Human Network for Decentralized Cryptographic Keys, Wallet Recovery, and Zero-Knowledge Identity
Apr 17, 2025
TL;DR
Human Network enables decentralized key generation and recovery via vOPRF
Human Keys support familiar logins (email, socials, biometrics) without sacrificing self-custody
Compatible with wallets, zk protocols, and privacy-preserving compliance flows
Powering apps like Human Wallet, Human Passport, and Reclaim Protocol
Encryption is part of our daily routine, securing our payments, communication, and being as accessible to us as the internet itself. When embedded seamlessly into infrastructure, users don’t feel the friction of encryption—it just exists.
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), a type of encryption, is fundamental to blockchain security and identity. These keys, encapsulated into wallets, allow users to sign transactions and verify identity. Most users on blockchain networks using self-custodial wallets understand some aspects of PKI—not just through education, but through the responsibility of keeping their seed phrases safe. While PKI is democratized by removing trusted parties, the friction of user responsibility still exists.
Wallets, UX, and Neutrality
The lines between wallets and frontends of apps will increasingly blur with improved UX, and more users will accumulate at this layer of the value chain in blockchain.
Single-click login, persistent and frictionless recovery, with no reliance on trusted parties, and secured by resilient decentralized infrastructure will be key to achieving this feat. Ensuring that no company or large player can capture this layer and turn it into a rent-seeking model will be critical for neutrality and self-custody.
Let’s look at some of the problems with onboarding and identity.
Single-click onboarding using familiar logins like email, passkeys, and biometrics is an ideal path to bring the next billion users on-chain. Despite the hassle, seed phrase-based wallets still dominate, as they have better self-custody, while social login wallets depend on centralized infrastructure for key access and recovery.
Zero-Knowledge identity has the potential to transcend from niche to mainstream digital identity. But faces tradeoffs in achieving unlinkability, since personal identifiers are often processed on centralized servers to generate nullifiers (unique identifiers preventing double-use), creating potential traceability vulnerabilities back to the user.
Privacy today is black or white: either there's a key under the doormat for compliance, or there's no accountability at all.
Human Network
human.tech, by Holonym, provides keys, wallets, and identity to unlock capital flows to real humans – not bots, middlemen, or bad actors. Powering this is the Human Network, a decentralized threshold network that computes the verifiable oblivious pseudorandom function (vOPRF), an important cryptographic primitive enabling perfect crypto onboarding.
Built as an Autonomous Verifiable Service (AVS) – Human Network derives its privacy, resilience and permanence from Ethereum’s verifiable trust network, through shared security from EigenLayer and Symbiotics staking, with over $1.4B in restaked ETH, in addition to the cryptographic guarantees.
Let’s look at how the Human Network reframes the problem—people are represented by keys... but what if keys could represent people instead?
Human Keys for Perfect Crypto Onboarding
Cryptographic keys are generated using cryptographically secure random number generators (CSPRNGs), requiring seed phrases for recovery and cross-device use.
Distributing the randomly created key, and enabling user access to their share through familiar authentication methods, reduces this complexity. However, social logins and passkeys rely on web2 accounts, social recovery, or the wallet provider itself—making them less self-custodial.
For example, passkeys are backed up to iCloud for cross-device usage, which has its own risks. On a separate note, a recent UK order requiring Apple to weaken iCloud encryption doesn’t directly impact passkeys, but it highlights the broader vulnerability of relying on centralized systems.
Human Network, instead of relying on arbitrary randomness, computes verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (vOPRF) on human data to derive high-entropy, deterministic cryptographic keys—Human Keys.
These human attributes are flexible, including:
– What you are (biometrics)
– What you know (passwords)
– What you have (hardware wallets)
These keys form a deterministic map of human identity—distributedly computed by a decentralized threshold network, without ever revealing or storing the underlying data.
Keys for Wallets
Human Network acts as a decentralized key derivation and recovery layer, offering user-friendly and flexible authentication methods for onboarding and access.
Wallets can integrate Human Network to support biometric, web2 account, phone number, or other context-aware credentials enabling persistent key custody and recovery without relying on centralized providers. dApps can use Human Keys for simple logins by white-labeling the flow through human.tech’s Human Wallet, with minimal development overhead and full brand control.
These keys work across devices and dApps, bringing composability and reducing the on-chain fragmentation particularly common with social onboarding dApps—where a new wallet is often spun up for every application.
In action:
Human Wallets put Human Keys into action. The keys in Human Wallet are secured with Two-Party Computation (2PC) to provide programmable security for transactions. 2PC is an emerging wallet security framework designed to eliminate common attack vectors on self-custodial wallets, such as blind signing.
Keys for zk Nullifiers
Off-chain web2 credentials such as ePassports, DKIM signatures of email, or TLS notary information are increasingly being used for identity by providing them zero-knowledge capability to selectively disclose information—effectively enabling privacy and reducing the risk of data breaches.
The integrity of such identity protocols also depends on generating privacy-preserving nullifiers for:
Sybil resistance: Ensuring each real-world identity can only create one valid proof in the system
Unlinkability: Since proofs are derived from web2 credentials, preventing the issuing authority (email providers, govt) from linking on-chain identity back to specific users is critical
One way to do this is to hash the personal identifier, but that can still be used to trace back to the user, either through brute force or if the issuing authority has access to the original identifier or signature in a database. While identity protocols could implement nullifier generation on their own servers, this creates a privacy tradeoff by requiring users to trust a centralized entity.
Creating secure nullifiers requires decentralized computation of identifiers, where no single party sees the data or can link nullifiers back to users.
Human Network uses vOPRF to derive secure nullifiers from personal identifiers, such as name, date of birth, etc. The user sends only a masked version of their identifier to the network, and through collaborative computation, they receive deterministic nullifiers, without the network learning anything about the original input.
In action:
– Reclaim Protocol creates zkTLS proofs, uses vOPRF for nullifier generation, and will soon decentralize this through Human Network
– Human Passport (previously Gitcoin Passport) uses Human Network to generate zero-knowledge nullifiers for its credentials (stamps)
Programmable Keys for Provable Encryption of Identity
Putting privacy and compliance into equilibrium has been difficult—often with user privacy compromised more than the prevention of malicious behavior. Key escrow, special decryption powers for trusted parties, or weakened encryption schemes all introduce single points of failure. These are either exploited by attackers or used by governments for surveillance.
Human Network enables users to encrypt sensitive data while proving it was encrypted correctly and to set specific conditions for when it can be decrypted. The network never sees or stores the decrypted data itself—it only assists in decryption when specific on-chain conditions are met, making it both secure and privacy-preserving.
This can be particularly useful for:
On-chain compliance during identity verification: known bad actors can be prevented from accessing applications, and users who are verified but later engage in suspicious on-chain activity can be decrypted selectively. This is live on the Ethereum–Aztec bridge through Holonym’s Proof of Clean Hands.
Undercollateralized lending: when a borrower defaults, the system can trigger conditional decryption to reveal identity while maintaining full privacy unless the condition is met.
On-chain reputation: many applications already offer tiered access to product features—higher transaction limits, token sale deals, or airdrop eligibility based on wallet history. While on-chain activity can help filter out bad actors, adding a conditional decryption layer creates proactive compliance from the ground up.
Start Building with Human Network
Developers and builders can start using Human Network to integrate easy onboarding, secure nullifiers for zk identity, and programmable privacy into their applications.
Explore the docs to get started.
About Human Network
Human Network, previously Mishti Network, creates secure cryptographic keys using familiar user-side authentication methods like web accounts and biometrics with programmable key management and private identity proofs. The Human Network generates Human Keys.
About human.tech
human.tech is a suite of technologies designed to enhance personal freedom, privacy, and financial autonomy. human.tech provides innovative solutions for secure identity, data ownership, and private transactions, ensuring that technology remains a tool for human empowerment.