Guest opinion from Evin McMullen, Co-founder & CEO at Billions.Network ZK Won’t Save Us: Why Digital Identity Must Stay Plural Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) are sexy tech: prove you’re human, of-age, or unique without spilling your PII.
Think of ZK like a sealed envelope everyone can verify without opening.
But as Vitalik Buterin warned, encryption doesn’t fix “architecture-level” coercion—if the system expects a single, rigid identity, you’ve just encrypted the chains. Most ZK-ID designs bake in a one-person–one-ID rule. That’s handy for voting or bot-fighting, but people live in a dozen social contexts—work, friends, fandoms—each asking for different levels of proof.
Forcing one global ID collapses pseudonymity and hands coercers a short-cut: if your ID is reused and linkable across apps, employers, states, or apps can pressure you to expose your whole digital self. Add machine-learning correlation attacks, and privacy gets roasted.
The Limits of ZK Alone ZK is a privacy tool, not an architectural panacea. The danger isn’t that ZK math is broken; it’s that identity architectures that assume uniform, static identifiers turn privacy tech into polished surveillance infrastructure. A privacy-preserving proof that’s tied to a universal identifier still allows cross-platform linking, reuse, and coercion.
Identity Isn’t the Problem; Uniformity Is Instead of one global ID, we need pluralism: context-aware credentials that prove just what’s needed where it’s needed. Per-app DIDs, unlinkable credentials, selective disclosure, and decentralized reputation graphs let you be provably trustworthy in a specific context without becoming traceable everywhere.
You stay verifiable, not visible.
Profile DIDs and the Case for Context-Based Identity Per-application decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are already a real option. They’re a structural fix, not just a cryptographic one; they prevent colluding platforms from stitching together your personas. This approach is in production across thousands of projects—over 9,000 projects reportedly use similar systems, with names like TikTok and Deutsche Bank in the mix—and it’s even being used to give AI agents verifiable identity and reputation, a practical necessity as autonomous systems proliferate. Don’t Fight Surveillance With Better Locks Good identity design isn’t surveillance in disguise.
You can stop bots or limit fraud without turning every interaction into a permanent log. Want to prove you’re not a bot? Prove uniqueness. Want to show you’re 18+?
Prove it without handing over a birthdate, postcode, and biometric template. Biometrics can’t be rotated, static IDs can’t be fully revoked, and centralized registries create single points of catastrophic failure. Vitalik Is Right, But the Future Is Already Here Vitalik’s warning is real: even the best cryptography can entrench harm if it underpins a one-size-fits-all identity architecture. But there’s a better path—pluralistic, decentralized identity systems that match how people actually live online.
Don’t waste ZK on defending broken ideas.
Use it to enable unlinkable, contextual proofs that protect privacy and resist coercion.
Bottom line: ZK proofs are powerful, but they’re not a silver bullet. The future of digital identity shouldn’t be universal—just human, contextual, and plural.
