Introducing Polygon ID, Zero-Knowledge Identity for Web3
Polygon Team
March 29, 2022
At Polygon, we believe that putting people firmly in control of their digital identities is at the core of Web3’s promise to empower users over networks. We have been working behind the scenes to fulfill this promise and today are proud to introduce PolygonID, the self-sovereign, decentralized and private identityfor the next iteration of the Internet.
What makes this new identity platform unique is that it is first ever to be powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography, a privacy and blockchain scaling technology. Polygon has made ZK a centerpiece of its strategic vision and has committed $1 billion to related projects. Polygon ID is the latest product in this rapidly growing portfolio.
Blockchain-based ID for decentralized and self-sovereign models
Zero-knowledge native protocols for ultimate user privacy
Scalable and private on-chain verification to boost decentralized apps and decentralized finance
Open to existing standards and ecosystem development
Polygon ID leverages the Iden3 protocol and Circom ZK toolkit. Moving forward, both of the projects will be sponsored by Polygon while keeping the original spirit of community initiatives to provide open source protocols and tools to the broader ecosystem of developers.
“Polygon ID is private by default, offers on-chain verification and permissionless attestation. There is nothing in the digital identity space now that ticks all these boxes,” said Mihailo Bjelic, Polygon’s co-founder. “It is also a great showcase for how zero knowledge proofs can help us create a better world.”
Vision & Guiding Principles
Private-by-default identity is a future-proof and the only solution to the world's digital identity needs: stronger privacy guarantees means more possible use cases, which in turn results in more users onboarded.
Decentralization and self-sovereignty principles: putting users in control of their identity and personal data is a way to enable social coordination and take back power from third parties.
Computational trust / reputation for people-powered networks (dWeb-of-Trust): identity attributes can be expressed as claims (or attestations) which can be combined to create compound proofs.
Open and permissionless issuance of claims from one identity to another identity without passing through a third party: Identities are not passive. Agency is being made available to individual users, not just organizations, enabling new use cases.
Expressible claim standard offers advantages over non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and verifiable credentials (VCs). NFTs are not private, and have high minting costs. While VCs offer some degree of privacy with selective disclosure and ZK add-on, their limitations are in the expressibility and composability, which are required for applications. Verifying VCs on-chain is prohibitively expensive.
Polygon ID leverages internal expertise to reduce complexity that comes with the use of Circom 2.0 to compile zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions known as zkSNARKs circuits.
Onboarding for developers and partners is done via the ID client toolkit that will include native apps, SDK’s and whitelabel solutions.
On-chain private verification is done using zkProof Request Language, a unique protocol for apps to specify the requested private attributes that the user needs to prove.
Relayer is a unique model that acts as a boost for Web3 apps by enabling any identity to issue claims. It helps reduce and manage the cost of user claims, improves privacy and removes complexity with a sponsor model for user identities.
Key Unique Value Propositions & Benefits
For end-users: convenient privacy for all
Privacy is a fundamental human right and Polygon ID empowers the users to reclaim it. Because it is private by default, access control is based on proving verifiable information rather than sharing it with the verifier.
Most advanced privacy that can still run on a user’s device
Right of access to apps with user anonymity
Aligned with Web3 privacy ethos
For Web3 protocols: advanced and private on-chain verification
Polygon ID allows for the construction of new forms of reputations. Some examples include decentralized credit score for financial primitives and social payments in DeFi; decentralized sybil score, voting power / delegation and domain-expertise reputation for DAOs to enable new decision-making and governance models; player reputation profile for Web3 games; private and censorship-resistant P2P communication and interactions for social applications.
Identity reputation can be cryptographically verified in a privacy-preserving way directly on-chain to trigger trustless execution / action
No need to rely on a middle man to execute interactions with users
Ability to compose validation by interacting with generic Smart Contracts or NFTs, but with privacy
For organizations and businesses: open ecosystem for trust management
Polygon ID is a complete platform that can be used to construct a variety of identity and trust services. The team is creating an open and enterprise-ready ecosystem for trust markets and trust management to build new attestation and access services with an incentive layer.
dAccess-as-a-Service
An environment where existing solutions can be deployed and new ones created
KYC, KYB, attestation
A distribution channel with a variety of options to leverage emerging crypto system
Product Roadmap
Polygon ID is currently under development. The solution will be structured as a set of tools, platform services and examples for developers to learn, test and integrate with their apps or dApps leveraging Polygon ID’s unique on-chain capabilities.
The product portfolio (focus on simplicity and inclusiveness) is the following:
Polygon ID Wallet app - a set of open source user and developer kits to integrate or whitelabel for custom applications.
Polygon ID Platform - an open, public platform developers and organizations can use to define and manage the trust lifecycle of their applications and other requirements, such as ZKPs, sources of trust, etc.
Polygon ID Connect - public service platform to integrate access across user wallets and applications.
Expected delivery plan:
Q1 2022 - PoC for Polygon DAO.
Q2 2022 - Public release of ID Wallet app and SDK to support essential features, like Claims Issuance, Private Authentication, zkProof Generation and Verification.
Q3 2022 - Full release of ID Platform and SDKs for developers to implement custom use cases, including the zkQuery Language, P2P Communication Protocol and Relayer Service.
If this sounds like something your project would be interested in, please reach out here to share your integration needs. Keep up with the latest development on our website.
Recall this grade school experience: you raise your hand and ask, “Can I go to the bathroom?” To which your teacher responds with “I don’t know. Can you?” Might seem far fetched, but this is a perfect entry point to understanding the difference between data availability and data storage. Let's bring this analogy close to […]
We all know that Ethereum needs to scale, and we at Polygon believe that zero-knowledge (ZK) tech is the most promising pathway to get there. But that path has often seemed as if it would be long and winding. The conventional wisdom has been that the crypto space would need many years to develop Layer […]
Polygon has made a major first step toward becoming carbon negative with the retirement of $400,000 in carbon credits representing 104,794 tonnes of greenhouse gasses, or the entirety of the network’s CO2 debt since inception. The milestone comes after Polygon in mid-April released its Green Manifesto, part of its broader vision for sustainable development. The […]
If we want the entire world to join Web3, blockchains will need to handle more transactions. Monolithic blockchains can’t scale because they’re asked to perform too many tasks (execution, settlement, and data availability) at once. But if chains were able to focus on just one part of the stack at a time, the entire ecosystem […]
Polygon is pleased to reveal that it has led a $25 million funding round for Web3 venture studio SuperLayer. This partnership and funding will help spread SuperLayer’s vision of accelerating the most promising Web3 platforms and projects. SuperLayer is led by managing partners Kevin Chou and Mahesh Vellanki, both founders of multiple leading Web3 companies, […]
The Ethereum community has recently seen a flurry of zkEVM (zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) announcements, including the unveiling of Polygon zkEVM. Given how new these technologies are and how many different approaches are being tried, it comes as no surprise that there has also been a lively debate around key concepts and terminology. What is […]
Polygon is coming to Latin America as a presenter-tier sponsor of ETHMexico. The annual gathering of Ethereum's brightest minds organized by ETHGlobal will be held on Aug. 19 - 21 in Mexico City. In preparation for the 36-hour-long hackathon, Polygon will host and mentor 25 top women builders in Web3 at our Blu3house #onPolygon. These […]