Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has been campaigning for data protection within the crypto space for years. Buterin argues that user onboarding alone just isn’t enough and warns that the widespread use of “walled gardens” would undermine the core purpose of decentralized systems.
“The goal just isn’t to introduce people to Ethereum. The goal is to maneuver people toward openness and self-sovereignty,” he wrote in a recent X post.
Source: Vitalik Buterin
Buterin is some of the outstanding proponents of cryptocurrency as a core value within the industry. He emphasizes protecting individuals from government and company surveillance and argues that decentralization helps distribute power amongst just a few dominant actors.
This yr, decentralized identity proved to be one in every of the industry's most lively responses to digital surveillance. Rather than specializing in a single global identifier, recent efforts are increasingly emphasizing selective disclosure enabled by recent technologies, allowing users to reveal certain attributes reminiscent of uniqueness, authorization or compliance without revealing their full identity.
The shift reflects a broader challenge facing blockchains, applications and regulators alike: How to confirm users without turning networks into surveillance systems?
Ethereum is becoming the foremost testing ground
Not surprisingly, Ethereum has emerged as one in every of the important thing testing grounds for decentralized identity and privacy infrastructure.
In an Oct. 29 thread, Ethereum's
Source: Ethereum
The thread was praised by the community, and the Book of Ethereum, a community-run account focused on the culture and ethos of Ethereum, responded with a post describing privacy, zero-knowledge tools, and human-centered identity as an “unfolding reality” on Ethereum relatively than a distant ideal.
Source: The Book Ethereum
Buterin also commented directly on decentralized identity in writing this yr.
In a June 28 essay, he warned that early attempts to interchange centralized logins with a single, persistent on-chain ID could still pose serious risks, arguing that even privacy-friendly identity systems could allow long-term tracking, coercion or lack of anonymity if an excessive amount of activity is tied to an identifier.
Instead, Buterin advocates for attribute-based verification, where users only prove what a selected application must know, relatively than presenting a single global identity. Zero-knowledge proofs are the tool that makes this possible by allowing an individual to prove the reality of an announcement without revealing the underlying personal information.
Under Buterin, this approach protects privacy while avoiding the hazards of consolidating identity right into a single, persistent digital ID. In December, Buterin suggested that Elon Musk should implement zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain-based systems on X to indicate that his content rating algorithms work fairly.
From firms to personality verification systems
Beyond Ethereum, enterprise-focused identity platforms have made strides in 2025. In August, Hashgraph Group launched IDTrust, a self-governing identity platform built on the Hedera network, positioning it as a decentralized option for governments and institutions exploring digital credentials.
Persona proof systems, which aim to confirm that an account corresponds to an actual and unique human relatively than a bot or duplicate, have also evolved in 2025, with Sam Altman's World remaining probably the most outstanding example.
World's identity protocol, World ID, is designed to permit users to prove they’re real, unique people online without revealing any personal information. According to project documentation, after biometric verification through an iris scan, the information is encrypted, sent to the user's device and deleted from the verification hardware, so only the user has control over their World ID and no personal information is shared with third parties.
While its biometrics-based approach targets human uniqueness on a big scale, critics have raised ongoing concerns about privacy and coercion.
Source: Eric Snowden
The resurgence of decentralized identity in 2025 has also caught the eye of leading figures within the crypto industry. In June, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called decentralized identity a key pillar of the subsequent phase of the web, writing that it was “on the rise” alongside decentralized social media and prediction markets.
Digital identity meets concerns about government surveillance
As governments move to digital identity systems, data control and privacy issues have gotten increasingly necessary.
In Switzerland, a rustic often cited for its strong data protection tradition, proposed surveillance reforms have drawn renewed scrutiny. In January, the Swiss Federal Council proposed a revision of the OSCPT (Regulation on the Monitoring of Postal and Telecommunications Correspondence) to expand monitoring obligations for telecommunications providers and extend these requirements to services reminiscent of social networks, messaging apps and VPNs.
As drafted, the changes would require service providers with at the very least 5,000 users to confirm identities and decrypt any communications that should not protected by end-to-end encryption.
The proposal met with strong opposition. Decentralized VPN provider Nym urged Swiss residents to contact their elected officials and oppose the proposal. The company wrote:
At a time when the Swiss are celebrating the success of leading privacy-conscious firms like Proton and Threema, when the military itself has chosen Threema, and when other promising players like Nym are emerging in the sector of privacy-friendly technologies and protecting people's digital integrity, this Federal Council regulation destroys a complete sector.
In July, privacy-focused tech company Proton said it had frozen investments in Switzerland and redirected $100 million to data centers in Germany and Norway as a result of uncertainty surrounding the proposal.
On December 10, the Swiss Council of States decided to curb the proposed expansion of telecommunications surveillance and tacitly supported a motion calling on the Federal Council to reconsider the reform.
In the UK, the Concordium blockchain launched a mobile app in August that permits users to make use of zero-knowledge proof to prove they’re over 18 without revealing their identity. The publication got here because the UK introduced mandatory online age verification rules for adult content.
In the United States, Google announced in April an expansion of government-issued digital IDs in Google Wallet to several U.S. states to enable the usage of mobile IDs at DMVs and TSA checkpoints.
The update also introduced zero-knowledge proofs for age verification, highlighting that the technology is not any longer limited to crypto-native projects but is increasingly being adopted by Big Tech platforms as a part of mainstream digital identity systems.
