Does digital ID have risks even if it’s ZK-wrapped?
The next is a visitor submit and opinion from Evin McMullen, Co-founder & CEO at Billions.Community.
ZK Received’t Save Us: Why Digital Id Should Keep Plural
Zero-knowledge (ZK)-wrapped id was lauded as a silver bullet to resolve every little thing about presenting your self on-line—offering verifiable, privacy-preserving proof of personhood with out the necessity to belief governments, platforms, or biometric databases.
However as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin argued in June, encryption alone can’t repair “architecture-level” coercion. When id turns into inflexible, centralized, and one-size-fits-all, pseudonymity dies and coercion turns into inevitable.
The dangers Vitalik raised in his latest submit aren’t simply theoretical. They’re the inevitable consequence of techniques that attempt to impose a single, mounted id on a pluralistic web. One account per individual sounds honest—till it turns into obligatory. Add ZK proofs to the combination, and all you’ve accomplished is encrypt the shackles.
Digital id is turning into an essential difficulty for governments, as proven by the G7 commissioning a report final yr to tell coverage, and the EU’s summit in Berlin in June to evaluate its regulatory framework for digital identities and belief companies.
The Limits of ZK Alone
Zero-knowledge proofs permit customers to show statements—age, residency, uniqueness—with out revealing underlying private information through the use of cryptographic strategies. It’s like exhibiting a sealed envelope that everybody can verify holds the suitable reply, with out anybody ever opening it. In idea, this could assist privateness. However as Vitalik rightly argues, the issue isn’t what the proofs cover, however what the system assumes.
Most ZK-ID schemes depend on a core design precept: one id per individual. That may make sense for voting or stopping bots. However in actual life, folks function throughout many social contexts—work, household, on-line, and many others.—that don’t map neatly onto a single ID. Imposing a one-person, one-ID mannequin, even with ZK wrappers, creates a brittle system that’s simple to weaponize.
In such a system, coercion turns into a trivial matter. Employers, governments, or apps can demand {that a} person reveal all their linked identities. Pseudonymity turns into inconceivable, particularly when IDs are reused throughout purposes or anchored to immutable credentials. Even the illusion of unlinkability breaks down below strain from machine studying, correlation assaults, or good old school energy.
What started as a privateness instrument turns into surveillance infrastructure, however with a nicer interface.
Id Isn’t the Downside; Uniformity Is
ZK-wrapped techniques don’t fail as a result of ZK is flawed; they fail as a result of the encircling structure clings to an outdated idea of id that’s singular, static, and centralized. That’s not how people function, and it’s not how the web works.
The choice is pluralism. As a substitute of 1 international ID that follows you in every single place, think about a mannequin the place you seem otherwise to every app, platform, or group—provably human and reliable, however contextually distinctive. Your credentials are native, not common. You’re verifiable with out being traceable. And nobody, not even you, could be coerced into revealing every little thing about your self.
This isn’t a fantasy. It’s already working.
Profile DIDs and the Case for Context-Based mostly Id
One method already in manufacturing makes use of per-app Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) in order that even colluding platforms can’t hyperlink a person’s personas.
It’s a structural repair, not only a cryptographic one. As a substitute of constructing international registries that bind folks to a single id, we are able to anchor belief in pluralistic fashions that includes decentralized status graphs, selective disclosure, unlinkable credentials, and ZK proofs that implement contextual verification moderately than static identifiers.
This technique is already utilized by over 9,000 tasks, together with TikTok and Deutsche Financial institution. And it’s not only for people. The identical framework powers Billions Community’s DeepTrust initiative, extending verifiable id and status to AI brokers—a necessity in an web more and more formed by autonomous techniques.
Don’t Struggle Surveillance With Higher Locks
Some see id as a needed evil—a strategy to forestall misinformation or spam. However good id design doesn’t require surveillance. It simply requires context.
We don’t want one ID to rule all of them. We’d like techniques that allow folks show what’s wanted, when wanted, with out turning each interplay right into a everlasting report. Need to show you’re not a bot? Superb. Show uniqueness. Need to show you’re over 18? Nice. Do it with out handing over your birthdate, postcode, and biometric template.
Crucially, we should resist the urge to equate compliance with centralization. Methods that use coercive biometrics, inflexible registries, or international databases to implement id could look environment friendly. However they introduce doubtlessly catastrophic dangers: irreversible breaches, discrimination, exclusion, and even geopolitical misuse. Biometric information can’t be rotated. Static IDs can’t be revoked. Centralized fashions can’t be made secure; they’ll solely be made out of date.
Vitalik Is Proper, However the Future Is Already Right here
Vitalik’s essay warns of a future the place id techniques, even when constructed on the perfect cryptography, unintentionally entrench the very harms they got down to forestall. We share that concern. However we additionally imagine there’s a manner ahead: one which doesn’t compromise on privateness, implement uniformity, or flip folks into nodes on a worldwide registry.
That path is pluralistic and decentralized, and it’s already dwell.
Let’s not waste our greatest cryptographic instruments on defending damaged concepts. As a substitute, let’s construct the techniques that match how folks truly dwell and the way we would like the web to work.
The way forward for digital id doesn’t must be common. It merely must be human.
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