The first step in building global-scale, privacy-preserving proof-of-personhood based on personal trust relationships, not biometrics
ZÜRICH, SWITZERLAND and SAN RAFAEL, CA, USA — Ayra Association announced that Customer Commons has provided funding to Ayra to develop a framework for governing interoperability of First Person Credentials across digital trust ecosystems worldwide.
First Person Credentials are a new approach to providing strong, cryptographically verifiable proof that the holder is a real, unique person and not a bot. Known as “proof of personhood” or “proof of human”, this is a very hard problem to solve at Internet scale—one that has reached crisis proportions with the ability of generative AI agents to impersonate humans to a stunning degree, even on live video calls.
Some proposed solutions to proof of personhood rely on a global biometric database. While this might solve the problem technically, it comes with massive privacy and governance implications: it is all but impossible to ensure that any such global database could not be subverted or abused. Furthermore, it just creates a different unsolvable problem: who should control that database?
First Person credentials take a very different approach based on the same thing we rely on in the real world: personal trust relationships. As Doc Searls, President of Customer Commons and author of The Intention Economy, puts it, “With the First Person Project, we have a path toward completely re-making the way identity works for both people and companies. First Person Identity (FPI) works like the first person voice in language: it puts the individual in charge of how they present credentials, and how they build out webs of verifiable relationships.”
At the heart of the First Person architecture are verifiable relationship credentials (VRCs)—cryptographically verifiable proof of a real personal trust relationship. VRCs were discussed in depth at Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) #40 in April, and their impact is summarized in this blog post by IIW co-founder Phil Windley. VRCs also leverage the power of personhood credentials as described in this August 2024 paper from 33 distinguished authors.
The First Person Project is deeply aligned with Customer Commons’ mission to “restore the balance of power, respect and trust between individuals and organizations that serve them.” As Doc explains, “The identity world we have today is what we call IONBA: the Internet Of Nothing But Accounts. You have as many identities as there are accounts, each with its own login and password. In this industrial relic of a system, it is easy to create fake people and relationships, easy for people to be exposed to surveillance, hard to prove authenticity, and hard to trust anything. The only way around that old system is to build a new one from individuals outward through trusted webs of their own relationships and their independent ability to acquire and share credentials.”
Building the First Person digital trust ecosystem requires both technical and governance work. The technical standards and open source code are currently underway within Linux Foundation projects including LF Decentralized Trust, Trust Over IP (ToIP), the Decentralized Identity Foundation, and the OpenWallet Foundation. But equally as important are the governance policies that will enable First Person credentials to be interoperable and trusted across companies, communities, sites, and apps anywhere on the Internet. This is the work that Customer Commons has commissioned the Ayra Association to begin.
As Ayra Executive Director Darrell O’Donnell explains, “The mission of Ayra is to enable interoperability of trusted digital data across ecosystems worldwide. First Person credentials are a textbook example of where this interoperability is needed. Ayra is pleased to be the forum where First Person Network Governance Framework is built and maintained.”
The next set of announcements from Ayra and the First Person Project are expected to be made at the Global Digital Collaboration event taking place July 1-2 in Geneva. Parties interested in participating in this event are invited to contact the Ayra Association for more information.