Who Vouches for You When Your Issuer Is Gone?

A compliance vendor gets sanctioned. Four hundred verified employees can no longer prove a status they legitimately earned, and nobody new can onboard. The application works and the privacy layer works. Nobody can get through the front door.

We built a proof-of-concept that moves the trust anchor onto an on-chain Merkle root. After one enrollment, holders keep proving attributes through zero-knowledge membership proofs while the issuer is adversarial or gone.

The talk prices that. Enrollment still needs a live threshold MPC quorum, so resilience only covers people who already enrolled. Public predicate parameters cap the anonymity set near 498 buckets, and repeated observation narrows it further.

I read those costs as requirements for plural identity, then check them against World ID, ZKPassport, Self, Semaphore, and Human. Plural identity means no single source holds a monopoly on who participates. Nothing deployed clears that bar, this work included.

Speakers: Aaryamann Challani

Track: Rights, Freedoms, and Governance