The need for Identity verification, Anonymity preservation and permissioned participation during an activity on a Decentralized network

Saying ‘Identity Verification and Anonymity Preservation’ in the same sentence seems like a paradoxical stance but hear me out.

Problem Context

You have employees, each with a unique employee ID. On the network, these employee IDs are visible i.e via nodes ran on employee machines, which means they can potentially be linked back to a real individual outside the network.

The goal is to create a session for a set of employees in your company. Some employees may be exempt (for example, those who have previously failed to attain employees of the month). An example session could be submitting drawings for the company’s next T-shirt design.

However, there’s a challenge: the session is visible on-chain, so anyone can see it. Despite that, you want to enforce that only certain employees can submit their drawings.

Requirements for Submission

To achieve the goal, the system needs to ensure the following:

1. Client-side private keys: Each employee’s private key must remain on the client side. The network should never see the private key.
2. Network verification without revealing identity: The network should be able to verify that a given public key (address) is allowed to submit a drawing because it corresponds to an employee ID whitelisted by the employer. At the same time, the network should not be able to map the public key back to the actual employee ID, preserving anonymity.
3. Single submission per employee: Each employee can only submit one drawing per session.

1. Session-specific tokens: If the network issues any tokens for submission, those tokens should not be reusable in other sessions with similar participation restrictions to bypass said restrictions.

Key Concept

The last two points (single submission per employee and session-specific tokens) are summarized as:

“One action per session per identity.”

This ensures that:

• Employees cannot submit multiple times in the same session.
• Any submission rights or tokens cannot be reused across sessions.