The Hidden Cost of Not Owning Your Digital Identity

Platforms like Google and Meta aggregate and monetize your behavioral data, creating a $500B+ ad-tech industry. You pay with privacy and control.

• Zero Portability: Reputation and history are locked in siloed platforms.
• Continuous Surveillance: Every click is tracked to refine advertising profiles.
• Value Extraction: Your attention and data generate revenue you never see.

Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) put identity ownership on-chain, enabling user-controlled data pods.

• Selective Disclosure: Prove you're over 21 without revealing your birthdate.
• Composable Reputation: Build a portable credit score across Aave, Compound, and real-world lenders.
• Direct Monetization: License anonymized data sets directly to researchers, cutting out intermediaries.

A public good infrastructure for making trust statements on-chain, becoming the primitive for portable reputation.

• Schema Flexibility: Attest to anything from Gitcoin Passport scores to employment history.
• Permissionless & Cheap: ~$0.01 per attestation, no platform approval required.
• Network Effects: Attestations from Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base compose across the Superchain.

The first trillion-dollar use case for on-chain identity. Protocols like Goldfinch and Centrifuge show demand; SSI enables scale.

• Risk-Based Pricing: Use verified income and repayment history from EAS attestations.
• Global Credit Markets: Unlock capital for the 1.7B underbanked with provable reputations.
• Capital Efficiency: Reduce over-collateralization requirements from 150%+ to <50%.

Centralized identity providers are single points of failure. The 2023 Okta breach affected 1Password and Cloudflare, exposing the stack's brittleness.

• Cascade Risk: One breach compromises thousands of integrated services.
• Censorship Vulnerability: Platforms can de-platform users and developers arbitrarily.
• Innovation Tax: Building compliance for each jurisdiction and platform adds ~30% to dev costs.

Owning your digital identity isn't just privacy—it's an economic imperative. It rewires capital allocation, reduces systemic risk, and creates a user-aligned web.

• New Business Models: Shift from attention extraction to user-consented value exchange.
• Regulatory Clarity: GDPR and eIDAS 2.0 are forcing functions for verifiable credentials.
• Protocol Moats: The identity graph becomes the most valuable non-financial ledger.

The Problem: Reputation and credentials are siloed and non-portable. The Solution: A public good for making trust statements (attestations) on-chain. It's the primitive for verifiable credentials and on-chain reputation.

• Schema-based: Define any data structure for attestations.
• Immutable & Portable: Credentials live on-chain, not in a corporate database.
• Composable: Builds the graph of trust for DeFi, hiring, and DAOs.

The Problem: Sybil attacks ruin fair distribution (airdrops, governance). The Solution: Biometric proof of unique humanness via the Orb, granting a World ID. It's the privacy-preserving primitive for global democratic systems.

• Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Prove uniqueness without revealing identity.
• Global Scale: Aiming for ~1B+ verified humans.
• Anti-Sybil Foundation: Enables fair airdrops and 1-person-1-vote governance.

The Problem: Centralized DNS and opaque wallet addresses. The Solution: Human-readable names (alice.eth) that map to machine-readable addresses. It's the identity layer for all on-chain activity.

• Self-Custodied: You own the NFT, you control the name.
• Universal Resolver: Works across EVM chains, Bitcoin, Solana.
• Profile Metadata: Attach avatars, socials, and other records.

The Problem: Your real-world credentials (degree, employment) are locked in PDFs. The Solution: A data backpack for your verifiable credentials (VCs) using decentralized identifiers (DIDs). It's the bridge between Web2 trust and Web3 portability.

• SSI Model: Implements the W3C Decentralized Identifier standard.
• Selective Disclosure: Prove you're over 21 without revealing your birthdate.
• Developer SDK: Lets apps request and verify credentials easily.

The Problem: Your social network and content are owned by Twitter or Facebook. The Solution: User-owned social graphs. Your followers, posts, and interactions are NFTs you control. It's the decentralized social primitive.

• Portable Audience: Take your followers to any front-end app.
• Monetization: Directly capture value via collectible posts.
• Composable Data: Build new apps on top of an open social layer.

The Problem: Ceding control of your digital self has tangible costs. The Solution: Owning your identity is a financial and political imperative. The protocols above are rebuilding the stack to prevent:

• $10B+ in Locked Value: From inaccessible accounts and lost keys.
• Sybil-Ridden Governance: Which destroys DAO legitimacy.
• Platform Risk: Where a ban erases your social and financial presence.