AT Protocol's identity system gives each user a web account with a portable identifier that points to three things: a current handle (a domain), a hosting location for their data, and a public key — all separate from any single domain or provider.

8:19describe it proto is that >> um maybe I just start by describing it first and then come back to your question because I think that that actually like clarifies it a little bit. Um, so you know, like you have a Google account, right? Like uh you maybe you have like a lot of sites that you log into, but you only have like maybe several Google accounts, right? Because

8:43uh maybe you have like separate identities for like work stuff and personal stuff or maybe like even a couple different identities for personal stuff, but really you don't want to have like 400 uh like password payers and so on. like it makes sense to manage them from uh kind of a single identity piece and a lot of us use Google for that and so with Prao kind of you know the first

9:04thing that it introduces is it really upstreams that concept into web itself. So the idea is that identity should actually be a legible concept in the web. So you should have a web account and you know you don't have to be logged in all the time of course or you can have multiple uh but ideally we upstream this so that you don't depend on Google and so uh you know it could be hosted by

9:31Google but you should be able to switch it to another provider or to host it yourself on your own server but basically like the the thing that you log into apps with that should be something that you know that is like under your control and that is a web standard. So this kind of the first idea >> is that like the idea of like owning your own domain or is it does it go even

9:54further than that? >> It goes further than that. So at uses domains as handles. >> So this is a part of this. Your identity has a handle >> but it's not tied to a domain because you want to change handles over time. Like that's pretty common, right? Like people want to be able to change their uh or like you could lose a domain, right? like you don't want to lose your

10:16identity. So it's like a layer above domains. Uh there's like a identifier that's associated with you and then there's like a JSON document that says three things. One is like what your current username is which is you know a domain but it can change over time kind of like your passport. So like it says who you are like what's your name? You know what is what is your handle? The

10:41second thing it says is where is your data stored? So what is your current hosting? And that is the novel concept, right? Like in today's web, we don't really have a concept of per user hosting, right? So like I only have a hosting if I host a website. >> Whereas here it's again kind of more like Google account or Google Drive. It's like everybody who gets, you know,

11:02a web account has some hosting and it could be provided by like a big company, but you could switch it over time to, you know, running it yourself or with a community and so on. It's just like a web standard. >> So everybody gets a hosting where some JSON can be stored. >> Uh and the third thing is just your public key so that the things that you