Humanity h

Humanity (Humanity Protocol) is a blockchain-based identity and trust network designed to let people prove claims about themselves without repeatedly disclosing the underlying personal data. Its original design focused on Proof of Humanity (PoH): establishing that an account belongs to a unique, real human and making applications more resistant to Sybil attacks, bots, and duplicate accounts. The project's current positioning is moving beyond uniqueness toward Proof of Trust (PoT), a broader identity framework for verifiable credentials.

PoT combines decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials (VCs), and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). Humanity's public materials describe a model in which users control portable credentials and selectively authorize applications to verify particular claims-such as age, residency, education, employment, or compliance-rather than surrendering a complete identity profile.

The network was initially built around palm-based biometric verification. The whitepaper describes a phased approach: smartphone palm-print recognition in visible light, followed by palm-vein recognition using an infrared-capable device. The stated objective is to verify uniqueness while avoiding raw biometric-data custody; the protocol describes processing biometric inputs into proofs and keeping sensitive information under user control.

H is Humanity's ecosystem token. Official documentation describes H as a fixed-supply ERC-20 with 10 billion units and says the token is intended to support network gas, humanity attestation, identity and credential verification, staking, governance, and rewards for verification infrastructure such as zkProofer Nodes and Identity Validators.

Digital services generally authenticate accounts, devices, or credentials issued by intermediaries, but do not provide a universal, privacy-preserving way to establish that one participant is one unique human. Humanity's whitepaper frames this as a source of Sybil attacks, automated abuse, fraud, misinformation, spam, and difficulty connecting Web3 applications to real-world identity and compliance requirements.

Conventional identity systems also create a trade-off between trust and privacy. Centralized or federated providers can become data-rich gatekeepers, while simply putting identity records on-chain can expose sensitive information and make activity easy to correlate. Humanity's proposed response is selective disclosure: users hold credentials and provide scoped proofs of specific claims, with ZKPs and decentralized storage intended to reduce raw-data exposure.

Humanity's architecture has two related stages. In the initial PoH stage, a user completes a palm-based human-recognition check intended to show that the person is unique on the network. The whitepaper describes visible-light palm-print capture through a smartphone as the first phase and infrared palm-vein recognition through accessible dedicated hardware as a later phase. It says an AI recognition model extracts palm features and that the system is designed to be contactless and inclusive.

In the broader PoT model, a verified person is associated with decentralized identifiers and can receive verifiable credentials from issuers. A verifier-such as an application, smart contract, or service-requests only the relevant claim or preset. The user authorizes the presentation, and cryptographic proofs allow the verifier to check validity without receiving the entire underlying identity record.

Developers can integrate Humanity through SDK/API flows or directly on-chain. The documentation describes OAuth-style "Sign in with Humanity" integrations for web, backend, and mobile applications, while the on-chain path exposes a Verification Oracle for smart contracts to query credential claims. The network's documentation also describes an ecosystem of zkProofer Nodes and Identity Validators, with H used for protocol incentives and verification-related rewards.

The H token is described as the native gas and ecosystem asset for Humanity's relaunched mainnet. Official token documentation says the maximum/fixed supply is 10,000,000,000 H, divisible to eight decimal places, and lists allocations including ecosystem funding, identity-verification rewards, community incentives, treasury operations, investors, early contributors, and a strategic reserve.