Humanity Protocol Offers Decentralized Identity Verification Amid The AI Era

The company aims to disrupt the way humans can be verified.

(Terence Kwok, founder and CEO, Humanity Protocol)

After being eclipsed by AI and an onslaught of cybersecurity threats, decentralized technology platforms have reemerged in tech news cycles with the phenomenal rise of Bluesky—the decentralized social media platform built using the AT protocol, and a site that many former X/Twitter users have flocked to since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Most associate decentralized tech with blockchain. And blockchain, typically, is associated as being a platform for cryptocurrency. However, there are new, innovative ways to use the technology.

Humanity Protocol can be considered, in some regard, the Bluesky of identity verification. The nascent company, founded by CEO Terence Kwok merely three months ago, is looking to disrupt the way humans can be verified, something of interest to many since AI is so proficient at mimicking human personas.

According to Crunchbase data, Humanity Protocol is a startup focused on decentralized identity verification mainly using palm scans. It has raised $30 million in funding and has a current valuation of $1 billion.

The product is currently in beta, however, Kwok said, “We have a lot of users who signed up for a human ID in anticipation to go scan themselves to prove that they’re human. And that number is somewhere around 2.9 million in the last three months.”

Kwok further spoke with MES Computing about his company, its potential use cases and how it could revolutionize the way humans are digitally verified.

Talk a bit about your background and how you came up with the idea for Humanity Protocol.

My background has always been in tech and always been an entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was 19. It was in the travel and hospitality space, and that company I ran for eight years, nine years, and then, unfortunately, the company failed. We grew to over 1,000 employees ... was getting profitable. And then, unfortunately, it was in travel, in the hospitality space—COVID just completely [ruined] it.

So, during that time, I started to think about travel, I think identity is a very big thing. We were mainly servicing hotels. One of the things that we were trying to figure out was, how come every single time you go to the same hotel 20 times they still ask you for your passport, your credit card, all that sort of stuff, and it’s very cumbersome.

I started looking into blockchain, started working on Humanity Protocol, and the idea for us was to use blockchain to create decentralized identity. Coupled with the current situation, with all the crazy advancements in AI, we think this is the right time to do something in the space. People pretend to be other people all the time. There’s fraud, there’s all that sort of stuff. But it’s now becoming way, way, way easier. We were looking at different sorts of attributes of a human being.

How does your solution work?

One of the first things we’re trying to do is prove you’re a human being. The idea is for us to layer that with other sorts of credentials that make you, you. Maybe it’s where you went to school, maybe it’s where you work, maybe it’s your nationality, maybe it’s potentially even other attributes that exist in the traditional offline world.

How do we tie that to a decentralized identity on the blockchain and make sure [your identity] is true and correct? That’s the gist of what we’re trying to do.

What are the use cases for Humanity Protocol?

We have different use cases, like payments, access control. In fact, we are installing some of the devices in the coming weeks in hospitals in Hong Kong .... for doctors to access certain rooms. They needed, obviously, access control and it’s not very hygienic to whip out an access card. They were using facial recognition for a while. It turns out, facial recognition is not very good when everybody’s wearing a mask, so using your palm makes sense ... and fingerprint doesn’t work because fingerprint has contact, which is unhygienic.

Why would midmarket IT leaders need to know about this technology?

I think when we can look at it from a cybersecurity perspective, companies are definitely overspending and underperforming on that front. When we think about cybersecurity, there’s fraud, fraud prevention, etc. What we’re trying to do is create the infrastructure to allow for some of these problems to be solved.

Proof of employment is important to people, people are pretending to be other people all the time nowadays. This is also something that we’re going to be actively rolling out to companies all around the world for people to simply say, ‘you know what, I’m going to issue credentials on Humanity Protocol saying that this person is an employee.’

And then, from our perspective, what we’re trying to build with Humanity Protocol is that ultimately, it’s a generic sort of credential blockchain, where the unit of accounting is a human being, or it’s a single person. And different sorts of companies, whatever line of business they’re in, can, according to their line of business, choose credentials to issue.