a16z crypto show How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer
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Apr 17, 2026 
Alex Blania, founder of Tools for Humanity and builder of World ID, is creating a privacy-preserving proof-of-humanity network using iris biometrics. He discusses proving human uniqueness at scale, the Orb hardware and anti-deepfake measures, privacy via MPC and zero-knowledge, and real-world uses from dating to video calls and platform verification.
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Uniqueness Is The Hard Part Of Proof Of Human
- Proof of Human aims to ensure each online individual has a single persistent account and remains the owner over time.
- The core technical challenge is uniqueness at scale: verifying one new person against all prior users (one-to-N) not just one-to-one checks.
Iris Biometrics Scale Where Face And Fingerprint Fail
- Simple biometrics like face or fingerprint lack sufficient entropy to distinguish one person from tens of millions.
- Iris patterns provide much higher entropy, making iris recognition a viable one-to-N uniqueness solution at large scale.
Protect Privacy With MPC And Zero Knowledge
- Use multi-party computation plus zero-knowledge proofs to verify uniqueness without centralizing biometric data.
- Split iris embeddings across parties so no single server holds the full secret while returning an anonymous uniqueness proof.