Spruce sets the bar for sovereign identity storage options, secures $7.5M

Spruce, a service that allows users to control their data across the web, has raised $7.5 million. The company builds open source, open standard developer tools helping users collect and control their data across the web. It helps prevent NFT frauds and defines access rules for decentralized finance pools and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

The company has earned recognition for becoming the project lead for sign-in with Ethereum, a new form of authentication helping users control their digital identity with their Ethereum account and ENS profile rather than a traditional intermediary.

Your Keys, Your Data

Spruce’s tagline, “Your Keys, Your Data,” encapsulates the services it provides. Working seamlessly across multiple blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Tezos, Solana, Ceramic, and Celo, Spruce’s portfolio offers two signal products: Spruce ID and Kepler.

While SpruceID implies an ecosystem of open source tools enabling user-controlled identity anywhere, Kepler is the decentralized storage that leverages smart contracts to determine the location of user data and its access.

SpruceID is a collection of four service categories: DIDKit, Rebase, Keylink, and Credible.

DIDKit serves as a cross-platform decentralized identity framework, while the Rebase facilitates reusable identity verifications across social media, DNS, etc. The Keylink, as a feature, serves the purpose of linking existing system accounts to cryptographic tokens. Credible is a Whitelabel-ready credential wallet.

Kepler, on the other hand, is Spruce’s self-sovereign storage. With Kepler, a user can share their digital credentials, private files, and sensitive media to blockchain accounts. All they need to carry out this sharing process is a Web3 wallet. Kepler also helps serve exclusive content to chosen NFT holders. To refine access, it uses NFT attributes and other blockchain data. With Kepler’s permission-centric storage facilities, users can allow DAO-curated registry members to access sensitive content.

Self-sovereign identity

The benefit of Spruce’s sovereign storage facility is that individual users own their storage, and no one other than them can govern their personal data. An individual’s keys control the smart contracts that define their Kepler service contours. Users can manage and access their Kepler services through their Web3 wallet, without having to go for any additional downloads or installs. Additionally, the ‘programmable permissioning’ feature allows users to define their own rules. Users can set data access guidelines by determining the norms of who can do what. There is also the benefit of upgrading rules with ownership or identity verifiable modules.

All these reasons are what motivated the investors towards Spruce. According to Joe Lubin, cofounder of Ethereal Ventures, “combining identity and storage elegantly,” Spruce is “building user-centric, Web3-style tools for the decentralized future.” Along similar lines, Ken Deeter, an investment partner at Electric Capital, believes that “Spruce is redefining how applications collect and share our data with others.”

Although Ethereal Ventures and Electrical Capital led the round, Spruce won the support of a range of leading blockchain investors, including Bitkraft, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda Research, A. Capital Ventures, Protocol Labs, and the Gemini Frontier Fund.

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