Publishing Your Profile ID

Publishing Your Profile ID

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Your profile ID looks like C-482-930-174-005 or B-029-384-751-224. The blockchain knows it exists. It does not know your name — and that is on purpose: if names lived on-chain, anyone could register as "Adidas" and inherit the trust that goes with it.

So the name comes from somewhere else: you publish the ID on a site people already trust to be yours. That link is the whole trust model. A passport from an ID that cannot be found anywhere proves a timestamp and nothing else.

Where to publish it

Publish both formats — the short ID and the wallet address — somewhere a normal person would look first:

Short:  B-029-384-751-224
Full:   0x742d35Cc…4438f44e

• Your official website, prominently. Not buried three menus deep.
• Your public social profiles and bios.
• On packaging, certificates and labels, where it makes sense.

An individual artist with no website can use a public social profile — that is valid evidence. An organization should use its own domain: a social account proves who posts, not who owns the company.

The machine-readable file (organizations)

A person can read your "About" page. Software cannot, reliably: pages rendered by JavaScript hide the text from anything that is not a browser, and a forum or community section on your own domain can be written by anyone.

So brands (B), museums (M) and proof institutions (P) also publish a small static file:

https://your-domain.com/.well-known/odp.json

{
  "odp": 1,
  "chainId": 137,
  "registry": "0x012aC6393464A73EC16131D701ff2e000695b91b",
  "profiles": [
    { "profileId": "B-029-384-751-224", "wallet": "0x742d35Cc…4438f44e" }
  ]
}

That is the whole file. .well-known/ is a reserved folder (RFC 8615) that every hosting setup supports — upload it like any other file. Only somebody who controls the server can put it there, which is exactly what makes it worth reading.

It changes nothing about the protocol: minting, proofs and verification all work without it. It only decides whether software can confirm your identity automatically or a human has to.

registry matters. A profile ID belongs to one registry generation — the same wallet gets a different ID in a different deployment — so the file names the registry its IDs came from.

Directories: useful, and not the truth

Some apps read a directory — a curated list mapping profile IDs to the sites that publish them. The reference format and example is public, and anyone can run their own.

What a directory may and may not claim:

• Being listed is not certification. It means somebody checked that the ID was published on that domain. It says nothing about honesty or quality.
• Not being listed means nothing at all. Most legitimate creators are in no directory.
• No directory is official. ODP has no central registry. A directory is one operator's editorial opinion about who is worth showing.

If a directory ever presents itself as the authoritative list of real ODP participants, it is overstating what it knows.

What an app should show you

If you use or build an app that reads a directory, these are the rules:

The check found	What you should see
The ID, published where it should be	The organization's name may be shown
Nothing — the site did not load	No name, and no warning. A server being down is not evidence
A page only a human can read	The name, with the date a person last checked
The page still loads, the ID is gone	A clear warning

The last two rows are the ones that matter. A site failing to load says nothing about anyone. An ID deliberately removed from a page that still works is a real signal. An app that treats the first as the second will accuse honest organizations of forgery over a weekend of downtime.

Organizations with divisions

A brand and its sub-brand, a university and its schools, a head office and a unit — each has its own profile ID, and the two can be linked on-chain. The child proposes, the parent confirms, and either can detach later. Both sides must agree, so nobody can attach themselves to a better-known name unilaterally.

The link says belonging, not endorsement. A parent does not vouch for a child's passports and does not share its minting allowance. Apps show the immediate parent, not a whole chain — "school → university → consortium" on one line reads as inherited standing, which this link never grants.

Individual creators (C) cannot use it. A person has no divisions.

See also

• Quick Start — registering a profile and minting
• How Verification Works — what a check actually proves
• SPEC.md §3 and §4 — the normative rules