I got inspired by a mod that was made to circumvent Mojang/Microsoft downtime, the way it works that when you and the server both have the mod, upon connecting it uploads a pubkey to the server that is valid for ~36 days, and the server downloads player info (skin, cape, name, etc) and associates it with that key
then when the mojang auth servers go offline you can still connect because you have your keypair
and that got me thinking "holy shit polyproto Minecraft"