Onename, an open-source protocol provider which creates secure and trustless identities on the blockchain network has announced that the platform will switch from namecoin’s blockchain to bitcoin at the Blockstack Summit 2015.
The company’s co-founder Muneeb Ali explained, “Namecoin is not secure,” because of one mining pool’s dominant control over the Namecoin mining network. According Onename co-founder Ryan Shea, one of China’s largest mining pools Discus Fish (F2POOL) controls over 60% of the entire Namecoin network’s hashing power.
“A single mining pool has 67% of the hashpower on Namecoin. Namecoin is not decentralized and not secure,” said Shea.
During the identity and security presentation at the Blockstack Summit 2015, Ali announced, “[We are] migrating all 30,000 onename users to the Bitcoin blockchain right now.”
The Onename platform is a decentralized identity system, in which users register and maintain a blockchain ID, which can be shared on their websites, social media profiles, and business cards. Onename Developers could also implement its technology to create a password-less login using the issued blockchain IDs, providing users with granular control over their privacy and data access.
The company raised its first round of seed funding from prominent venture capital firms and angel investors, including Barry Silbert, AngelList co-founder and CEO Naval Ravikant and SV Angel, with an aim to create a public and transparent system to verify and authenticate identities.
“We are looking at it more as probabilistic identity, you connect a bunch of online presences, your Github or your Twitter, and it gives you a sense with a high probability that it is this person, but it’s not really verified by a government by a Social Security number,” explained Ali during that time.
Ali added, “Over time we would want it to be extensible to everything, so you could imagine it being used for something like KYC (know-your-customer) at some point,” in an interview with Coindesk.
