Eth-Connect

Eth-Connect - A metadata mapping service for your ethereum address

This is a lookup system to find a secure way to connect to any ethereum address. Eth Users can declare certain metadata by signing them and then they are available for everyone to access.

The first step is to map a seperate and secure PublicKey to an address. Most address which are used to transact might be on a hardware wallet or have valueable Eth It is inconvenient and really insecure for the user to expose private keys to decrypt messages for an dapp while it contains ether

It also makes sense to map multiple Ethereum address with a single public key/contact mechanism. These are the justifications to use a different key for contact/connect with the community

We can generate a new key using the signature of the existing key as entropy or it can be imported. The user will be asked to sign the json containing his/her contact information. For now, its only the encryption public key. Using asymmetric encryption(public-private key system), people can communicate securely. This ensures there is a safe way to write messages.

This can extended to multiple networks, different metadata and a kind of signed self-declaration of one's info.

It uses Ethers for Signing and verification.

The signed metadata is of this format and to be extended.

{

address: "0x.."

metadata:	{

		"content": "Mapping contact-info for wallet-address defined by Eth-connect protocol",

		"walletAddress": "0x.."

		"publicKey": "0x"

		"Date": "2021.."

}

signature: "0x34..."

}

This data is currently stored in a document db. There are plans to move this to ipfs, however limitation of storing the mapping address: cid is still a blocker.

Integrations:

ENS: ENS named fields allow for similar system. I plan t use reverse ens lookup from the address and the get this similar metadata info. I haven't been able to do this integration due to time constraints.

IPFS/Filecoin: Am planning to use Slate to push all metadata instead of using a DB. This represents a good use case for this scenario. I haven't done the integration yet since the address:ipfs mapping is still a service no one provides.

Status: This solves the scenario on how to find another user's public key for secure encryption via Waku. I haven't had the time to build a client for waku. This is valid use case to decentralize identity lookup.