Polygon network announces launch of Polygon ID that keeps users’ personal information private
The Polygon network, a decentralized app (Dapp) layer for Ethereum, today announced the launch of “Polygon ID,” a decentralized and private identity that seeks to give users control of their digital identities, keeping all their personal information private.
The new identity platform is the first ever to be powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography, a privacy and blockchain scaling technology, that has zero-knowledge native protocols for ultimate user privacy, is scalable and private on-chain verification to boost decentralized apps and decentralized finance, and is open to existing standards and ecosystem development.
Polygon ID leverages the Iden3 protocol and Circom ZK toolkit. Moving forward, both of the projects will be sponsored by Polygon.
“Polygon ID is private by default, offers on-chain verification and permissionless attestation. There is nothing in the digital identity space now that ticks all these boxes,” said Mihailo Bjelic, Polygon’s co-founder. “It is also a great showcase for how zero-knowledge proofs can help us create a better world.”
Expressible claim standard offers advantages over non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and verifiable credentials (VCs). NFTs are not private and have high minting costs. While VCs offer some degree of privacy with selective disclosure and ZK add-on, their limitations are in the expressibility and composability, which are required for applications. Verifying VCs on-chain is prohibitively expensive.
Polygon ID leverages internal expertise to reduce the complexity that comes with the use of Circom 2.0 to compile zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions known as zkSNARKs circuits.
Onboarding for developers and partners is done via the ID client toolkit that will include native apps, SDK’s and white-label solutions. On-chain private verification is done using zkProof Request Language, a unique protocol for apps to specify the requested private attributes that the user needs to prove, according to Polygon.
Polygon ID allows for the construction of new forms of reputations, including decentralized credit score for financial primitives and social payments in DeFi; decentralized Sybil score, voting power/delegation, and domain-expertise reputation for DAOs to enable new decision-making and governance models; player reputation profile for Web3 games; private and censorship-resistant P2P communication and interactions for social applications.
Identity reputation can be cryptographically verified in a privacy-preserving way directly on-chain to trigger trustless execution/action. There will be no need to rely on a middle man to execute interactions with users and users now have the ability to compose validation by interacting with generic Smart Contracts or NFTs, but with privacy.
According to the company’s stated timeline, the proof-of-concept (PoC) has been developed and the complete Polygon ID platform is scheduled to be ready in the third quarter of 2022.