2026-11-04 –, Lotus Stage 1
Every identity system on Ethereum answers to a source that can disappear, or turn against the people it verified. I show what removing that dependency really costs, and what plural identity needs that nothing deployed today has.
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.
I'm an engineer and amateur cook, passionate about privacy, cryptography, and distributed systems. I write about the intersection of technology and society, with a focus on building systems that preserve human autonomy and privacy.
Currently, I work with EthSystems to onboard institutions to Ethereum in a way that's performant and confidential, and being pragmatic about the tradeoffs that come with private systems.