AVS SPOTLIGHT: Human Network by Holonym - Building Human Keys for Perfect Crypto Onboarding
Imagine the digital world as a sprawling city where every building requires a different complex key—random strings of characters that are impossible to remember and easy to lose. In today's crypto landscape, these seed phrases and private keys create significant barriers to mainstream adoption, functioning as complicated locks that keep most people outside.
For users, this means constant anxiety about losing access to their assets, frustration with complex passwords, and a steep learning curve that keeps millions away from web3's benefits. Stories of people losing fortunes due to misplaced seed phrases aren't just cautionary tales—they're symptoms of a fundamental design flaw.
Enter Human Network by Holonym Foundation—creating what the industry has desperately needed: human-friendly keys derived from what we know, have, and are.
The Identity Barrier
Today's blockchain ecosystem has a fundamental usability problem. Users face an impossible choice:
- Self-custody with seed phrases (high security, terrible UX)
- Web2-style authentication (better UX, compromised security)
Neither option truly delivers what mainstream users need—intuitive access without centralized control. When people lose seed phrases, they lose assets permanently. When they use centralized authentication, they surrender the core benefits of decentralization.
Traditional solutions attempt to improve usability by sacrificing security, creating single points of failure through web2 accounts, siloed biometric authentication systems, or custodial solutions that hold your keys.
Human Network provides a breakthrough solution that feels familiar to users while maintaining cryptographic strength, like having a master key that works anywhere but can only be created by you, using information you already know or have.
The network achieves this by creating a threshold decentralized network for verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (vOPRF) computation, enabling users to generate cryptographic keys from familiar inputs while maintaining enterprise-grade security.
A Universal Identity Layer
Human Network builds a foundation for perfect crypto onboarding through two revolutionary services:
1. Intuitive Keys for Frictionless Onboarding
Imagine logging into your crypto wallet as easily as you access your email—using a combination of your password and face scan, but with the security of self-custody. If you get a new phone, the same inputs recreate your cryptographic keys instantly, with no seed phrase backup required.
The network enables anyone to create cryptographic keys based on familiar authentication methods:
- Passwords and security questions
- Social logins
- Government IDs
- Biometrics
These Human Keys are deterministically generated, giving users self-custodial control across any device without seed phrases. The keys can be reproduced using the same inputs on any compatible device, making them universally accessible.
This is made possible through threshold Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (OPRF) technology, which transforms low-entropy human data into high-entropy cryptographic keys. Think of it like turning your simple, memorable password (which alone would be vulnerable to hacking) into an extremely complex cryptographic key through a special process that adds massive computational strength without requiring you to remember anything complicated.
The network never sees the user's input but adds sufficient entropy to create keys that are computationally infeasible to crack.
2. Programmable Privacy through Provable Encryption
Human Network allows users to encrypt sensitive data while proving it was encrypted correctly. The network never sees or stores the encrypted data itself—it only assists in decryption when specific conditions are met, enabling:
- Compliance requirements for regulated DeFi
- Loan default triggers for undercollateralized lending
- Custom privacy conditions set by developers or users
This capability (known technically as DecryptBabyJubJub) uses advanced cryptography to ensure that even if parts of the system were compromised, user data remains protected, similar to how a bank vault requires multiple keys held by different people to open. It facilitates this through a decentralized version of ElGamal encryption, ensuring that even if the network's security were compromised, the encrypted data remains safe without access to the stored ciphertext.
EigenLayer: The Essential Foundation
Human Network derives its privacy and resilience from Ethereum's trust network through EigenLayer's shared security model. This architecture provides three crucial components:
- Economic Security: Human Network is live on EigenLayer mainnet with over $1 billion in staked assets delegated to 9 operators.
- Distributed Computation: A threshold setup where at least t out of n nodes must participate to derive keys or decrypt data.
- Verifiable Operations: Lightweight zero-knowledge proofs attesting to honest computation.
Critically, EigenLayer's AVS framework significantly streamlined Human Network's development. A key objective, decentralizing Human Network, had previously been deferred on their roadmap due to the significant challenge of establishing independent, robust security. Bootstrapping security allowed their team to concentrate on perfecting core functionalities, secure in the knowledge that they inherit robust security guarantees without the immense undertaking of designing and launching their own complex token-based consensus mechanisms.
For users and developers, this integration means unprecedented peace of mind and financial security, with the assurance that sensitive operations are verified across a diverse network of operators rather than relying on any single point of failure.
Real-World Impact
Human Network has already demonstrated transformative results:
- Actively rolling out its security to an engaged community of over 2 million user identities and 34.5 million credentials
- Created a two-click onboarding process without compromising security
- Self-custodial wallets and Proof of Personhood credentials built using Human Network in partnership with Refunite for direct aid distribution in Africa
This translates to real benefits for users, developers, and platforms:
- Users gain hardware-level security for hot wallets through distributed key generation and two-party computation
- Developers can build frictionless onboarding without sacrificing self-custody principles
- Platforms ensure capital flows to real humans, not bots or bad actors
"We built Human Network to solve tech needs we faced: we needed a way to onboard users without giving Web2 companies access to their keys and private data. We similarly needed a way to provably encrypt data and be decrypted according to certain conditions, so that regulated industries could adopt ZK identity. Human Network has helped us do both of these, 1000xing the amount of users we can reach." ~
Nanak Nihal Khalsa, Co-founder, Holonym Foundation
Why This Matters
As blockchain ecosystems multiply and mature, the need for human-centric identity becomes critical. Human Network doesn't aim to replace existing infrastructure—it preserves what makes each blockchain unique while adding a standardized layer for intuitive key management.
Through this powerful combination—EigenLayer's security infrastructure and Human Network's intuitive key derivation—we're moving toward a world where blockchain applications are accessible to everyone, regardless of technical expertise. The result is a unified ecosystem that preserves decentralization while eliminating usability barriers.
For users and developers, this means unprecedented peace of mind and financial security backed by over $1 billion in staked assets, distributed across a diverse network of operators.
This means no more anxiety about lost seed phrases, no more complex key management, and no more compromising on security for convenience. The vision of crypto that's as easy to use as traditional apps, but with the power of self-custody, is finally becoming a reality.
Learn More About Human Network's Tech
- Visit network.human.tech
- Read about Threshold OPRF for Human Keys
- Follow Holonym for updates
- Twitter X: @humnnetwork