Polyhedra i-D: Proving Identity Without Surrendering Control
Why the next wave of identity tech must protect us from AI, fraud, and overreach.
It’s been a strange year for truth online. In the UK, the number of young people struggling with gambling has more than doubled in just twelve months. More than 85,000 children are now at risk, many betting on the internet through borrowed accounts or age checks that barely deserve the name.
In Australia, new laws will soon make it illegal for under-16s to use specific social platforms. The fines for companies that cannot prove user ages will reach up to 50 million dollars. The government has made it clear that building centralised biometric databases is not the answer.
And in the US, a school found itself in the headlines when students used AI to create deepfake videos of classmates. The fakes were so convincing that, at first glance, they could have been real. This wasn’t done by a cybercrime ring; it was just teenagers with a laptop and a grudge.
Different countries, different problems, and one common problem. We no longer have a reliable way to tell who is real online.
The limits of the old
Most verification systems were built for a pre-AI world. Upload a passport photo, tick a box, move on. Now AI can generate faces so perfect they can fool both people and machines. Centralised ID databases are no better. They create permanent risks to personal data and are one breach away from disaster.
Doing nothing is not an option. Whether it’s stopping underage gambling, enforcing age limits on social media, or preventing malicious impersonation, the need for reliable verification has never been greater.
A different way to prove you’re real
Polyhedra i-D, powered by zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML), changes the model entirely. Instead of collecting and storing sensitive information, it proves you’re real without revealing it.
Your face is processed locally on your device. What is shared is a cryptographic proof, not the face itself. That proof is checked on-chain in milliseconds, stored immutably, and cannot be reverse-engineered to reconstruct your identity.
Soon, hardware-level authenticity checks through standards like C2PA will make it even harder for AI-generated fakes to pass as real. Data protection isn’t an afterthought; it’s built into the system.
From research to real-world proof
Polyhedra’s i-D is the result of years of work on the foundations of verifiable computation.
We’ve been building the zkML stack from the ground up. Tools like zkPyTorch make it simple to convert complex machine learning models into zero-knowledge circuits. The Expander prover dramatically accelerates proof generation, making advanced zkML applications viable at production scale. All of this was designed to be modular, chain-agnostic, and ready for real-world use.
More than an identity solution, it’s a new trust primitive: the ability to prove biometric uniqueness safely, on-device, in milliseconds. The same stack can support proof-carrying identity, zk attestations, and other computations that safeguard personal data-all essential in an AI-native internet.
This reflects our core philosophy. Build primitives that developers can compose into systems without introducing new trust bottlenecks. Polyhedra i-D is one of many ways to put that philosophy into people’s hands.
Why this matters now
This is data-protective verification: Proof that you are human, without surrendering what is your most valuable asset, your Identity.
In an age where AI can fake anything and a world that demands you show it, you should always control what makes “you you”.
Experience Polyhedra’s i-D → http://id.polyhedra.network