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Introducing Privado ID: Moving Beyond Polygon to Deliver Independent, Privacy-Preserving Identity Solutions
We’re thrilled to announce that Privado ID is spinning out of Polygon Labs and returning to its roots as an independent and neutral company. This change marks a monumental step as we aim to meet the growing global need for digital identity and reputation solutions.
Capable of working with both onchain and online data, Privado ID is designed as a decentralized and trustless identity platform that supports a wide-open ecosystem, including apps, users, and credential providers. It's about protecting user privacy and data sovereignty. Privado ID acts as a decentralized intermediary, linking apps with trusted issuers to ensure smooth and efficient interactions and that trusted providers can sustain themselves economically.
Privado ID's decision to remain neutral and separate from the Polygon ecosystem is essential for capturing a broader market and enabling interoperability. While Privado was acquired by Polygon and renamed Polygon ID, the company’s roots are neutral and ecosystem-agnostic. This neutrality equips the company with a trustworthy, standardized way to handle sensitive data.
The need for unified, verifiable identity data across chains is critical — particularly within the Ethereum ecosystem. While various solutions are employed to tackle identity problems, the lack of reconciliation across protocols poses a significant hurdle. Addressing both unified financial and data liquidity offers a new approach to interoperability amid the fragmented blockchain space. By becoming independent from Polygon, Privado ID can align itself with existing protocols and become a valuable tool in the blockchain ecosystem, catering to the growing demand for comprehensive identity solutions.
In 2024, there's a significant demand for robust, privacy-focused digital identity solutions, with research showing that the market for digital identity solutions will rise from $30.81 billion in 2023 to $101.37 billion by 2030. The market demands identity verification solutions that address needs ranging from privacy-focused age verification to protection against Sybil and bot attacks by proving users are human. These solutions include reusable privacy-preserved KYC that lets people conveniently use their national ID. The proliferation of AI-generated content on the internet only complicates the problem by enhancing the difficulty of separating real content from fake.
Seven of the world’s ten most populous countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Indonesia, will hold national elections this year, making verifiable information more poignant and critical than usual. Considering how many deepfakes are already targeting candidates in the lead-up to these votes, the proliferation of cyber threats is a big issue.
Digital identity tools can solve this problem by bringing genuine authenticity to digital content. These tools can mitigate the risks posed by AI-generated misinformation and restore an element of trust. Privado is collaborating with prominent brands with expertise beyond the traditional scope of blockchain applications, including Proof-of-Concepts (PoC) with multinational financial service companies.
How Privado Meets This Demand
Privado leverages cryptography alongside Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to allow all individuals and organizations to validate their credentials without end-users being forced to reveal sensitive personal information. Additionally, Privado supports W3C identity standards that are interoperable with traditional data systems and can be integrated with any EVM-compatible private or public blockchain. Privado ID’s tech stack will be capable of supporting non-EVM chains in the future.
In traditional identity systems, third parties usually hold the reins on personal data. Privado ID disrupts this model by using decentralization and private interactions. This shift not only cuts costs and complexity and reduces the risk of dealing with intermediaries. Privado ID is all about putting users in control of their data, which can open up more benefits from the services they use. It simplifies things like proving identity, meeting regulatory needs, handing out rewards, managing ecosystem growth, and dealing with tokenized assets. Plus, this blockchain-based solution works just as well for companies in any industry, whether rooted in blockchain tech or more traditional fields.
Privado ID is actively building strategic partnerships with notable decentralized and institutional organizations. These include notable PoCs with several multinational banking and financial service companies to establish the technical groundwork for interoperable and compliant identity frameworks. These frameworks are designed to be reusable among institutions, apps, and smart contract interactions.
How This Technology Changes Business
SSI solutions hold great potential in traditional banking processes, like ensuring compliance with OFAC compliance and streamlining KYC procedures. This could mean big savings by cutting down customer acquisition costs, speeding up how quickly new products and users start generating revenue, keeping clients around longer, and boosting the overall customer experience. These improvements equip financial institutions to prepare for the AI era, where verifying data quickly and efficiently is critical.
Another use case that has emerged in the proofs of concept is using Privado ID's verifiable credentials (VCs) as a way to control who gets to do what in financial transactions. For instance, VCs could ensure only eligible parties engage in certain decentralized finance (DeFi) activities, like joining liquidity pools, which opens up new ways for institutions to get involved in DeFi while staying compliant. These VCs can also act as digital proofs of who someone is or if they're qualified or legally allowed to access certain services, managing who gets what based on their identity in a fine-tuned way.
Privado ID has also integrated with the Verax attestation registry, on the Linea zkEVM Chain developed by Consensys. Paving the way for unified, crosschain identity, Privado ID enables Verax to resolve a wide range of use cases, such as sybil resistance, making it more difficult or expensive to create and maintain fake identities. This collaboration establishes a framework for interoperable identity that lowers the cost of discovery and coordination with composable trust. Apps can bootstrap user reputation at onboarding with tools from Privado ID and Linea that engage verifiable data from diverse sources.
The increasing importance of Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, coupled with incoming regulations surrounding these assets, is cementing RWAs as a prime use case for decentralized identity solutions, too. A great example is DigiShares, a white-label tokenization platform that digitizes and automates investment processes. By leveraging Privado ID, DigiShares ensures secure and decentralized identity verification and streamlines investor onboarding through KYC and e-signing. As asset tokenization becomes more consumer-focused, integrating decentralized identity solutions like Privado ID can offer a significant competitive edge by enhancing security, compliance, and user experience.
Meet The Team Building The Future
The Privado ID executive team includes co-founders: David Schwartz as CEO, and Antoni Martin as COO. Additionally there will be two non-executive cofounders: Jordi Baylina, Polygon co-founder and a key figure in the development of Polygon zkEVM, as technical advisor, and Polygon Labs co-founder Sandeep Nailwal as growth advisor.
Privado ID aims to shape the future of digital identity and improve how organizations and individuals interact online through highly interoperable cross-platform tooling. By lowering the cost of trust and simplifying the integration of identity solutions, it becomes possible to securely exchange and permissionlessly validate information across different systems and networks. This capability brings a fundamental shift to how content, identity, and credentials are exchanged for users and enterprises. Stay tuned for an upcoming product release aimed at revolutionizing the digital identity industry — beyond Web3.
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