Delaware, United States, August 16, 2024, Chainwire

The project is led by Finality Capital and Paper Ventures, with participation from Arrington Capital, Draper Dragon, Lightshift and others.

Holonym Foundation, an organization building the next generation of digital identity security for the decentralized web, announces the close of a successful $5.5 million seed funding round. The funding round was led by Finality Capital and Paper Ventures, with significant participation from Draper Dragon, Arrington Capital, Lightshift, Zero Knowledge Ventures, Zero DAO, and other prominent funds.

Shady El Damaty, co-founder of Holonym, said: “We are infusing the fundamental principles of putting people first into the technology we send out into the world. Our goal is to build a global open source layer that empowers every citizen by giving them basic access to a digital identity using cryptography to prove their personhood.”

“We cannot have sovereign control over our monetary assets without sovereign identity. The Holonym Foundation is building critical middleware and applications that will make Web3 users the envy of Web2 users by giving them the ability to own, manage, and selectively share their data with strong privacy and security guarantees. Holonym will be part of the solution that will bring the next trillion dollars of assets to the blockchain,” said Kamal Mokeddem, GP at Finality Capital.

Cryptographic keys, or private keys, govern the network and secure every digital interaction on the internet. But what if private keys could be built differently and in a more sophisticated way? Human keys completely change the way private keys are created. Instead of creating private keys from random phrases, human keys turn people into keys. This modern structure shifts ownership of digital assets from the holder of a random seed to a human who can unequivocally prove their biometrics. Human keys make the layers of ownership of the internet built on top more consumer-friendly, decentralized, and secure.

Human Keys includes three protocols developed by the Holonym Foundation, whose core principles are security and strong data protection systems:

• Mishti Network, a breakthrough threshold entropy network that computes an unconscious pseudo-random function (OPRF) from biometric data.
• This allows people to derive random, secure keys that are hard to steal, and also enable private homomorphic computations on encrypted data, allowing untrusted third parties to authenticate users without ever having to see the underlying data.
• It is an lively verification service (AVS) on the Eigenlayer platform, using crypto-economic mechanisms that leverage the economic security of the network.
• Zeronym, a zero-knowledge identity protocol, uses human keys to allow anyone in the world to secretly prove facts about their identity.
• More than 125,000 Zeronym users worldwide have already unlocked these rights by proving their unique personality, location, and other attributes, allowing them to build a prosperous digital reputation that they exclusively own and control.
• Silk, a elementary and elegant wallet user interface for interacting with crypto protocols.
• Silk allows human keys to be used in the real world by the average internet user.
• Silk offers advanced security tools to protect users from hackers, fraud, and malware on a decentralized network.

Nanak Nihal Singh Khalsa, co-founder of Holonym, said: “Humanity is not just biometrics, like your face. It is what you have, what you know, and who you are: your property, your memory, and your body. In today’s centralized network, we give our data to free property. Web3 must be a space where we provide solid data ownership and secure personhood sharing, so that no one can own your data but you.”

By giving every person on the planet a secure key that only they can own and control, the Holonym Foundation is moving toward global digital inclusion, just as advances in artificial intelligence are on track to leave so many behind.

Shady El Damaty, co-founder of Holonym, says this is just the beginning for the Holonym Foundation. “Human Keys will redefine how citizens interact with the internet, limiting the abuse of power and empowering individual rights through resilient decentralized protocols built on Zeronym and the Mishti Network.”

The Holonym Foundation focuses on innovations in applied cryptography that provide solutions to real-world problems.

About the Holonym Foundation

The Holonym Foundation’s mission is to proliferate Human Keys to make security and privacy more useful in zero-trust environments. The Holonym Foundation has developed the infrastructure that allows anyone, anywhere, to create Human Keys using the Mishti Network, easily exploit them using Silk, and privately prove their identity using Zeronym.

Products for Holonym foundation

Mishti Network. Zero Trust Human Key Extraction Threshold Network. Create high entropy human keys from private biometrics, passwords, security questions, or other data that people can remember. Mishti also powers Zeronym programmable privacy for on-chain private banking, payments, and other real-world regulated industries.

Silk. Human-friendly wallet for instant onboarding. Use Human Keys with zero trust protocols to save, send payments, access global internet finance protocols, and manage your private data. Silk is a secured, self-escrow wallet that can be retrieved without trusted custodians.

Zeronym. Proof of legal personality and private identity. Fast client-side privacy for identity verification, supporting digital credentials from 180 countries. Use Human Keys to prove any fact privately without revealing any information in zero-knowledge. Businesses can exploit Zeronym for KYC/AML privacy protection with programmable privacy for continuous monitoring.

CONTACT AND SOCIAL MEDIA

For PR inquiries, users can contact press@holonym.io

Users can stay connected to the Holonym Foundation and its products: