Is there a more "decentralized" way to verify an Ethereum account owns a particular Twitter handle?

Question

Is this something fulfilled by a project like uPort?

Basically, I need a way in my contracts to verify that a particular Ethereum address (0xasdf...) and a particular Twitter handle (@user) are owned by the same person.

So far, the only solution I can come up with is me being a centralized party: the user logs into my Twitter OAuth app, I check who they are on Twitter, and write into the contract the association between the verified Twitter handle and their Ethereum address.

Was hoping there might be another way to do this using existing tools from the ecosystem where there is at least less of a dependence on me as a centralized attestator of Twitter identity.

Answer 1

You could let the user post a signed message to their Twitter account and let them write the permalink to the Tweet into your smart Contract. Everyone who wants to verifiy the identity, could then do it for themselves.