Phygital Entity Providers (PEPs)

This section describes Phygital Entity Providers (PEPs), who ensure the security and functionality of the phygital environment.

Overview

Phygital Entity Providers (PEPs) are entities that source NFC chips from factories. These NFC chips can then be sold to brands and creators or embedding in various products.

Adding a PEP

PEPs are integral to the system and are added through governance processes. They are responsible for ensuring the security of their NFC chips. It is crucial to add only trusted PEPs to maintain system integrity.

Responsibilities and Actions of PEPs

PEPs aim to use the phygotal abstraction sevices for all embedded NFC chips, creating a decentralized solution for future phygital object resolution. PEPs must enroll their NFC chips in the system by invoking MintNFCChip on the PEPRegistry contract.

During this enrollment, PEPs must provide:

Field	Description
NFC Chip ID	The Ethereum public key represented by the chip, which could be derived from the chip or represent an account contract tied to the chip.
Authentication Method	Cryptographic primimtives available in NFC chip configuration.
NFC Chip Model	Indicates the model of the NFC chip being enrolled.

Validation Information

PEPs are also tasked with providing four key pieces:

Field	Description
Manufacturer Certificate	A signature.
Manufacturer Certificate Signer	The public key of the certificate's signer.
Merkle Tree/Root	PEPs must create a Merkle tree of all NFC chip IDs in the enrollment. The Merkle tree's root is stored on-chain to verify that an NFC chip was produced by a trusted PEP. Each leaf represents a chip and consists of the chip ID's hash and its index.
Validation Data URI	An IPFS URI stored on-chain containing the Manufacturer Certificate and Merkle proofs for each NFC chip in the enrollment.

Bootloader Application

PEPs are encouraged to include a bootloader application address in their enrollment. This ensures that NFC chips not enrolled in a specific project but enrolled by the PEP can still resolve. The bootloader application can contain any data the PEP deems necessary.