Human Network is Going Open Source

Human Network, the decentralized infrastructure that turns everyday secrets and human attributes such as passwords, social logins, and government IDs into cryptographic keys without ever seeing them, is now open source and audited by Halborn.

Anyone can verify how keys are derived, how the threshold protocol operates, how secrets remain private. As the first decentralized production of vOPRF technology, open sourcing the code improves verifiability and equality of access to builders.

Human Network provides “Secrets-as-Service” by computing the vOPRF (verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Function) — a cryptographic primitive that empowers humans to derive keys from human-memorable inputs for private identity, self-custodial wallets, and compliance access control.

Human Network Pioneered vOPRF

human.tech pioneered the usage of vOPRF through Human Network — a threshold network that adds entropy to human attributes, solving three historically separate problems where usability, privacy, and security couldn't previously coexist.

The Human Network is built as an Actively Validated Service (AVS), restaked on EigenLayer and Symbiotic, with 27 nodes and over $2.5B in restaked ETH securing computation on human data.

The network has created almost 3 million keys for Human Passport's deduplication of stamps, self-custodial keys for WaaP (Wallet-as-a-Protocol), and compliance access control for Proof of Clean Hands also used in human.tech’s Bridge to support compliant private transfers to Aztec.

Trustless Implementation of vOPRF

vOPRF is now used across varying trust models by World ID, MetaMask, and Celo. human.tech paved the way by pioneering the first large scale production implementation with permissionless joining and strong censorship resistance. The network is a 6-of-8 threshold network with 28 nodes from all over the world (and growing) providing compute resources.

Network integrity rests on a combination of collusion and threat resistance models. Crypto economic security via restaking makes attacks costly. Cryptographic guardrails, such as resharing protocol, Forward-Secure Public-Key Encryption (FSPKE) and mobile adversary tolerance  ensure nodes cannot learn each other's secrets or collude across epochs to reconstruct the network secret. The nodes utilize the 2Hash DF implantation with zero knowledge proofs (DLEQ) to attest that each node computed honestly on the correct keyshare. Dishonest nodes can be deprioritized from the network, keeping it operating at a high standard.

For a deeper explanation, see the post on Ethereum’s research forum, Reintroducing Human Network's vOPRF or whitepaper for technical explanation.

Now, Open Source

Open sourcing Human Network marks a significant milestone for this novel cryptographic primitive. The code verifies what the network claims: that your secrets stay yours.

vOPRF is still nascent. The design space for how identity, i.e., both cryptographically verifiable (social auth, email signatures) and otherwise (unsigned government IDs, SSN),  can be privately used to generate secure keys remains underexplored. Use cases we haven't imagined will emerge from builders who can now inspect, fork, and extend the implementation.

As AI and surveillance capabilities scale, infrastructure that keeps sensitive human secrets human-controlled becomes critical. Open source accelerates both the security review and the adoption of technology that preserves human autonomy.

What Human Network Unlocks

Seedless self-custodial wallets. Keys derived from what you know, what you have, or what you are, not random numbers you write down and protect. Common scenarios like losing your device, switching between devices, a social auth provider going down, or other recovery scenarios are handled without seed phrases or custodians.

Unlinkable nullifiers for ZK identity. Identity systems need unique per-user identifiers that can't be traced back to real-world people. Human Network generates nullifiers from human data without seeing it, enabling proof-of-personhood credentials without centralized databases.

Programmable compliance via threshold decryption. The same underlying primitive is repurposed to enable programmable disclosure. Users can encrypt identity data and define conditions under which it can be decrypted by the network, satisfying compliance requirements without exposing the sensitive data of all users.

We are actively researching on deriving keys from biometrics, which can further make self custodial wallets accessible to anyone. More details here.

Build on Human Network, or fork it!

Code is open. Audit complete. Everyday secrets become cryptographic secrets.

Here is the open repo. Docs. White paper. Audit report by Halborne security.