Crypto Heads Into 2026 With Privacy, Decentralized Identity On The...
“The goal is not to onboard people to Ethereum. The goal is to onboard people to openness and self-sovereignty,” he recently wrote on a X post.
This year, decentralized identity emerged as one of the industry’s most active responses to digital surveillances. Rather than converging on a single global identifier, new efforts increasingly emphasize selective disclosure enabled by new technologies, allowing users to prove specific attributes, such as uniqueness, eligibility or compliance, without revealing their full identity.
The shift reflects a broader challenge facing blockchains, applications and regulators alike: how to verify users without turning networks into surveillance systems.
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Buterin has also weighed in directly on decentralized identity in writing this year.
Instead, Buterin advocates for attribute-based verification, where users prove only what a specific application needs to know rather than presenting a single global identity. Zero-knowledge proofs are the tool that makes this possible by allowing a person to prove a statement is true without revealing their underlying personal information.
Beyond Ethereum, enterprise-focused identity platforms advanced in 2025. In August, the Hashgraph Group launched IDTrust, a self-sovereign identity platform built on the Hedera network, positioning it as a decentralized option for governments and institutions exploring digital credentials.
Proof-of-personhood systems, which aim to verify that an account corresponds to a real and unique human rather than a bot or duplicate, also continued to evolve in 2025, with Sam Altman's World remaining the most prominent example.
World’s identity protocol, World ID, is designed to let users prove they are real, unique humans online without revealing personal data. According to the project’s documentation, after biometric verification through an iris scan, the data is encrypted, sent to the user’s device, and deleted from the verification hardware, so only the user controls their World ID, with no personal information shared with third parties.
The resurgence of decentralized identity in 2025 has also drawn attention from leading figures in crypto. In June, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong framed decentralized identity as a key pillar of the internet’s next phase, writing that it is “taking off” alongside decentralized social media and prediction markets.
Source: CoinTelegraph
