I counted the photos of my passport on my camera roll last month. Fourteen. Fourteen apps, three years, the same document photographed over and over because each platform needed its own fresh copy before it would let me in.
Nobody talks about what that actually costs. Not the ten minutes per verification — the copies. Every KYC I complete doesn't just prove who I am to one company, it creates a new file of my passport sitting on a server I don't control, managed by a compliance team I've never met, waiting to be the next line in a breach report. I started calling this the copy tax: the real price of identity verification isn't the friction, it's the sediment. Every app you've ever verified with is still holding a piece of you.
I've been reading how Newton Protocol handles this differently. A developer can register KYC data once, and another developer's policy can check an attribute against it — age, jurisdiction, approval status — without ever seeing the underlying document. The identity data isn't copied into a new silo; it's referenced and verified inside the same policy evaluation that governs the transaction itself, then discarded from view. The check happens, the document doesn't travel.
What I don't know is whether platforms will actually trust each other's verification enough to use this the way it's designed — checking an attribute through someone else's KYC instead of quietly running their own anyway, out of habit or liability instinct. Reusing an attestation still means trusting the party who issued it, and that trust doesn't build itself just because the cryptography works.
I still have fourteen copies of my passport out there. None of them are coming back. I'd just like the fifteenth app to be the last one that asks for a new one.
@NewtonProtocol $NEWT #Newt #newt
Nobody talks about what that actually costs. Not the ten minutes per verification — the copies. Every KYC I complete doesn't just prove who I am to one company, it creates a new file of my passport sitting on a server I don't control, managed by a compliance team I've never met, waiting to be the next line in a breach report. I started calling this the copy tax: the real price of identity verification isn't the friction, it's the sediment. Every app you've ever verified with is still holding a piece of you.
I've been reading how Newton Protocol handles this differently. A developer can register KYC data once, and another developer's policy can check an attribute against it — age, jurisdiction, approval status — without ever seeing the underlying document. The identity data isn't copied into a new silo; it's referenced and verified inside the same policy evaluation that governs the transaction itself, then discarded from view. The check happens, the document doesn't travel.
What I don't know is whether platforms will actually trust each other's verification enough to use this the way it's designed — checking an attribute through someone else's KYC instead of quietly running their own anyway, out of habit or liability instinct. Reusing an attestation still means trusting the party who issued it, and that trust doesn't build itself just because the cryptography works.
I still have fourteen copies of my passport out there. None of them are coming back. I'd just like the fifteenth app to be the last one that asks for a new one.
@NewtonProtocol $NEWT #Newt #newt