Let the world know about your contributions

Jason Smythe

December 22, 2019 · 4 min read

Wildcards is excited to announce a new feature, cryptographically verifiable attestations of identity!

What exactly does this mean, in simple terms?

The owner of a wildcard can now have their twitter handle publicly displayed on our website showing they are the owner.

Go forth and show you believe in wildlife conservation!

How does this work?

Ethereum allows users to sign a message with their account. This signature is publicly verifiable to have only been signed by the owner of the account.

This is only half of the problem though, I could for example sign a message that says “I am the @realDonaldTrump” but that is rather meaningless, unless I post that from the correct twitter account (namely Donald Trump’s twitter account). That is exactly what we require from you, that you post the signed message from a twitter account that you own.

Step by step guide

To verify you own a Wildcard you need to own a wildcard first.

Click on your wildcard to go to the detailed view (eg. https://wildcards.world/#details/andy).
Click on the “Verify” button under your wildcard.

3. Enter your twitter handle.

4. Click generate proof, and wait for your Ethereum signer to open. Read the message you are signing and make sure it is correct, than click sign.

5. Copy the message and paste it in a tweet on twitter. Get the link of the tweet.

And JasoonSmythe is the current patron the wildcard info page.

Why this is important?

Your reputation is valuable. If you believe that people today or in the future will value and appreciate that you did a good deed of donating money to a wildlife conservation, then your contribution is an investment into your reputation. Dollars and Euros are not the only things that people value, thankfully.

It works the other way around too! Everyone has existing social capital, and validating your identity to owning a Wildcard imbues some of that social capital to the Wildcard. And this has the potential to make the wildcard more valuable, which thankfully isn’t a selfish thing — wildcards never stop generating funds for wildlife conservation.

Here is a concrete example from Wildcards history:

On _Jun-27–2019 04:46:08 PM +UT_C Vitalik was born. He cost 0 ether — humble beginnings.
Over the next day it was traded and the price was changed a number of times. It price fluctuated, and it changed hands: 0.0002 ETH, 0.4 ETH, …, 0.15 ETH, 0.25 ETH, 1.7 ETH. All this time Wildcards was generating money for wildlife conservation.
And then, on the Jun-28–2019 09:31:46 AM +UTC, it was bought for 1.7 ETH and the price was set to 20ETH (3665.80 USD) by someone who clearly believes in our project.

Vitalik has a monthly pledge rate of 2.5% of its self assessed value. This means at its current price of 20ETH the owner pays 0.5 ETH (91.54 USD)per month to hold this token. This means that if someone buys Vitalik from them for 20ETH within 36.6 months they make a guaranteed profit. I would say that is a decent amount of incentive for someone to use their social capital to promote Wildcards and its case. And thus — the idea of Patronage Markets starts to come into reality.

As it happens, we do know who the owner of Vitalik is, and they have been public about it. But we hope to make this easier for other patrons on the Wildcards platform in the future.

We are constantly working on new features to further integrate the human and fun side of patronage markets via gamification, stay tuned as these new ideas are implemented.

Follow our socials to learn more about our project and the conservation causes we are working towards.

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Jason Smythe

Lover of bamboo shoots, foraging and shaddy branches
You can connect with me via Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.