Digital Identity Under Platform Rule (Part One)
Challenging the Authority Platforms Claim Over Identity in Digital and Physical Spaces
Decentralized Identity Without the Hype
In my last article, I explored the hidden cost of “free” social media and how blockchain might offer an alternative—one where users could reclaim value by monetizing the data they currently give away for free. But the premise came with a caveat: the system only shifts if enough people opt in. A few users asserting ownership over their data won’t change the status quo. For any meaningful transformation, collective action is required—millions of users recognizing not only the value of their data but also their power in numbers.
This article was sparked by a conversation I had with someone from our blockchain accelerators group at work. We were discussing similar themes around data ownership, but in a slightly different context: digital identity. And that got me thinking: In a world where platforms hold the keys to our digital selves—our logins, our credentials, our reputations—what does it actually mean to own your identity, and why is that a question we should take seriously, in a space where so many concepts sound important but fade into buzzwords?
As you may have gathered from the articles I’ve written so far, my interest in blockchain isn’t rooted purely in the technology itself or in hyped-up products that promise “value” for the sake of marketability. Rather, my interest lies in the original ethos that the technology promises to make tangible—and in the underlying question of how digital infrastructure shapes power: how systems are designed, who they serve, and whether it’s possible to build ones that reflect a more thoughtful balance between individual autonomy and collective structure.
The idea of a decentralized or Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) initially struck me as yet another buzzword in a space full of them. Even as I’ve explored this concept more deeply through writing these articles, I’ve found that while certain aspects of decentralized identity are genuinely thought-provoking, they have not fully persuaded me.
Part One walks through the mechanics of decentralized identity and why it appeals to so many advocates. Part Two reflects my own attempt to assess whether those ideas hold up beyond the conceptual level—whether they meaningfully alter the balance of power, or whether they ultimately repackage familiar dynamics in new language, adding yet another layer of abstraction to an already crowded digital landscape.
Technological Concept
After reading dozens of pieces on the topic, one series finally helped the concept and its implications really click for me. It was a three-part blog post from the RadicalxChange Foundation, published back in 2019—a time when many of these ideas were still early and raw (see the RadicalxChange series: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.) I hadn’t heard of the foundation before stumbling across the article, but their framing was unusually clear and ambitious in scope. RadicalxChange is a civic innovation nonprofit that explores how emerging technologies can enable more democratic, equitable societies. Their work often sits at the intersection of tech, political theory, and institutional design, and this series on decentralized social identity reflects that interdisciplinary spirit.
Before diving into the broader implications, it’s worth pausing on how they actually define the concept at a technical level. In practice, the RadicalxChange vision of decentralized identity works like this: Instead of logging into platforms via a central authority like Google or Facebook, individuals hold their own digital credentials—similar to digital ID cards—that are issued by a range of sources, such as schools, employers, or community groups. Verification happens peer-to-peer, rather than through a central gatekeeper. These credentials live in a secure digital wallet, most likely in an app on the user’s smartphone, functioning much like Apple Wallet or Google Pay but for identity. The user has full control over which credentials to store, how to organize them, and which ones to reveal in any given interaction. You might show proof of membership without sharing your name, or verify your age without revealing your birthdate.
This model represents a shift from a one-to-many architecture—where a few IdPs manage access for millions—to a many-to-many network. In this setup, users manage relationships with many different credential issuers—individuals, institutions, or communities—each of whom can verify a specific aspect of their identity. These credentials are portable and reusable, held by the individual and shared selectively depending on the context. To make this possible, the system relies on what is essentially a universal identity wallet—an application that stores and organizes credentials securely on the user’s device. All credential issuers, from institutions to peer groups, can become compatible with this system by following shared technical standards for credential formats and verification protocols, making the wallet interoperable across a wide range of services and communities. This concept is outlined in Part Two, where the authors describe a user interface that brings together credentials from diverse sources, allowing individuals to manage them privately without central coordination. Importantly, the architecture avoids funneling everything through a single identity hub or namespace. The ultimate ambition, as suggested in Part Three, is for this universal wallet system to transcend national boundaries altogether. While ambitious, the vision is a globally interoperable infrastructure for identity—one that could underpin new forms of digital citizenship and democratic coordination beyond the limits of the nation-state. Instead, identity is treated as distributed, emergent, and responsive to the specific social setting in which it’s used.
This setup removes the need for traditional Identity Providers (IdPs)—centralized services that currently dominate the login layer of the internet. IdPs not only determine who you are in digital spaces, they also collect and monetize your activity, creating lock-in and surveillance risks. They track user behaviors, preferences, and interactions—data that is often sold to advertisers or used to create targeted profiles. And once these systems accumulate large stores of behavioral data, users become functionally ‘trapped’—switching services means losing access and convenience. It’s the same dynamic I explored in my last article: our data, constantly mined and monetized by platforms, becomes the product we no longer control.
Zero Knowledge Proofs
Although the RadicalxChange series doesn’t explicitly mention zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs), it’s worth briefly touching on how this cryptographic technique could enhance the kind of selective disclosure described in their vision. For instance, being able to prove that you’re of legal drinking age without revealing your actual birthdate—or confirming membership in a group without disclosing your name—are both use cases that ZKPs make technically feasible.
As explained in this article by Mina Protocol, zero-knowledge proofs allow users to verify the truth of a statement without revealing the underlying data. The mechanism relies on cryptographic algorithms that let a ‘prover’ demonstrate to a ‘verifier’ that they know certain information (like their birthdate or income bracket) without ever exposing the data itself. This is achieved through math-intensive commitments and challenge-response interactions that confirm truth without transfer. This approach ensures that “only the proof is shared, not the underlying data itself,” allowing individuals to verify key aspects of their identity while maintaining full control over their private information.
This opens up a wide range of practical uses for identity: someone could prove they’re over 18 without revealing their date of birth, show they live in a particular voting district without disclosing their full address, or confirm their income level for benefits without submitting bank statements. In the context of a universal identity wallet, ZKPs could radically enhance user control while minimizing the data footprint shared across services—allowing people to prove enough, but never too much.
The Parallel Between Identity Providers and Nation-States
Earlier, we discussed how the ultimate goal of decentralized identity systems is to transcend the limits of nation-states altogether. In this context, however, we could note that traditional Identity Providers (IdPs) themselves function similarly to nation-states, with the power to completely shape users’ digital identities, limit their access, and even erase their existence. Like Natalie Smolenski notes in her article “A New Paradigm for Sovereignty on the High Seas: “web-based applications like Google, Facebook, and others are very similar to nation-states in this regard, only with the added sovereign power of completely constituting the identities of users, presetting their capabilities within the application, and even erasing their existence without recourse if they choose…They are accountable to their users insofar as without them their own existence is precarious, so they seek to please them; however, the legal terms of service agreements users agree to, and which are enforceable by the nation-state, grant users very few rights.” These platforms have become essential to modern life—acting as the infrastructure, “the seas, roads, buildings, schools, and libraries”, within which we interact, work, and express ourselves. However, users without access or the ability to control their data are left subject to the whims of whatever system they happen to fall under.
These risks have also been well-documented by critiques like this overview from Stanford’s Journal of Blockchain Law & Policy, which highlights how current identity infrastructures concentrate power and undermine both privacy and democratic participation. When a handful of companies or governments control access to identity, they gain disproportionate influence over who can participate in civic, economic, and political life. Centralized identity systems can inadvertently (or deliberately) exclude vulnerable groups, silence dissenting voices, and entrench inequality.
A clear example of this is India’s Aadhaar system—the world’s largest biometric ID program—which has drawn sustained criticism for its execution. While Aadhaar was intended to streamline access to services, it has also led to the exclusion of individuals from essential welfare programs due to authentication failures and bureaucratic mismanagement. Privacy and surveillance concerns have also been raised about the central database’s vulnerability and potential misuse. As reported by The Probe, Aadhaar has in some cases become a gatekeeping tool rather than an enabler—showing how even well-intentioned digital identity systems can backfire when implemented through rigid, top-down structures. By contrast, the model proposed by RadicalxChange avoids these dynamics entirely. It breaks identity into contextual pieces, distributes verification across many actors, and returns control to the user—without requiring a central intermediary to oversee or approve each interaction.
Concluding Part One
The parallel between identity providers and nation-states is a compelling one. Platforms do not merely mediate access; they define the terms of participation, legitimacy, and exclusion in ways that increasingly resemble sovereign power. This concentration of authority—rooted not in territory or law, but in control over data, credentials, and inference—points to a broader problem that extends beyond identity alone. Across digital systems, power has begun to accrue to those who control infrastructure and interpretation, raising familiar concerns about technological centralization and what is sometimes described as a form of informational or platform-based dominance - sometimes characterized, more bluntly, as a kind of data dictatorship rather than democratic governance.
Part Two turns to the question this framing raises. If centralized identity systems pose a real and growing problem, does decentralized identity meaningfully challenge that dynamic—or does it simply reframe it in new technical language? Can decentralization disrupt entrenched power, or is it yet another layer of abstraction that absorbs dissent without altering underlying structures? The next section examines whether decentralized identity represents a genuine shift, or whether it ultimately adds to the noise surrounding technological solutions to fundamentally political problems.
This reflection is part of my ongoing writing project, “Reverberations, Onchain”, exploring how blockchains can help us re-imagine how we organize, cooperate, and build shared futures.