Different people know different things about us, and that’s completely normal. Friends, colleagues, employers, institutions and the services we use all meet us in different contexts. We don’t give every one of them the same access to our lives.
Something can be perfectly appropriate to share in one situation and completely out of place in another.
Online, those boundaries are easier to lose.
The same email, phone number, wallet address or persistent identifier can connect activity that happened in completely different parts of your life.
Digital identity now has to solve both aspects of that problem: continuity when we need it, without making everything automatically linkable.
Inside SourceLess, 𝐒𝐓𝐑.𝐃𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧 is a human-readable identity recorded on-chain, purchased once and owned for life, and used across connected services. 𝐙𝐊𝟏𝟑 is being developed so that using the same identity doesn’t have to mean revealing the same information every time — ownership or certain attributes can be verified without exposing the information underneath.
Before anything is written on-chain, one of the first design questions is: what needs a permanent record, and what can be verified without exposing the data behind it?
In July, the European Data Protection Board finalized new guidance for blockchain systems handling personal data. Among its recommendations: minimise the personal data placed on-chain, keep additional data off-chain where possible, and consider privacy-preserving methods such as zero-knowledge proofs.
Sometimes you need a permanent record. Other times, you only need proof that something is true, without revealing the information behind it.
SourceLess’s technical architecture includes ZK13 for verification without exposing the underlying data, alongside a hybrid approach that separates off-chain information from blockchain proofs and records.
This doesn’t automatically make any system GDPR-compliant. But privacy begins with what the actual architecture is designed to reveal, verify and keep private.
Explore how SourceLess approaches privacy, identity and blockchain: www.sourceless.net
“Digital identity has become a central concept for understanding how online presence is formed and interpreted. Although it has been studied extensively, most work still focuses on two things: how platforms shape identity, and how users curate and perform it. Comparatively less attention is given to how people themselves understand digital identity - how they perceive it, assess it, and relate to it.”
That’s the opening of our new article: 𝘋𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘷𝘴 𝘋𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺 - a baseline for one of the biggest topics of our time. We go from today’s verification direction and platform dependence to zero-knowledge proofs, and what’s coming with AI agents.