Sep 17, 2025
TL;DR
SSI (self-sovereign identity) gives people self-custodial, privacy-first credentials with reliable recovery, keeping data encrypted and sharing only the proofs so private information is never exposed.
human.tech builds on these principles with an open, cryptographic framework secured by Human Network, embedding privacy, self-custody, and universal personhood directly into identity infrastructure.
on the ground, Relay ID in Rwanda and Uganda builds on human.tech infrastructure, enabling community leaders to use familiar tools like SMS, WhatsApp, and Face ID to verify identities, deliver aid, and coordinate resources securely and with dignity.
By 2030, the UN aims to ensure that everyone has a legal identity, including birth registration, an ambition defined under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9. If realized, this could transform the lives of people, whether displaced, on the move, or simply undocumented—placing them on a path toward opportunity, protection, and basic rights that any of us can lose when systems fail.
Remaining unregistered and invisible to governments is a global problem, with more than ~850 million people today still lacking any official proof of identity. Most live in low- and lower-middle-income countries; more than half are children whose births were never registered. Others are adults who can’t prove who they are in the eyes of the law. Without recognized identity, they’re routinely shut out from education, work, mobile access, healthcare, or legal protection.
The goal of SDG 16.9 is clear. But the safest path requires tools that can meet legal, political, and human-rights requirements at once. Sovereign tech, which is privacy preserving, and based on open standards, without dependencies on large institutions, offers the clearest rights preserving path in contexts where connectivity is intermittent, central databases create human-rights risk, or cross-border portability is essential. In places without public infrastructure, it offers a safe way to bootstrap identity; where public systems exist, it strengthens them by minimizing data shared and enabling offline, portable proofs. Entrusting big tech or corporations to build sovereign infrastructure could inherit the same risks of data collection. While code and cryptography functions autonomously, they can be made political actors, as it defines who gets included.
Where Legal Identity Breaks
The first step toward legal identity is birth registration, which is often far from straightforward. Many births occur outside formal healthcare systems, and families may rely on social or community recognition instead of official documentation. As children grow, the absence of legal proof of identity becomes a barrier to school enrollment, healthcare, or even basic mobility.
For displaced or migrant families, the situation becomes even more complex. First, many lack foundational documents like marriage certificates, which are often required to register a child’s birth. Second, the very documents that prove one’s identity, such as birth records, family books, certificates, are frequently lost in transit or never issued in the first place. Without these, families cannot re-enter official systems once they’ve crossed borders or resettled.
Even when registration systems exist, they’re often fragmented, with separate systems for healthcare, aid distribution, education, or cash assistance that rarely speak to each other. This creates siloed records that don’t add up to a coherent legal identity, leaving people in a bureaucratic limbo. The problem is more than technical or administrative; it’s structural.
Rights vs Control
Identity is grounded in international human-rights law (UDHR Article 6 recognizes the right to be a person before the law; the Convention on the Rights of the Child Article 7 recognizes the child’s right to birth registration, a name, and nationality), but systems are designed, intentionally or not, in a way that they are easily exploited to control a population through surveillance and barriers to entry. The data of the most vulnerable is the least protected — unconsented data has led to forced repatriation, data leaked during a cyberattack, and has been exploited by authoritarian regimes to target former allies. Poorly designed systems have also resulted in mass exclusions. In many cases, simply having an identity document has made people traceable and thereby targeted.
Biometrics-based identification has become commonplace for undocumented groups, but sacrifices privacy. Even small biometric failure rates can create large absolute exclusion at the scale of entire populations, and centralized databases raise privacy and seizure risks..
This tension remains a core barrier to building inclusive identity systems. Socio-political conditions and localized challenges cannot be addressed through a single, universal digital ID, controlled exclusively by large corporations or governments. And this is exactly why we need sovereign tech.
Sovereign Identity
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is a standards-aligned model built around privacy, interoperability, and self-custody. It uses open-standard, cryptographically verifiable credentials that people hold themselves, with recovery that works in practice. Designed for low-infrastructure settings with familiar, simple onboarding, it derives security from applied cryptography and decentralized networks. Personal data is encrypted by default and never stored in plain text on shared systems; only reusable proofs travel across providers, so people can authenticate without exposing any other private information.
We have privacy-enhancing technologies that exist to embed these values into real systems. The challenge is to apply them consistently and make them work offline.
SSI may not aim to replace every legacy system, but it can offer a crucial foundation for high-impact contexts, particularly in humanitarian response, where privacy, safety, and dignity should exist by design.
The Tools
SSI, supported by decentralized tools, applied cryptography, and open networks for tamper-evident audit, can help meet the challenge of legal identity without relying on institutional control, but by replacing it with cryptographic guarantees.
The landscape is evolving. New solutions enable context-aware, offline-verifiable credentials, ranging from zero knowledge proof of biometrics, TLS-based signatures, NFC-enabled e-passports and encrypted web accounts, without exposing underlying data. Advances in privacy-enhancing technologies now allow for selective disclosure, data minimization, and verifiable user consent, raising the bar for privacy and control in digital systems.
A diverse ecosystem of open frameworks and issuers can support governments and agencies working with the stateless to design identity systems that match their need, and avoid single points of failures. In order to fulfil SDG 16.9, the point is not to bypass civil registration but to let people prove relevant facts safely while governments strengthen their civil registration systems to better respond to citizens’ needs.
human.tech’s Credentials for Legal Identity
We’ve built human.tech to respond to exactly this need; reconciling what every human needs to access services and human rights with the regulatory requirements of government institutions and humanitarian organizations. human.tech is an open framework built on applied cryptography, designed to embed digital rights directly into the fabric of identity infrastructure, grounded in principles like self-custody, universal personhood, and privacy by default.
Achieving legal identity for all will require collaboration between states, NGOs, and institutions. Tools like human.tech contribute to this ecosystem by offering an open-source framework that can support people with no root documents or upgrade the privacy and resilience of existing credentials. human.tech’s backend, secured by Human Network, inherits the same economic security as Ethereum, the network that currently secures billions in tokenized dollars and other critical infrastructure.
Humanitarian Credential in Pilot
Relay ID, developed by Refunite and Holonym Foundation, equips community leaders to create digital wallets, validate identities through peer trust, and coordinate resource distribution through stablecoin finance with simple interfaces and familiar tools like WhatsApp, SMS, and Face ID. Relay ID is currently being piloted in Rwanda and Uganda, where trusted community leaders, who collectively serve networks reaching over 135 million people, are testing onboarding, aid delivery, and recovery workflows in real-world conditions.
About human.tech
human.tech is a suite of technologies designed to enhance personal freedom, privacy, and financial autonomy. human.tech provides innovative solutions for secure identity, data ownership, and private transactions, ensuring that technology remains a tool for human empowerment.
