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Holonym Foundation Raises $5.5 Million To Provide Global Digital Personhood With Human Keys

by ChainwireAugust 17th, 2024

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Human Keys make the ownership layers of the internet built on top more consumer-friendly, decentralized, and secure. 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.

featured image - Holonym Foundation Raises $5.5 Million To Provide Global Digital Personhood With Human Keys

**DELAWARE, United States, August 16th, 2024/Chainwire/--**Led by Finality Capital and Paper Ventures, with participation from Arrington Capital, Draper Dragon, Lightshift, and others.

Holonym Foundation, Holonym Foundation, an organization building the next generation of digital identity security for the decentralized web, is announcing the completion 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’re building core person-first principles into the technology we ship out to the world. Our goal is to build a global open-source layer that upgrades the abilities of each citizen with basic access to a digital identity using cryptography to prove their personhood."

“We can’t have self-sovereign control of our monetary assets without self-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 power to own, govern, and selectively share their data with strong privacy and security guarantees. Holonym will be part of the solution to usher in the next trillion dollars of assets into blockchain.’’, said Kamal Mokeddem, GP of Finality Capital.

Cryptographic keys, or private keys, run the web 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 how private keys are derived. Instead of creating private keys from random phrases, Human Keys make humans into keys.

This new framing shifts ownership of digital assets from the holder of a random seed, to the human that can uniquely prove their biometrics. Human Keys make the ownership layers of the internet built on top more consumer-friendly, decentralized, and secure. Human Keys encompass three protocols built by the Holonym Foundation, all having security and robust data privacy systems as core principles:

Mishti Network, a breakthrough threshold entropy network that computes an Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (OPRF) on biometric data.
This allows humans to derive random secure keys that are hard to steal, and it unlocks private homomorphic computation on encrypted data, allowing untrusted third-parties to authenticate users without ever seeing the underlying data.
This is an Actively Validated Service (AVS) on Eigenlayer with crypto economic mechanisms that leverage the economic security of the Ethereum network.
Zeronym, a zero knowledge identity protocol, leverages Human Keys to allow anyone in the world to secretly prove facts about their identity.
Over 125,000 pseudonymous Zeronym users around the world have already unlocked these rights, proving their unique personhood, residency, and other attributes to curate a rich digital reputation that they alone own and control.
Silk, a simple and elegant wallet user interface for interacting with crypto protocols.
Human Keys are made usable in the real world by the everyday internet user with Silk.
Silk provides advanced security tools to protect users from hackers, scams, and malware on the decentralized web.

Nanak Nihal Singh Khalsa, Co-Founder of Holonym said: ’’Humanity is not just biometrics, e.g. your face. It is about what you have, what you know and what you are: your property, your memory, and your body. On the current centralized web, we are giving free ownership to our data. Web3 must be the space where we provide robust data ownership and secure sharing of personhood, so that nobody can own your data except you.’’

By granting every human in the world a secure key that only they can hold and control, the Holonym Foundation moves towards global digital inclusion, precisely at a time when advancements in artificial intelligence are poised to leave so many behind.

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

Holonym Foundation is focused on applied cryptography innovation that delivers solutions for real-world problems.

About Holonym Foundation

The Holonym Foundation’s mission is the proliferation of Human Keys to make security and privacy more usable in zero trust environments. Holonym Foundation has developed infrastructure to allow anyone, anywhere, to create Human Keys with Mishti Network, easily use them with Silk and privately prove facts about their identity with Zeronym.

Holonym Foundation Products

Mishti Network.

A threshold network for zero trust Human Key derivation. Create high entropy Human Keys from private biometrics, passwords, security questions, or other human-memorable data. Mishti also powers Zeronym’s programmable privacy for on-chain private banking, payments, and other real world regulated industries.

Silk

The 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 protected self-custody wallet that can be recovered without trusted guardians.

Zeronym

Proof of personhood 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. Business can utilize Zeronym for privacy-preserving KYC/AML with programmable privacy for on-going monitoring.