Humanity: The palm as proof of being human on the net

Humanity: The palm as proof of being human on the net

The Humanity Protocol is working on creating a “proof of humanity” through a scan of the palm. This, as a token in a wallet, should make it possible to prove that you are a person and not a machine. With a new investment, the Humanity Protocol is now cracking the $ 1 billion.

The Humanity Protocol recently received a $ 20 million investment from Pantera Capital and Jump Crypto and was rated on this train with more than one billion dollar.

Humanity is a protocol for a decentralized identity. It develops a “proof of humanity” that proves that you are a person and should be integrable in the web3. For this purpose, it uses a scan of the palm, according to Humanity “the most elegant key”. All data remain completely with the owner, who can selectively reveal it if necessary.

It runs like this in the process: First you register a “human id” with any username. Then you scan your palm from which a kind of hash is saved on the blockchain and connected to the ID. Then you can use a “Zero Knowledge Proofs” to prove that you are the only person with the palm of the hand with the hand surface that suits the ID.

You don’t have to explain for long why such a protocol is useful. A “proof of humanity” can clean social networks of bot farms, which becomes more important in times of a linguistically increasingly competent artificial intelligence from month to month. It is not an exaggeration if you say that the future of democracy and our minds could hang on it. Humanity also proposes to handle hotel checkins, access to events or even payments via a palm of palms.

Even if it is about using decentralized autonomous organizations, daos, for something like elections or votes, a proof of humanity can be extremely useful. So far, the number of tokens is the only reliable way to tare the influence of members. Attempts to introduce a kind of “democratic” vote in which a user has a voice fails because you can also distribute your tokens on many addresses. With a Proof of Humanity, after all, you can prove that you are a unique person (which of course does not exclude cooperation and dependencies).

Humanity became public from May 2024 and regularly reports on his blog about updates. So far, the protocol has only been on a test, but has already processed two million identities there. In the future it should run on its own blockchain, which, after all, docks many more blockchains by layerzero and thus can bring the Proof of Humanity to Web3. The “Humanity Scanners”, which scan the palms and calculate the ingredients for the Zero Knowledge Proof, have been delivered to selected partners for several months, such as some American universities.

This makes Humanity the first noteworthy competitor of Worldcoin, which also offers a Proof of Humanity, but based on an iris scan. Worldcoin was founded by Openai founder Sam Altman, but is slowly slowed down by data protection concerns in the EU. As understandable as it is, so little desirable, it is that this prevents the urgently needed proof of humanity, which can become the basic building block of a decentralized identity that is equally urgently needed.

The alternatives are to either give up in front of the flood of the bots and thus to distinguish every claim to distinguish people from the machine – or to leave the digital ID to conventional, centralized institutions, such as in electronic patient files. What should go wrong?