The “Proof of Humanity” sector of Crypto experienced a major merger on Monday with the Holonyh Foundation acquiring the Gitcoin passport for an undisclosed sum of money and tokens.
The transaction unites two close companies: Holonyme already distributed its technology via Gitcoin Passport, a logbook where 2 million Internet users hide proof of personality for services which must verify that they are flesh and blood.
AI agents are not people, but they may well claim that money is at stake. Holonyme and Gitcoin are part of a wave of cryptographic startups (notably Sam Altman Worldcoin) to eliminate boots.
Gitcoin Passport will find out about the human passport and eight of its employees will continue in Holony, now aged 30, said CEO Shady El Damaty. It plans to make the digital passport more portable so that it can “follow you wherever you go on the Internet”, carrying out the identity checks necessary to carry out business on the web.
The privacy factor first comes. Part of the attraction of flashing his Gitcoin passport, say, a government identifier is that the cryptographic passport can attest that its holder is who they claim to be without really revealing their identity.
This does not change with fusion; El Damaty said it gets a boost. The nearly 35 million identification stored on passport will be upgraded with zero knowledge proof technology.
Perhaps the best known use case for proof of humanity technology in the crypto is delivered with Airdrops. The projects that seek to ensure that their token launches are enriching people, not robots, have sometimes turned to tools like these. Holony’s helped get $ 225 million in such distributions, said El Damaty.
But it also plans to join more humanitarian efforts, such as digital identity auditors for refugees who need to access financial aid. An upcoming project will connect to 1 million displaced people.
The acquisition can strengthen Holonyme’s capacity to challenge WorldCoin, which leads the identity pack because of its association with Sam Altman of Openai. “We position ourselves as an alternative to Worldcoin,” said El Damaty.
