@Walrus 🦭/acc Imagine your digital identity as a passport that you truly control one that proves who you are without broadcasting your life to everyone nearby. That’s the promise Humanity Protocol has been tuning toward, and now the project is taking a major step: migrating more than 10 million credentials from IPFS onto Walrus, becoming the first human ID partner inside the Sui ecosystem. Ambitious? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
Why does this migration matter? Because identity is the hinge on which so much of Web3 and the real world turns. With AI tools growing sharper and cheaper by the day, the risk of fraud, deepfakes, and Sybil attacks rises in lockstep. Humanity Protocol’s move to Walrus is about hardening the identity layer while keeping it private and self-custodied.
Why Walrus short version: guaranteed data availability. Think of Walrus as a climate-controlled archive that guarantees your passport won’t get lost in a shipping container somewhere. For identity systems, that guarantee is priceless. Storing credentials on a network that can promise reliable access and do so in a way that plays nicely with Sui unlocks a lot of downstream benefits for developers, businesses and everyday people.
What’s actually moving? Over 10 million credentials, including verifiable attestations like palm-scan-derived proofs of uniqueness, memberships, reputations, and achievements drawn from both Web2 and Web3 contexts. The plan isn’t to stop at 10 million. Humanity and Walrus are targeting growth to more than 100 million unique user credentials by the end of 2025, and Walrus expects to hold over 300GB of this identity data by year’s end. Those numbers aren’t just vanity metrics they signal scale, resilience, and the ability to serve real-world identity needs across sectors.
How does this help fight AI-driven abuse? Two ways: verifiability and self-custody. Humanity Protocol’s system anchors cryptographically verifiable credentials on-chain so that apps and services can check identity assertions quickly and reliably without collecting raw personal data. Palm scans provide a biometric uniqueness signal without exposing raw images the protocol stores a privacy-preserving form that proves uniqueness, not the picture itself. Combine that with Walrus’ dependable availability and Sui’s fast execution layer, and you get a setup where fraudsters can’t easily mass-produce fake identities or mount Sybil armies.
Developers gain a lot, too. Humanity is designed to be composable: plug the identity graph into a wallet, a marketplace, or a lending app and you instantly gain verifiable trust signals. With Walrus acting as the storage layer and Sui as the smart-contract layer, identity checks become faster, cheaper, and more private. That’s a neat triangle: credentials in Walrus, verification logic on Sui, and user-controlled disclosure at the edge. The result is a developer-friendly identity stack that scales.
Privacy is central here Humanity Protocol is privacy-first and self-custodied by design. That means the user holds the keys to their credential wallet and decides what to share and with whom. For businesses, this is a plug-and-play way to accept trusted credentials without building new KYC pipelines or hoarding PII. For users, it’s about reclaiming agency: you share attestations, not raw data.
Of course, migrating and scaling identity at this level comes with trade-offs and risks. Storing credentials even in privacy-preserving forms raises questions about custody, recovery and governance. Walrus and Humanity need to ensure that availability guarantees are matched by robust access controls and social recovery mechanisms so users aren’t locked out if they lose keys. There’s also the ongoing tension of biometrics: palm scans are less sensitive than full facial datasets, but any biometric signal must be handled with care. The teams are addressing this through layered encryption, selective disclosure and strong UX around key management.
The path forward is clear and deliberate. Short-term efforts focus on the actual migration, ensuring data integrity, and smoothing onboarding for current and new users. Medium-term, the partnership wants to accelerate growth 10M to 100M credentials while expanding features like privacy-preserving reputation, merchant attestation services, and AI-safety tooling. Long-term, as AI becomes woven into more services, a resilient identity backbone could become indispensable: marketplaces for verified AI training data, fraud-resistant social graphs and cross-chain identity portability.
At its heart, this migration is about trust engineered with care. Bringing Humanity Protocol’s identity fabric into Walrus and the Sui ecosystem is not just a technical shift it’s an act of design that prioritizes privacy, resilience and real-world usability. For users, it means credentials that are verifiable yet self-controlled. For businesses, it’s a lower-friction path to trusted interactions. For the wider ecosystem, it’s a step toward an identity infrastructure that can scale to the millions and eventually the hundreds of millions without sacrificing the human dignity at its core.
If you care about making the internet less anonymous in the worst ways and more accountable in the best ways, watch this space. This migration might be the first domino in a broader movement where identity is both private and trusted, where AI can be powerful without making identity brittle and where people actually keep the keys to their own digital lives.#Walrus $WAL
