UniqueID: Decentralized Proof-of-Unique-Human

TL;DR

UniqueID proposes a decentralized blockchain-based system for creating and maintaining verified human identities, leveraging biometrics, cryptography, and novel governance to ensure integrity, privacy, and one-person-one-ID property.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralized identity system with biometric verification, peer-to-peer validation, and incentive mechanisms to prevent fraud and centralization.

Findings

Blockchain effectively stores and verifies biometric claims.

Novel governance mechanisms incentivize honest verification.

Privacy-preserving cryptographic techniques enable secure identity use.

Abstract

Bitcoin and Ethereum are novel mechanisms for decentralizing the concept of money and computation. Extending decentralization to the human identity concept, we can think of using blockchain for creating a list of verified human identities with a one-person-one-ID property. UniqueID is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization(DAO) for maintaining human identities such that every physical human entity can have no more that one account. One part of this identity is simply the user's claim on one of his unique, permanent, and measurable characteristics -biometrics. Blockchain has proved its integrity as a platform for storing and performing computations on such claims. The biggest challenge here is to ensure that the user has submitted his own valid biometric data. Human verifiers can check if there is any inconsistency in other users' data, by peer-to-peer checks. For preventing bad behavior and centralization in the verification process, UniqueID benefits from novel governance mechanisms to choose verifiers and punish unjust ones. Also, there are incentives for honest verifiers and users by newly generated tokens. We show how the users' privacy can be preserved by using state-of-the-art cryptographic techniques, and so they can use their identity without any concerns for votings, financial and banking purposes, social media accounts, reputation systems etc.