Humanode raises $2M to further biometric verification on decentralized exchanges

‘Crypto-biometric’ network provider Humanode has raised $2 million in a seed round led by Republic Cash with participation from Tribe Money, Blizzard, Wintermute, GravityX Capital, and others, News4Social reports.

The company says it will utilize the fresh funds to keep developing its blockchain consensus system based on crypto-biometric identification where a human equals a single person node.

“At the minute, crypto governance is a plutocratic nightmare fraught with whales and Sybil attacks,” Alex Ye, controlling companion of Republic Crypto, tells News4Social, referring to security threats caused by individuals trying to take over a network by creating multiple accounts, nodes, or computers.

“Humanode is laying the foundational infrastructure for robust, entirely pseudonymous digital identities that will provide a cornerstone of our significantly immersive electronic earth,” Ye adds.

From a technical standpoint, Humanode’s layer 1 protocol offers Sybil resistance via private biometric algorithms developed together with face biometrics provider Facetec. 

The company intends to start its mainnet in mid-2022, after extensive testing conducted in September and December 2021.

According to News4Social, there have already been 11,000 apps developed for the new infrastructure, with a corresponding number of biometrically confirmed validator nodes.

Using biometrics to build market participants in DEXs

Humanode has also published a blog article describing the benefits of its technology for trading on decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

In it, the technology firm explains how trading volumes on DEXs have recently increased substantially, driven by the rise of constant function market makers (CFMMs), which enable computationally inexpensive on-chain trading.

“The concept of liquidity mining (LM) is that the network has a specific need, which is liquidity provisioning, and users are rewarded with tokens,” the post reads.

To facilitate the distribution of these tokens in a fair way, Humanode believes it important to operate the infrastructure using objective criteria not limited to only direct sales, while also ensuring that everyone has equal access to that distribution.

“Imagine using Humanode private biometric checks to attest for participants in Balancer Smart Pool or any other liquidity bootstrapping protocol,” the blog post reads.

“This will be a new form of whitelisting where someone’s private key and biometric essentially becomes the basis of identity.”

Humanode suggests the use of zero-knowledge liveness verification and biometric identity checks can enable democratized markets without revealing personally identifiable information.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  blockchain  |  crypto-biometrics  |  face biometrics  |  FaceTec  |  facial authentication  |  funding  |  Humanode  |  identity verification