Holonym Co-Founder on Blockchain, Privacy, and Digital Identity

In an exclusive interview, Shady El Damaty, Co-Founder of Holonym Foundation, delves into the transformative power of blockchain, privacy, and digital identity. From pioneering decentralized science (DeSci) to the creation of Human Keys, El Damaty shares insights on solving identity challenges, ensuring privacy in an increasingly invasive tech landscape, and safeguarding digital natural rights. Holonym’s innovative approach to identity verification and privacy promises to bridge gaps for individuals worldwide, including those in vulnerable and undocumented populations.

Q1. How did you get into the blockchain space?

My path to blockchain began with a problem, “How do we share data peer-to-peer between research institutions to train ML models for predicting cognitive brain age in developing adolescents.” I was seeking to create a brain prediction algorithm that used terabytes of neuroimaging and behavioral data from multiple institutions. However, these institutions all used different cloud service providers and it was non-trivial to get them all to agree to use a single service provider to host the data. Whenever I’m stuck with a problem I can’t solve on my own, I utilize a hackathon to crowdsource solutions! I proposed this challenge as part of the DC brainhack, where I discovered IPFS and coined “DeSci” or decentralized science as the use of decentralized web technology to power scientific research. 

Q2. How did Opscientia start?

OpSci, formerly Opscientia, started as an experiment where I decided to continue my scientific career by launching a web-native research lab, instead of continuing down the traditional path of academia. We launched a decentralized research fellowship program with the help of Ocean DAO and Filecoin Foundation and attracted many talented young people to pioneer DeSci. Later Sarah Hamburgh joined and we set many standards and open questions for the DeSci space to tackle in the years to come.

Q3. Can you speak on the pivot from Opscientia to Holonym? DeSci → Digital IDs?

One of the key problems we sought to solve with OpSci was the verification of academic identities and reputations in digital platforms for scientific research. We identified this as the first problem to solve before DeSci could scale to solve scientific coordination problems around peer review, replication, and funding. For example, we built a permissionless data archival platform for large scientific datasets but had no way of verifying that real researchers were uploading real data and not junk data. At ethAmsterdam in 2022, we debuted the first DeSci academic identity registry to solve this problem. This was built on top of the Web Toking Forwarding (WTF) Protocol, which later became Holonym. 

Q4. Has Holonym been used/tested in the real world?

Yes! Zeronym, our zero-knowledge identity service is used by many companies to solve identity verification while providing privacy to their users. Our first adopter was Andrew Yang’s DAO, Lobby3, which used Holonym to prove donations to political and civic advocacy campaigns came from US residents in compliance with Federal Campaign Finance Laws. Today we’re used by privacy protocols, grant-making organizations, decentralized job posting protocols, and many more.

Q5. What’s the biggest privacy risk right now? Is biological privacy a concern? 

There are many privacy risks today. The rush to build foundational models for AI has kickstarted a race to scrape as much valuable human data as possible. This includes bots and companies that are scraping public health data that contain our most intimate information about our bodies, location data that track our daily habits and location, and social graph analyses that predict our relationships with other people. The riskiest I can imagine in the near term is the wide-scale adoption of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). Some of this technology is already here, with the Apple Vision Pro, which uses microfluctuations in our pupil diameter to estimate our arousal, attention, and other internal states. This is because the pupil is directly controlled by the noradrenergic tone in the brain, making it an excellent proxy for generic internal brain states. I fear that companies like Neuralink will expose human neural data which can be sold to companies to improve methods of social influence and control, either indirectly through suggestive advertising or directly by beaming memes to your brain. After what happened to Twitter, I think the last thing we want is for Elon Musk or his companies to have anything close to read or write access to human neural activity.

Q6. Why Human Keys, and how do you keep that data safe? 

Human Keys are how we bring the benefits of cryptography to every single person on the planet by making crypto key self-custody as easy as interacting with any web standard service or platform. Human Keys are secure keys that are derived from your unique human attributes, such as what you know, what you have, or what you are. We utilize a decentralized network to derive these keys that are secured by the same mechanism as Ethereum Proof of Stake. The network implements a mathematical technique, called the Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (OPRF) that allows network nodes to compute part of the key without any understanding of the input/output data. The human receives the key shards on their device and is uniquely able to reconstruct the key that matches their human attributes. With this key, they can send secure communications, prove their personhood, or sign transactions on any blockchain. 

Q7. What’s the difference between Human Keys like Holonym’s and a company like WorldCoin that also uses biometric data?

The versatility of Human Keys is the main difference. The OPRF adds entropy to low entropy data that is not good for deriving keys secure enough for holding funds or sending sensitive communications. Worldcoin uses the retina instead of other biometrics because it has very high entropy, is uniquely identifying, and is difficult to brute force. They did not have any other method that let them use simpler human data to derive keys from. With Human Keys, you don’t need creepy eye scanning, or open the door to phishing attacks with fake orbs that farm eyes for bad actors. Also, we don’t rely on paying people to use our technology, users create human keys because they have real utility and allow them to leverage cryptography for payments, decentralized finance, unlocking grants, proving personhood, and many other utilities.

Q8. What’s the most impactful real world use case you see for Holonym? 

Holonym is the first organization that has built primitives to make digital natural rights real. Natural rights are a cornerstone for democratic societies, with a rich and deep intellectual tradition stemming back to great thinkers such as Aquinas, Locke, and Hobbes. However, the only thing that makes natural rights, “natural” are the governments and institutions that safeguard them. With Human Keys, we can harden natural rights to security, privacy, personhood, digital ownership, and more by building them into a resilient decentralized network.

Q9. What’s the most immediate real world use case you see for Holonym? 

We are hard at work today creating universal personhood issuers using Zeronym, this allows anyone, anywhere in the world to create a minimal viable digital identity with full privacy. We expect that this will have a huge impact on displaced populations that are undocumented and unable to open bank accounts, apply for work, or generally participate in society as a civic member. This work naturally extends to verifying human identities and distinguishing real people from bots and fraudsters.