The following is a guest post and opinion from Evin McMullen, Co-founder & CEO at Billions.Network.

ZK Won’t Save Us: Why Digital Identity Must Stay Plural

Zero-knowledge (ZK)-wrapped identity was lauded as a silver bullet to solve everything about presenting yourself online—providing verifiable, privacy-preserving proof of personhood without the need to trust governments, platforms, or biometric databases.

But as Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin argued in June, encryption alone can’t fix “architecture-level” coercion. When identity becomes rigid, centralized, and one-size-fits-all, pseudonymity dies and coercion becomes inevitable.

The risks Vitalik raised in his recent post are not just theoretical. They are the inevitable outcome of systems that try to impose a single, fixed identity on a pluralistic internet. One account per person sounds fair—until it becomes mandatory. Add ZK proofs to the mix, and all you’ve done is encrypt the shackles.

Digital identity is becoming an important issue for governments, as shown by the G7 commissioning a report last year to inform policy, and the EU’s summit in Berlin in June to assess its regulatory framework for electronic identities and trust services.

The Limits of ZK Alone

Zero-knowledge proofs allow users to prove statements—age, residency, uniqueness—without revealing underlying personal data by using cryptographic methods. It’s like showing a sealed envelope that everyone can confirm holds the right answer, without anyone ever opening it. In theory, this should support privacy. But as Vitalik rightly argues, the problem is not what the proofs hide, but what the system assumes.

Most ZK-ID schemes rely on a core design principle: one identity per person. That might make sense for voting or preventing bots. But in real life, people operate across many social contexts—work, family, online, etc.—that don’t map neatly onto a single ID. Enforcing a one-pe

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Author: Evin McMullen