Getting started

This guide will walk through publishing a piece of content onto VERIFY. This guide assumes knowledge of blockchain transactions and wallets.

As publishers on Testnet and Mainnet must be registered with the protocol, here we will use the set of sandbox contracts. The only difference in the sandbox environment is root identities are able to register themselves and there is no name entity attached to root identities.

Important: This guide is meant to be used with keypairs that will not be used in production environments. Its recommended to follow best practices for managing wallet keys. This guide does not make recommendations on best practices for key management.

0. Setup an environment

In this guide we are going to be using ethers (opens in a new tab) v5 to create a script to publish content to VERIFY. Any evm compliant library or SDK can be used to perform the same steps:

Requirements to follow this guide

Have npm and Node js installed. Instructions here (opens in a new tab)
Have MATIC on the VERIFY Testnet. For more information follow the VERIFY Testnet Guide here.

With npm and node installed, pull the getting-started (opens in a new tab) repo and install the npm packages.

npm install

If you are using the Sandbox environment, the getting-started should already contain the ABIs.

If you are not using the Sandbox environment, export the application binary interface (ABI) for the IdentityRegisty and ContentGraph smart contracts. You can do so by going to the implementation contract on the block explorer (list here), and saving the exported ABI in a correspondingly named json file in the root of the getting-started directory.

1. Registering a Root Identity

The root identity is a secp256k1 key pair that represents the publishing organization or person. This wallet does not need to be funded and will maintain the balance of content tokens. It will be used for registering intermediate identities that will handle transactions for VERIFY.

Create a keypair or use an existing keypair, to act as your root identity
It's important to make sure the generated keypair uses the secp256k1 curve

You can also create keys running the following in the root of the getting-started directory:

node gen-wallet.js

Create a transacting wallet to perform transactions, to act as your intermediate identity.

Follow the guides from the previous step to create a second wallet. Fund the wallet with MATIC on VERIFY Testnet (opens in a new tab). Follow the "Using the VERIFY Testnet" guide here for more detail.

Follow the setup instructions in the README.md of getting-started
Register the Root Identity

In the main() function of index.js you will see some code commented out. Uncomment the call to the registerRoot() method and run the code by running: node index.js. Your code should look like the following:

async function main() {
  await registerRoot();
}

If all is configured you should see the following as output:

Registering root...
Root registered!

If you encounter an error check the response against the error codes of the IdentityRegistry.sol here. In addition make sure you have configured the .env file as shown in .env.template.

Go the Identity Registry Sandbox Proxy (opens in a new tab) smart contract read as proxy methods. Running registered(<ROOT_ADDRESS>) should return true.

2. Registering a Intermediate

Once a root Identity has been registered we will create a signature from the root signing pair on the address of the intermediate Identity, following the EIP712 (opens in a new tab) typed signature standard.

Modify main() in index.js to the following:

async function main() {
  await registerIntermediate();
  const root = await whoIs();
  console.log(root);
}

The registerIntermediate() function will register the intermediate wallet for 1 day. To customize this behavior, check the implementation index.js and the docs for the register() method of IdentityRegistry.sol.

Run node index.js

From running the command in 2 you should get the following output:

Getting nonce...
Sign message: <BYTE_32>
Signature generated: <BYTES>
Registering intermediate...
Intermediate wallet registered!
Who is: <INTERMEDIATE_ADDRESS>
<ROOT_ADDRESS>

You can check the registration by going to the Identity Registry Sandbox Proxy (opens in a new tab) smart contract read as proxy methods. Running whoIs(<INTERMEDIATE_ADDRESS>) should return the root address.

3. Publishing

In this step we are going to create an asset token using a randomly generated string as our content.

Modify main() in index.js to the following:

async function main() {
  const { assetId } = await publishContent();
  console.log(assetId)
}

The publishContent method does the following:

Creates a random piece of content, a utf8 random string.
Generates an AssetID from hashing the content.
Stores the content via IPFS.
Creates a metadata file for the content.
Signs the metadata file with the intermediate key pair.
Stores the metadata via IPFS
Creates a new Asset node owned by the root wallet in the ContentGraph using the publish() method.
Run node index.js

From running the command about you should see the following as output:

Publishing content:  { text: <RANDOM_TEXT> }
AssetId: <BYTES_32_ASSET_ID>
Storing Content...
Stored content at: ipfs://<CID_CONTENT>
Signing metadata...
Metadata signed
Uploaded to ipfs: ipfs://<CID_OF_METADATA>
Publishing to the ContentGraph...
Transaction hash: 0xf0a7aeb750fef9287f23944ff6e25bd9eef93ec1ce5d612ec1b154588e60166e
******** content published ********

Congrats you have now published and attested to your first piece of content in the VERIFY sandbox environment! Checkout the consuming getting started for more info on consuming the tokens that exist in VERIFY.

Storage Overview