Applications

Welshare avoids collecting any data on its own. Instead, applications are supposed to utilize the protocol's data storage capabilities by registering application accounts and delegate capacity to their users.

During the Alpha phase the welshare protocol is free to use for applications - ultimately the protocol will likely ask to contribute to the involved (Nillion's) storage and key management costs, which potentially also can be covered usage fees paid by other parties (e.g. research agents).

Here's our application registration guide

Keypairs

Similar to how users derive their storage keys, applications derive purpose bound interaction keys that identify them on the Nillion network. The respective DIDs start with did:nil: followed by the public key part.

Delegations

Welshare itself has no intrinsic interest to access user profile data directly. We instead ask applications to use the protocol and store their users' information on their respective Welshare profile. Conceptually, users always stay in control over their own information but to be able to store data, they somehow must interact with the storage layer.

This works by delegating a NUC policy token from a builder account (welshare) to the end user. To figure out, whether a delegation request is legit, it must be signed off by the application that "guarantees" the legitimacy of the user's request. Details on how this works under the hood can be found in the fundamentals section,

Schemas

Application based custom schemas are a topic that we're actively discussing (as it's touching Nillion's core offering). At the moment we're not offering a public endpoint that would allow applications to register custom schemas or collections using the welshare builder account.

Questionnaires

The current main demo use case is built around Questionnaires and user responses. Applications are free to create new Questionnaire definitions (see Crafting a New Questionnaire) and build frontends that submit their user's responses using the self signed / delegated data submission flow. Our React SDK helps with integrating Welshare Wallet features directly into apps. Here's a fully vibe coded demo that shows how apps can generate a fully working, highly customized, standards based questionnaire submission website without knowing much about the internals: https://github.com/welshare/demo-saq