Overview

Humanity Protocol is building a highly scalable and decentralized solution that enables any online actor to be cryptographically proven as a real human through its Proof-of-Humanity protocol. This is done via a non-invasive palm scan in a privacy-preserving manner.

The result is a global system of unique humans upon which nearly any form of credential can be issued or verified. This is built using a decentralized identity graph whereby people own and manage their identity, enabling verifiable and trustworthy interactions amongst participants both online and offline.

This could include verifying one's age, work credentials, educational credentials, financial identity, and nearly anything else.

Why Humanity Protocol?

Blockchain's anonymous nature has contributed to the concerning issue of Sybils, which refers to a single entity controlling multiple identities. This problem is further compounded by the rise of AI, which is making it even more difficult to determine who is behind each identity. This undermines the integrity of decentralized networks and leads to concerns about Sybil attacks, fair airdrops, governance voting, and more.

Even Web2 has many issues. For example, verification is slow, lacks standardization or portability, and is reliant on centralized platforms that retain control over personal data.

Humanity Protocol's goal is to build the first economic framework that incentivizes a fair and accessible system of verified credentials.

With Humanity Protocol, any form of verifiable credential can be issued with complete privacy over user details thanks to Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

Proof-of-Humanity

Proof of Humanity (PoH) verifies that a person is truly human, and with this knowledge they can then be assigned any form of Verifiable Credential (VC).

For example, upon successful enrolment of one's palm, a VC would be received that proves one's status as a unique human. No matter the type of VC, users maintain full control over their digital identity and credentials, with the assurance that all underlying data remains private and secure thanks to the implementation of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs).

By leveraging PoH, Humanity Protocol builds the Human Layer necessary for a more secure and human-centric digital ecosystem.

Human Recognition

We envision a world where biometric data is used for verification in a non-intrusive and privacy-preserving way.

In the future, when users scan their palm, the image will be immediately transformed into a one-way cryptographic representation. This mathematical output will strip away identifiable attributes of the palm, making it extremely difficult for any third party to recognize or reverse-engineer the original palm print. This enhanced privacy measure will be a key feature of future versions of the protocol.

Rather than storing the image, the system compares this modified output against a machine learning model (a CNN) that checks whether the palm has already been enrolled. If a match is found, the system confirms the user is a human in the Humanity Network. In addition, any additional verified credential associated with a particular human can be verified in a privacy preserving manner. An example would be that "This person is a human that has the permission to enter this event".

If the model doesn't recognize the palm, it means this person is a new unique human that can be added to the network. To add the new human to the network, the mathematical representation of the associated palm will be added as dataset to the machine learning model so that next time the human scans their palm, their palm is recognized.

The mathematical representation of the palm ensures that the palm scans remain private and secure, without exposing sensitive biometric information. Over time, the system continues to improve its accuracy over recognition of palms in various ages, races, sizes, and conditions while still adhering to the highest privacy standards.