✨Features

Expert Evaluations

The goal of Aura is to provide expert evaluations to other apps. In the BrightID domain, an expert evaluation answers whether a BrightID is a person's single allowed account or a duplicate. In other domains, other kinds of expert evaluations are possible.

Privacy

BrightID activity is a primary source of verification information in Aura. Aura inherits the same privacy rule as BrightID: no information should be shared with anyone that doesn't already know it.

Aura relies on verification by people that already know the person being verified. This is in contrast to privacy-invading verification methods which require providing personal information to someone who doesn't already know it.

Sybil battleground

Aura hosts the best motivated, best equipped, and most capable sybil defenders. Sybil defense moves from casual BrightID users to elite Aura Players, Trainers, and Managers. Sybil attackers are forced to target highly-skilled Aura participants rather than BrightID users.

Accountability

Aura participants have skin in the game. Performing poorly in a role or participating in an attack will result in a poor or negative evaluation, which will quickly drop the score of a participant to a level where they can no longer influence decisions.

Resilience

The ability of evaluators to react quickly to lower the score of an attacker or someone making critical mistakes is a key feature of Aura. A large sybil attack can be stopped quickly with a single evaluation change.

Coexisting teams add resilience as does the ability to fork and spin up new leagues.

Decentralization

Aura offers redundancy against serious attacks through the existence of multiple teams. Aura players belong to multiple teams--even if they're not aware of it. If a team becomes compromised, a league will exclude it and Aura will continue to operate using the other teams.

Managers can add new managers in a decentralized way using a transitive trust calculation. Anyone can start participating in Aura and seek evaluations from existing participants.

Rewards

Scores resulting from participants evaluating each other provide a convenient scale for monetary rewards to be distributed to participants within a team.

Leagues are responsible for marketing expert evaluations to apps that need them and distributing the money collected to teams in proportion to the value they bring.

Scaling to new Regions

In the BrightID domain, apps seeking to expand into regions can pay leagues to cover those regions. The need for verification in a region drives well-connected users to learn to become Aura players.