Who Vouches for You When Your Issuer Is Gone?

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Aaryamann Challani

Type: Talk

Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

A compliance vendor gets sanctioned. Four hundred verified employees can no longer prove a status they legitimately earned, and nobody new can onboard. The application works and the privacy layer works. Nobody can get through the front door. We built a proof-of-concept that moves the trust anchor onto an on-chain Merkle root. After one enrollment, holders keep proving attributes through zero-knowledge membership proofs while the issuer is adversarial or gone. The talk prices that. Enrollment still needs a live threshold MPC quorum, so resilience only covers people who already enrolled. Public predicate parameters cap the anonymity set near 498 buckets, and repeated observation narrows it further. I read those costs as requirements for plural identity, then check them against World ID, ZKPassport, Self, Semaphore, and Human. Plural identity means no single source holds a monopoly on who participates. Nothing deployed clears that bar, this work included.