Digital Identity Startup Holonym Acquires Gitcoin Passport

Crypto's "proof of humanity" sector saw a major merger on Monday with Holonym Foundation acquiring Gitcoin Passport for an undisclosed sum of cash and tokens.

The transaction unites two close companies: Holonym was already distributing its tech through Gitcoin Passport, a logbook where 2 million internet users stash proof of personhood for services that need to verify they are flesh and blood.

AI agents aren't people, but they may well pretend as much when money's on the line. Holonym and Gitcoin are among a wave of crypto startups (most notably Sam Altman's Worldcoin) building ways to sift out the bots.

Gitcoin Passport will rebrand to Human Passport and eight of its employees will continue on at Holonym, now 30 strong, said CEO Shady El Damaty. He's planning to make the digital passport more portable so it can "follow you wherever you go on the internet," performing the identity checks necessary to conduct business on the web.

First comes the privacy factor. Part of the appeal of flashing one's Gitcoin Passport over, say, a government ID is that the crypto passport can attest its holder is who they claim to be without actually revealing their identity.

That's not changing with the merger; El Damaty said it's getting a boost. The nearly 35 million credentials being stored on Passport will be upgraded with zero-knowledge proof technology.

Perhaps the best-known use case for proof of humanity tech in crypto comes with airdrops. Projects that seek to ensure their token launches are rewarding people, not bots, have sometimes turned to tools like these. Holonym's helped secure $225 million in such distributions, El Damaty said.

But he's also planning to partner with more humanitarian endeavors, like digital identity checkers for refugees in need of accessing financial aid. One coming project will plug into 1 million displaced persons.

The acquisition may bolster Holonym's ability to challenge Worldcoin, which leads the identity pack by virtue of its association with OpenAI's Sam Altman. "We're positioning ourselves as an alternative to Worldcoin," said El Damaty.