Humanity Protocol pivots from Proof-of-Personhood but sticks with palm biometrics

Humanity Protocol, one of the companies that has followed in the footsteps of  Sam Altman’s World in creating a Proof-of-Personhood (PoP) network, is abandoning the concept in favor of biometric-based verifiable credentials.

The Hong Kong-based startup is calling it the “Proof-of-Trust” network. The decentralized framework will allow organizations to verify and prove information about users, such as identity, age, residency, employment eligibility, or access, without collecting sensitive personal data.

Humanity initially focused on confirming users as unique, real individuals through palm biometrics and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). Just like World, the company began by offering some cryptocurrency in exchange for signing up, but unlike the U.S.-based company, it relied on palm biometrics instead of iris to create the Proof-of-Personhood (PoP).

The company says it has issued more than eight million Human IDs to date.

The firm says that abandoning the PoP concept will allow it to answer not just whether the user is real, but also allow the user to confirm a wide range of information about themselves in a privacy-preserving way. Once a user verifies their personal details, the verification method can be used across different services.

Humanity says it will keep personal data under user control by sharing only cryptographically proven claims, according to its new Trust Manifesto.

The firm has also announced investments into companies that adopt their model through a new venture called Humanity Investments.

Last year, the firm acquired Moongate, an on-chain ticketing and credentialing platform, and teamed up with Mastercard to enable users to quickly verify personal data, such as income, assets and financial credentials.

To further its reach, Humanity has released developer APIs built for traditional, i.e non-blockchain applications. The company lists use cases such as social platforms verifying users, Know Your Customer (KYC) for financial services, real-world asset ownership verification and more.

“Every major digital sector, including social platforms, financial services, marketplaces, gaming, education, healthcare and governance, relies on identity, access, reputation, and compliance, yet most still operate on fragile, easily manipulated signals,” Humanity’s founder Terence Kwok says in a statement. “As synthetic identities and automated behavior scale, the demand for privacy-preserving, portable trust primitives will expand across billions of users and trillions of dollars in economic activity.”

Kwok talks palm biometrics and Tinder experiment

Humanity’s turning away from the PoP concept comes as World and its operator, Tools for Humanity, face controversy and skepticism from regulators worldwide. Although it will no longer focus on proving its users are human, the project is doubling down on palm biometrics as the base of its infrastructure.

The reason Humanity chose palm biometrics is not just that it feels less invasive than scanning eyeballs, but also because it is a proven technology, according to the company’s founder.

In Japan, palm biometrics have been used in ATMs for more than a decade. Palm-based payment technology has been used by Amazon in the U.S and Tencent in China.

“From our perspective, it actually opens up a bunch of different use cases,” says Kwok, adding that the company plans to use palm biometrics for accessing events and ticketing in collaboration with Moongate.

“We think it is a little bit more secure than a wristband or a lanyard where you could just hand it to other people,” Kwok explained in an interview with Coinbase. “We actually think that palm is  just less invasive and easier for people to be comfortable with, and just much more scalable.”

Kwok also discussed Humanity’s recent Tinder experiment, in which the startup created four synthetic dating profiles that attracted 296 real matches over two months.

The AI personas had Midjourney faces and backstories generated by ChatGPT. Swipes and replies to matches were automated using open-source TinderGPT. Each profile conducted more than 100 concurrent chats without human oversight.

The bot set up in-person dates with forty participants at the same time and place. At that point, members of the technology firm informed them that the date is not real.

“We invited 20 guys and 20 girls, men and women, for essentially a date, or what they thought would be a real date, all at the same place,” says Kwok. “But they realized that they were essentially chatting with just an AI agent. And, yeah, people were pretty shocked.”

The experiment was meant to demonstrate the dangers of deepfake dating fraud and the value of privacy-preserving identity verification. The results were published in a Twitter video at the beginning of February.

“The event was great because everybody stayed,” says Kwok. “A lot of people built real human connections, a lot of them made friends. My understanding is that some of them actually ended up seeing each other afterwards from this event.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  data privacy  |  decentralized ID  |  digital identity  |  digital trust  |  Humanity Protocol  |  palm biometrics  |  verifiable credentials