrGa2RnhhVansbCHuRktiiyHpjsW5nDkDefwHr
    • Fee: 5 $PHA
  • Registrar 2:
    • Doyle Guo
    • Contact: [email protected]
    • Account: 46E4xojF1Q3kaihagQt8to3pFMXQkNRdQAs8BnpyqVNKWHg6
    • Fee: 0 $PHA

Khala Registrars

There will be multiple registrars on Khala. But at the moment you only have 2 registrar suppliers:

  • Registrar 0:
    • Marvin Tong
    • Contact: [email protected]
    • Account: 42McARWf3FMrGa2RnhhVansbCHuRktiiyHpjsW5nDkDefwHr
    • Fee: 5 $PHA
  • Registrar 1:
    • Doyle Guo
    • Contact: [email protected]
    • Account: 46E4xojF1Q3kaihagQt8to3pFMXQkNRdQAs8BnpyqVNKWHg6
    • Fee: 0 $PHA

Please add the following information to the application:

I am applying for identity verification on Khala, the information is as follows:

{
  "account": "42McARWf3FMrGa2RnhhVansbCHuRktiiyHpjsW5nDkDefwHr",
  "display": "Marvin Tong",
  "web": "https://phala.network",
  "email": "[email protected]"
  "twitter": "https://twitter.com/marvin_tong"
}

Registrar 0 will reply with the next steps.

Sub Accounts

Users can also link accounts by setting “sub accounts”, each with its own identity, under a primary account. The system reserves a bond for each sub account. An example of how you might use this would be a validation company running multiple validators. A single entity, “My Staking Company”, could register multiple sub accounts that represent the Stash accounts of each of their validators.

An account can have a maximum of 100 sub-accounts.

To register a sub-account on an existing account, you must currently use the Extrinsics UI. There, select the identity pallet, then setSubs as the function to use. Click “Add Item” for every child account you want to add to the parent sender account. The value to put into the Data field of each parent is the optional name of the sub-account. If omitted, the sub-account will inherit the parent’s name and be displayed as parent/parent instead of parent/child.

Note that a deposit of identity_sub_reserve_funds is required for every sub-account.

You can use polkadot.js/apps again to verify this amount by querying the identity.subAccountDeposit constant.

Clearing and Killing an Identity

Users can clear their identity information and have their deposit returned. Clearing an identity also clears all sub accounts and returns their deposits.

To clear an identity:

  1. Navigate to the Accounts UI.
  2. Click the three dots corresponding to the account you want to clear and select ‘Set on-chain identity’.
  3. Select ‘Clear Identity’, and sign and submit the transaction.

Killing: The Council can kill an identity that it deems erroneous. This results in a slash in the deposit.