Holonym Foundation Secures $5.5M Seed Funding to Provide Global Digital Personhood with Human Keys

Finality Capital and Paper Ventures are leading this venture, with Arrington Capital, Draper Dragon, Lightshift, and other notable participants joining in.

Holonym Foundation, an organization dedicated to revolutionizing digital identity security for the decentralized web, is thrilled to announce the successful completion of a $5.5 million seed funding round. Finality Capital and Paper Ventures spearheaded the round, which was substantially involved with Draper Dragon, Arrington Capital, Lightshift, Zero Knowledge Ventures, Zero DAO, and other notable funds.

Shady El Damaty, Co-Founder of Holonym, said: “We’re building core person-first principles into the technology we ship out to the world. Our goal is to build a global open-source layer that upgrades the abilities of each citizen with basic access to a digital identity using cryptography to prove their personhood.”

“We can’t have self-sovereign control of our monetary assets without self-sovereign identity. The Holonym Foundation is building critical middleware and applications that will make Web3 users the envy of Web2 users by giving them the power to own, govern, and selectively share their data with strong privacy and security guarantees. Holonym will be part of the solution to usher in the next trillion dollars of assets into the blockchain.’’ said Kamal Mokeddem, GP of Finality Capital.

Private keys are the backbone of the internet, ensuring the security of all digital transactions and interactions. However, imagine if private keys could be constructed in a more innovative and advanced manner. Human Keys completely revolutionize the derivation of private keys. Instead of generating private keys using random phrases, Human Keys transform humans into keys. This new perspective changes the dynamics of digital asset ownership, transferring it from someone who possesses a random seed to someone who can provide unique biometric proof. Human Keys enhance the user experience of the internet by making ownership layers more accessible, distributed, and protected.

The Holonym Foundation has developed three protocols that prioritize security and robust data privacy as their core principles:

• Mishti Network is a breakthrough threshold entropy network that computes an Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (OPRF) on biometric data. 
• This allows humans to derive random secure keys that are hard to steal. It also unlocks private homomorphic computation on encrypted data, allowing untrusted third parties to authenticate users without ever seeing the underlying data. 
• This is an Actively Validated Service (AVS) on Eigenlayer with crypto-economic mechanisms that leverage the economic security of the Ethereum network.
• Zeronym, a zero-knowledge identity protocol, leverages Human Keys to allow anyone in the world to secretly prove facts about their identity.
• Over 125,000 pseudonymous Zeronym users around the world have already unlocked these rights, proving their unique personhood, residency, and other attributes to curate a rich digital reputation that they alone own and control.
• Silk is a simple and elegant wallet user interface for interacting with crypto protocols. 
• Human Keys are made usable in the real world by the everyday internet user with Silk.
• Silk provides advanced security tools to protect users from hackers, scams, and malware on the decentralized web.

Nanak Nihal Singh Khalsa, Co-Founder of Holonym, said: ’’Humanity is not just biometrics, e.g. your face. It is about what you have, what you know, and what you are: your property, your memory, and your body. On the current centralized web, we are giving free ownership to our data. Web3 must be the space where we provide robust data ownership and secure sharing of personhood, so that nobody can own your data except you.’’

The Holonym Foundation is taking a significant step towards achieving global digital inclusion by providing every individual with a secure key over which they have complete control. This initiative is particularly crucial as advancements in artificial intelligence threaten to exclude a large portion of the population.

Shady El Damaty, co-founder of Holonym, says this is just the start for the Holonym Foundation. “Human Keys will redefine how citizens interact with the internet by limiting the overreach of power and hardening individual rights with resilient decentralized protocols built on Zeronym and Mishti Network.”

Holonym Foundation is focused on applied cryptography innovation that delivers solutions for real-world problems.