POP CO

Decentralised Proof-of-Ownership for Web3 Builders 🔗 Pitch Deck

Overview

POPCO is a proposed solution to fill a growing need across the Ethereum ecosystem: verifiable, privacy-respecting ownership confirmation for externally owned accounts (EOAs) and smart contracts. At a time when proof of control has become essential across funding workflows, DAO coordination, and dApp interactions, existing solutions such as Etherscan lack the privacy guarantees, lifecycle management, and open-source flexibility developers and teams require.

POPCO aims to address this by providing a decentralised, open-source proof-of-ownership platform that would allow individuals and organisations to verify account or contract control on any EVM-compatible network but without logging data, compromising on UX, or centralising trust.

The Challenge

The emergence of complex Web3 coordination; between DAOs, grantees, contractors, and infrastructure providers, has exposed limitations in existing verification tools. Current methods often involve test transactions, copied messages, or opaque backend logging. The lack of lifecycle visibility and inability to manage signature requests at scale makes trust-building difficult.

Furthermore, users increasingly rely on smart contract wallets like Gnosis Safe, where verification is multi-signature by design. Existing tools don’t account for these use cases, leaving a critical gap in how ownership and control are communicated across parties.

The Approach

POPCO was envisioned to:

• Enable privacy-focused, signature-based verification for EOAs and smart contracts
• Offer lifecycle tools to share, track, and log signature requests
• Integrate with identity credentialing tools such as WID3.XYZ
• Operate across EVM chains with both on-chain and off-chain proof storage

Unlike Etherscan or Signator.io, POPCO proposes a system where verifiers set a message and network, send a link to one or more signers, and automatically receive validated signatures. Signers could choose whether to log their proof on-chain or off-chain, creating a reusable record of verification without compromising privacy.

Broader Ecosystem Contribution

POPCO was conceived as a public good. It is intended to be fully open-source, non-excludable, and non-rivalrous. The proposed codebase would be freely auditable, extendable, and deployable by other builders. The project exemplifies PORTERS’ belief that developer infrastructure should be censorship-resistant, auditable, and interoperable.

In addition to proposing functionality not available in existing tooling, POPCO was planned to integrate with the WID3.XYZ identity framework to bridge ownership with verifiable credentials, endorsed by the EU’s TRUSTCHAIN initiative.