Privado ID

Privado ID sits on cryptographic foundations that reach far beyond its own products: the team pioneered Circom and SnarkJS, the open-source zero-knowledge tooling that underpins a vast swath of the ZK ecosystem, including infrastructure behind Worldcoin, TikTok, and systems serving well over a hundred million users. That gravitational position — being the ZK-proof plumbing others build on — is a rare and durable form of relevance. Spun out of Polygon Labs in 2024 as an independent, chain-agnostic identity company (formerly Polygon ID), Privado ID lets people hold W3C verifiable credentials and prove attributes like being over 18 without exposing underlying data, exactly the privacy-preserving primitive that a surveillance-wary internet and age-verification-mandating regulators increasingly demand. Its 2024 merger with Disco.xyz unified multichain verifiable data and reputation, bringing Consensys veteran Evin McMullen aboard as co-founder and chief strategy officer, and it incubated Billions Network — a non-biometric proof-of-personhood system using just a passport and phone that positions itself as the privacy-respecting alternative to Worldcoin's iris-scanning approach. As AI floods the internet with synthetic humans and agents, verifiable proof-of-personhood becomes essential infrastructure, and Privado ID offers it without the biometric-collection backlash that dogs its highest-profile rival. Owning foundational ZK tooling plus a credible personhood network is a powerful two-layer position.