From ZK-first to AT Protocol — our path to DDS

I first met "Agora — a platform for public deliberation using Polis-style clustering" a year or so ago. Now they're moving to ATprotocol and "proposing the Decentralized Deliberation Standard (DDS) as an open protocol for deliberation, built on AT Protocol".

This post goes through their history, which started by investigating how to "use zero-knowledge proofs as the root of identity" in their platform: "A ZK nullifier derived from a real-world credential (biometric passport, verifiable credential) acts as a privacy-preserving, one-human-per-account identifier. No email, no phone number, no social login". Their original protocol idea also supported verifiable moderation in a centralized context: "a platform could monetize data access while providing cryptographic transparency about its moderation decisions...

We no longer think this is the right approach... the market is far from ready" - they were probably way to far ahead of users, who "don't want to download a third-party wallet, scan their passport, or understand what ZK is... ZK anonymous identity is the wrong default for a public deliberation platform... participants who need hard anonymity... are a real but niche use case "

So they evaluated AT Protocol, Nostr and Logos. They provide arguments for all 3 protocols, but chose Atproto as "the problems we'd need to solve to build deliberation infrastructure were already solved at the protocol level".

They therefore propose building Decentralized Deliberation Standard (DDS), "our proposal for a vendor-neutral protocol for public deliberation", where "Apps define their own data formats (product lexicons) while sharing a common base (base lexicons). A deliberation platform, an analysis engine, and a voting app can interoperate... each reads the other's data from the Firehose... Multiple Analyzers can compete on the same data; multiple collection streams can feed one analysis... different apps handle different parts, composing permissionlessly via shared lexicons... Every component in the stack... can independently offer paid services."

Next: "AT Protocol compatibility — specifically, supporting the different ways users already log in to Agora (email, phone, guest, ZK passport) as PDS authentication methods. A key design challenge is "Guest Mode" for AT Protocol accounts ... worth solving at the protocol level".