Identities are universal, and they become a trouble to many when not properly handled. In recent decades, software users have grown from a few to billions. One constant has always been the creation and management of online identities. 

In the era of exponentially growing internet usage, sophistication, and complexity, protecting these identities and all the proprietary information they contain has become an extremely time-consuming task. 

Luckily, a new censorship-resistant internet identity system is now available that lets you use a string of emojis for your universal username. As the world's online population is aware, emojis are a universal language, with 92% of them frequently using them. Keep on reading to find out more about this system that enables radical forms of self-expression using universally recognized and loved images.

Yat: An Overview

Your username is your internet identity. However, you cannot transport your data or users from one platform to another, and platform operators can cancel you at any time with no recourse. In addition, most platform operators primarily make money by advertising so they have a vested interest in tracking your behavior. 

Therefore, the solution is to have a username that you own, can be associated with a wide range of data types, and cannot be cancelled. Here comes a new censorship-resistant internet identity system called Yat.

Yats are emoji usernames that become your universal internet identity, website URL, and payment address. Since humans are visual creatures and texts are harder to recall than pictures, yats can be as short as a single emoji, and as long as five emojis. Moreover, the Yat is a unique piece of art that is not connected to an advertising business or used to track you. Instead, Yats do true radical expression by turning universally recognized icons into your identity.

Yats are a unique combination of a censorship-resistant domain, a self-sovereign username, a story, and an incredibly rare collectible. Unifying all four elements enables a powerful, radical new form of internet identity.

A Censorship Resistant Domain 

Domains are essential for making the internet usable for humans. Without them, we would have to use onerous IP addresses to access our favorite websites and send emails. Yats are similarly foundational for internet identity. Rather than resolving to an IP address, Yats resolve to any data type the Yat owner chooses to associate with their Yat. A Yat, for example, can be used for:

• A website URL

• Payment addresses

• Storage locations for files, avatars, etc.

• Chat handles

The benefit here is tremendous because when a third-party platform or service looks up a Yat, it can pull in all of the associated data for that Yat automatically. In a future Yat-powered platform, your preferences, balances, avatars, and other data will be inherited by all the platforms you use.

The goal of Yat's is to become decentralized, so its registrations will occur on a centralized basis. This will prevent Yat laboratories from removing any registration. Moreover, since all popular operating systems and platforms support Unicode emojis, it would be impossible to censor Yats.

"Right from the start, the aim of the project is to give users their own personal emoji username, which would prevent them from being censored or cancelled by governments or big tech brands," says Naveen Jain, , co-founder of Yat. "With Yats, users get an added level of protection that's indispensable in this day and age."

A self-sovereign username

Historically, when we think of a username, we think of the platform it's associated with. For this reason, they are inseparable. The reason is the misalignment of interests between users and platforms. 

The point of these large, free internet platforms is to monetize by selling access to their users and their deepest secrets to advertisers. As a consequence, platforms have control over usernames and interest graphs. They also set persistent cookies to learn about their users' behavior outside of the platform. The terrible end results for users include:

• The possibility of being canceled with no recourse

• The end of privacy

• The emergence of new forms of profiling

• An endless cat and mouse game of chasing preferred usernames across an ever-growing number of platforms

By separating the identity of a user from the platform, Yat breaks this paradigm. Platform owners have no control over the Yats. The only information that users share with a platform is the information a user chooses to share.

Additional Useful Information
Username Dilemma	The current disadvantage of using a typical username is that most platform operators' primary business is advertising. As a result, their primary incentive is tracking your behavior to serve their primary customer. Also, the data is owned by the platforms and you cannot move users and data between platforms.
Yat as the Answer	One of the advantages of using Yats is they can be as short as a single emoji, and as long as five emojis. Emojis can be presented in an infinite number of ways to tell your story and share your identity with anyone you desire. Every Yat is a one-of-a-kind, unique as your fingerprint that allows radical forms of self expression using universally recognizable and loved images.

A Story

Stories are part of the human condition, connecting us to one another, teaching us social norms, and fostering social cooperation. It takes us countless hours to create stories and share them with each other online. However, the way in which people know us, our usernames, do not communicate much about us at all. 

Yat is changing this paradigm. With Yat, you can communicate multiple passions, feelings, and ideas in as few as 1-5 characters. Yat enables us to completely reimagine the way we express ourselves on the internet.

The Yat can become a meme or serve as the foundation for a community, for example, if you are a sneakerhead having a Yat that starts with an emoji of a sneaker may be a prerequisite for joining a sneakerhead community. Yats take on their own lives.

An Incredibly Rare Collectible

Yats are a unique form of collectible. Because they possess captivating visual properties, connections to identity, narratives, and expressive abilities, they are captivating objects of desire. A Yat may be your key to a community you care about or your way to take control of your internet identity. 

Moreover, owning an early Yat, a short Yat, a collection of Yats, or a Yat that becomes a meme may also convey status. Every Yat is unique and can never be duplicated. Additionally, there are only a limited number of Yats of varying lengths and consisting of the most popular emojis. Great Yats are hard to come by and as uncommon as our society's most prized possessions.

Early Yats were created in the early Generations.  Yats are currently in Generation 1 as Generation 0 ended on July 30th, 2021.  Every Yat is one-of-a-kind regardless of the Generation in which it was created.

Yats are also NFTs meaning anyone can still become the owner of an early generation Yat.   To mint a Yat as an NFT, a creator must first use the Yat Visualizer to create a stunning one-of-a-kind visualization of their Yat.  Available Yat NFTs can be found on OpenSea at https://opensea.io/collection/yat