Terence Kwok - Who Owns You? It's Time to Control Your Identity - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Uh the topic for today for this short keynote is who owns you. Um just a quick intro. Uh my name is Terrence. I'm the founder of humanity protocol. Uh we are a relatively new project.

We've been around for around just for just just under two years. Uh have built quite a fair bit of technology and traction. uh recently raised our last uh private round at uh a billion dollar valuation from Jump and Panta. Uh we're focused on building in an identity blockchain. And so it's it's really interesting when we talk about identity, especially in the crypto space because it's been something that people have been talking about since, you know, Ethereum came about.

You know, identity being one of the key sort of use cases for uh for blockchain. Uh unfortunately, nobody seems to have been able to uh to create something uh or at least create something that has scaled. Uh recently, I think the the a company or project that's been closest to that is probably WorldCoin. Um and fortunately or unfortunately, we get compared a little bit to Worldcoin also because uh a very big part of humanity protocol is what we call uh proof of humanity uh or proof of personhood, right? And when we think about sort of identity uh there are problems for consumers and there are problems for businesses.

When we look at businesses there's huge costs um you know and then you you you look at a lot of fraud consumers consumer side you know you really don't know what's happening with your data. What we realize is that you know when you're signing up for Facebook for Twitter for Google for some of the big technology companies you're giving over all of your data and you have absolutely no control. uh they monetize it and they can do whatever they want with it. And with the proliferation of AI, we actually think this problem is only going to get worse. Okay.

And what it what we're doing with humanity protocol uh is very simple. We want to create a verificationbased blockchain where people and companies and users can verify different things. So to start uh what we're verifying and the reason why we're called humanity protocol is because we're starting with the very most important attribute of all which is to prove whether you're a human being or not. I think a couple years back um if you were to speak to people and say hey you know what we want to verify whether you're a person or not uh you would sound pretty insane. But I think recently with uh with AI uh with chatbt with your deep fake videos uh with you know 11 labs and voice generation um you really cannot tell especially in the digital online world you can't really tell whether content's written by a person.

You can't really tell whether a video is is actually the person at all. Um voice you can be getting phone calls. You really don't know if it's it's it's it's actually somebody you know. Um, and so what we're what we're solving for is uh is number one to verify that you're a human being. And the way we're actually doing that, as I mentioned, is a little bit similar to Worldcoin in the sense that we also use biometrics.

The the sort of biometrics that we use though is a little is is a lot less invasive and dystopian. What we're doing is we're leveraging uh palm uh print and palm veins to register people, verify people uh verify that they are a unique human being. Um palm technology has been around for a long time. Uh Amazon has been using it for for payments at Whole Foods in the US. 10 cents using that for payments in China.

We actually uh built our I acquired a company that has been building this technology for seven years. Um and what we have is proprietary technology to ensure that every single person's palm patterns and palm signatures are unique. And unlike Worldcoin, what we're doing is we're actually encrypting that information, turning it into a biometric signature so that we actually never have access to the information, but we can still prove that you are a unique person. And the other cool thing is we actually have uh started rolling out our hardware devices in different sort of places around the world in Europe in Asia so that people can register and with that um we are also creating use cases where people can use this for loyalty programs for payments or potentially even accessing uh events and and ticketing uh ticketed concerts. And I think for us the the the whole idea of starting with uh proof of humanity uh it the the goal is to be much bigger than that.

And for us, it's not just about verifying you're a human being, but also verifying many different things. Right? If you think about this world where in the next couple years, it is run by AI agents, it's run by bots, where any piece of information that you're seeing online, it's so easy to fake. For me to create a LinkedIn account now, put in a fake name, put in fake education, fake companies that I've worked for, I'll immediately get recruiters pinging me. I could easily get a fake job, scam companies out of that.

And so what we're trying to do is essentially create an open ecosystem where anybody can verify things that includes potentially your nationality, your age, um your education, your your your where you work, etc., etc., right? And one of the other things that we're also doing with uh ZKTLS, I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the technology, is that we will allow people to verify many different things, right? starting with potentially your rider rating with Uber or maybe proving your loyalty status on Emirates um proving your contributions on GitHub etc etc and this actually opens up and and what we're turning uh these uh these pieces of information is into essentially reusable verifiable credentials onto humanity protocol and allow different applications and potentially applications on other chains to make use of this information.

Right? So think of think about you know imagine we we actually you know we're also building our applications on top of our own chain. Imagine Emirates being able to say, "Hey, you know what? If you prove to us that you are a loyalty member member on Cafe Pacific or on American Airlines or some of the other competitors and we'll airdrop you miles, right? Or, you know, looking at companies that say, you know what, you can actually now prove to us how good your GitHub contributions are, okay?

how much coding you actually do so that from an employment perspective I'm actually sure that you know you're somebody who actually works rather than somebody who's just talking. So what we're trying to do is essentially built this all into humanity protocol and we have one thing that we call is the human ID where people can connect multiple addresses to it and essentially any of the applications on these ecosystem will be able to make use of these credentials and I think when when we look at sort of verifiable credentials and did projects they've existed for uh they've exist they've existed for a while right starting with port sovereign I'm not sure if these are names that you guys are familiar with um but or pvado with polygon ID so a lot of these projects historically uh have existed some of them are still around a lot of them are dead uh and you know when we were actually pitching humanity protocol and trying to raise money from uh from venture capital investors one of the very first key questions was hey how how can we you know there there's so many people who have tried doing this uh why won't you be the same you know why why can you actually scale this up why does this make sense and I think the the way I look at this coming from my background prior to this running a uh running a technology company in the web two space where I scaled it up to over hund00 million in revenues a year um ultimately I think what we wanted to do is build a DID ecosystem where there is commercial viability what I I mean by that is right now most of the blockchain based decentralized identity systems or projects are focused on making everything as open as possible which historically is probably the ethos of crypto and and blockchain but we're actually taking a step back and making this a little bit closer to sort of a web two platform meanwhile ensuring that people can still control all of their data. It's priv privacy preserving, but ultimately the user gets to control what information is shared. And the way we're doing this is that we've set up something we call identity validators. What identity validators do is that they are essentially the ones issuing a credential for a person on humanity protocol.

And it could be maybe your university issuing a graduation certificate or a transcript. It might be a government issuing a national ID or as I mentioned earlier it might even just be you know our foundation issuing a proof of personhood credential because you've completed a biometric scan. And the way this works is that these credentials are owned by the user, controlled by the user. They get to choose what gets to be shared. But ultimately there is a commercial model in place where credential issuers actually get paid whenever these credentials are used.

Right? So the whole idea is that imagine a DeFi protocol where they want to prove and they want to check if you're a sanctioned individual instead of going for a full KYC if there is already you know a non-sanctioned status credential being issued on humanity protocol they can just pay a small fee to the network to our nodes as well as the identity validators in order to make use of these credentials. So what what we're trying to do is essentially create a an economic model where people are incentivized or entities trusted entities are incentivized to issue credentials. And when it comes to users, whether it's applications, whether it's companies, I'm hiring somebody new. I want to just make sure or check when you tell me that you went to Harvard University, you actually did.

Or you you told me you work for Google, you actually did. So, I'm happy to pay a little bit of fees in order to make these verifications. And from our perspective, with the proliferation of AI in the next couple years, it's going to be super super important because essentially the cost of faking anything is becoming super super low, right? I think I actually personally live uh most of my time in Hong Kong. Uh I remember actually not sure if you guys are aware essentially a year year and a half ago there was a British engineering firm where uh the finance director based in Hong Kong was told to wire $25 million US uh to another company for payments.

Um, the scammers, what they managed to do was spoof the emails and on top of that set up a fake Zoom meeting with deep fakes of the CFO, COO, CEO and then convinced the finance director to go send that money out. And this was actually done I think a year year and a half ago at back then technology is not as great. You look at deep technology is not as great. Voice generation technology is not as great. Right now, you can pay $5 and get something like this done in no time.

So, from our perspective, there's going to be a a super big need for verifying truth. Um, and you know, I think here are just some of the use cases uh that we have in mind, you know, when it comes to proof of humanity and verifications, right, in the crypto space. Um I think one of the big things in terms of projects obviously airdrops uh farms people are farming farming airdrops all the time. what we're doing with Fairrops. So, we're we're launching fairdrops.

com very soon and that will also actually be the platform where we will launch our own airdrop. um is where you know people different projects will have the ability to say okay you know what at the at the very least I want to make sure each person can only have one allocation but then beyond that it might even be okay you know what you'll get additional bonuses if you have various credentials right so recently we actually partner up with Kaito um to allow for kaito points and kaito credentials to be issued on chain and so down the road potentially there are projects that say you know what I want to give bonuses to people that are, you know, inner CT uh as defined by Kaiito or, you know, if you have 100 smart followers or above. And the other thing that we're we're we're super excited about is ultimately just, you know, making sure that there's bot-free social media. You know, if you think about, you know, your Twitters, your Facebooks, your Instagrams right now, uh you're I I you know, on on Instagram, I already seeing a lot of videos popping up teaching people how to create fake influencers, etc., etc.

I think ultimately there's going to be a market for that. But more importantly, I think there's just a need for people to be able to check, you know, so that I know, okay, you know what, this is this this social media account, this Twitter account, all the content is entirely generated and I understand and I appreciate it. But then, okay, you know what? These are people, these are brands, these are things that are real people putting their effort to create content. So, I think, you know, the ability to discern these differences is going to be super important.

Uh yeah, and uh you know, we're we're not supposed to be talking about tokens, so there's a disclaimer underneath. Um but in fact, we're currently the humanity protocet. Um test net, we've signed up just over 6 million people already with millions of credentials already issued and that's just on test net. We will actually be launching our mainet in the coming months. Um and the whole idea for us unlike some of the other projects where the whole concept is just about UBI airdropping tokens giving it to people uh for you know selling their their biometrics what we think about you know humanity protocol in terms of our tokconomics as I mentioned earlier is all about verifications is all about creating utility um it's all about incentivizing identity validators to issue the credentials and using that as a payment token obviously as gas fees for for the blockchain but also for uh for verifications.

Yeah. So, uh I think my time is uh is pretty much up. Um this is a QR code that uh links to our test net. Um the test net is at testnet.humanity.

org. Feel free to uh to check it out. Um it does refi it does require somebody to refer you because we've designed a referral system to incentivize people. Um so if you if it you get asked for a referral, you can just use mine which is just tea. Uh, thank you very much.