Ename

Public registry of verified human identities, maintained by a nonprofit organization: the shared identity layer beneath the platforms, the one that lets you move between them without losing anything.

Online, a name doesn't truly belong to the person who bears it: it lives in the database of a private company, free to suspend it, reassign it, or vanish along with it. Nor does it prove who wrote a message or took a photo, a gap that has grown critical now that machines produce text and images the way humans do. The physical world met both needs long ago, with civil records and the handwritten signature; the digital world has built neither. Ename closes both gaps by lifting identity out of each platform and placing it underneath, shared by all.

Enames

An ename is a readable identifier, one you can say out loud, for example john-doe#1. Behind it stands a person whose identity has been verified. Inside it, a cryptographic key lets that person sign what they produce, binding content to its author.

A life rarely fits into a single name. When someone's legal name changes, after a marriage or an adoption, they receive a new ename, and the old one is not recycled: it still refers to them. They can also keep several names alive at once: a creator goes by mr-beast#1 in public, backed by the verified jimmy-donaldson#1, and the public name stays fully authentic because it is anchored to that root.

An ename doesn't stand only for an individual. The organizations that humans form (a company, a nonprofit, a public body) receive one on the same principle, acme-inc#1, with a verified identity just like a person's. They, too, change names over time, and they anchor their brands and products to their root, each as its own ename. Acting on behalf of one of them is written john-doe#1@acme-inc#1, like an email address, with the organization attesting to the link.

Verification is the central case, but there are also unverified enames. On a forum, in a game, on a social network, you don't always want to say who you are; for a human-rights defender or a dissident, hiding it may be necessary. These enames are purely declarative: no established identity stands behind them. A dot precedes them, .pixel-cat#12, so they are clearly set apart from verified enames.

Registry

The registry holds very little: for each ename, a public key and the name of its current platform. Nothing else: not the data, not the messages, not the relationships, and above all not the private keys, which stay in the hands of their holders. What a registry does not hold, it cannot lose, cannot sell, and cannot be forced to hand over.

Platforms

Platforms, not the registry, are the way in: they are the ones that issue enames and provide everyday services. This position seems to give them power; in practice, almost none. Whatever a person produces, they sign it themselves; the platform never signs for them. Every signature is verified against the keys published by Ename, no matter which platform carried it. At worst, a platform can make someone invisible; it cannot speak in their name. Nor can it hold on to its users: whoever leaves takes their identity and their data with them, in formats every platform can read, because the architecture requires it, not as a commercial favor.

Standards

Independent platforms form a coherent whole only if they understand one another. That is the role of Ename's standards: shared formats that every accredited platform can read and write. They make two things possible that closed platforms deny. Interoperability first: you write to someone, or read what they publish, even if they are on another platform. Portability second: the day you leave, you find your identity and your data intact at a competitor, one from the registry, the other from the platform. Without these shared formats, both would be nothing but promises.

A platform can also invent its own formats where no standard exists yet: this is how new uses emerge. The risk arises only if one of these formats wins broad adoption while remaining readable by that platform alone, because what people create in it then ends up locked in. Ename answers this with a rule: as soon as a proprietary format spreads and touches data you cannot afford to lose, it must become an open standard, submitted to Ename and free for anyone to adopt. The success of a good idea then enriches the commons instead of locking it away.

Governance

That leaves the question of what keeps the registry itself from becoming the master in turn. It is maintained by Ename, a nonprofit organization. It is governed by several groups (the platforms, civil society, technical experts, the founding members), none of which holds a majority on its own; the founders' weight is set to diminish over time. Its funding rules out the usual levers of abuse: no advertising, no data resale, no single patron, no government, but instead the platforms it accredits, which aligns its interest with the long term rather than with whatever it could squeeze out in the short term. Finally, any rule that touches the ename format, platform accreditation, or people's rights goes through a public consultation.

Horizon

The horizon is measured in centuries. An ename created today must remain valid and verifiable long after the person who bears it has died; when a platform vanishes, the enames endure. The ambition is not one more service for a few million insiders, but an identity open to every human who wants one.

Get in touch: contact@ename.ngo