Human identity verification on Celo - built for the agents and dApps that need to know who they're dealing with. Zero-knowledge proofs, private AI reasoning via Venice, on-chain credentials via EAS, structured claims layer. Verify once, credential is free for everyone to read, forever.

Mission Summary

Make human identity verification as composable and accessible as token transfers on Celo. Four tiers from free (onchain reputation, no documents) to $0.75 (full biometric KYC + AML). Zero PII stored. Zero-knowledge proofs. Private AI reasoning. Structured claims queryable by any agent. Credentials reusable across the entire ecosystem. Identity as a public good.

What Makes This Different

• Venice as reasoning layer, not just scoring. Most KYC systems use hard-coded rules. KYH uses Venice's private AI inference to make verification decisions - reasoning over all provider signals holistically. Venice retains zero data. The privacy guarantee is structural, not a policy page.
• Two-layer credential design. On-chain attestation is permanent and unopinionated. Off-chain claims are structured JSON, versioned, pinned to IPFS, and extensible. Add new claim types without schema migrations. The on-chain layer provides durability; the off-chain layer provides granularity.
• Verify once, read forever, for free, for everyone. The first verification costs pennies. After that, the on-chain credential and structured claims are a public good. No per-read fees. No API keys for lookups.
• Zero-knowledge by default. Self Protocol's ZK passport proofs mean no passport images, no document scans, no biometric photos are ever stored. Just math proving humanity.
• Modular provider architecture. Self, Didit, Human Passport are the current providers. The system is designed so new identity services plug in without schema changes. The API and attestation format stay stable.
• Sub-cent economics on Celo. A penny to prove you're human with a ZK passport scan. Celo's low gas fees make micropayment-based identity verification economically viable at price points that would be absurd on other chains.

As AI agents gain the ability to transact autonomously on Celo, there's no lightweight, composable way to verify that a wallet belongs to a real, unique human.

Existing KYC tools are built for banks: expensive ($1.50+ per check), document-heavy, off-chain, and impossible to reuse across applications. Every new dApp forces the same human through verification again. The credentials don't travel. The data gets stored on corporate servers indefinitely, and the verification logic is opaque and inflexible.

The result is sybil attacks in governance, regulatory gaps in DeFi, exclusion of the unbanked, and a growing pile of personal data sitting in breach-prone databases.

Know Your Human is a tiered identity verification API for the Celo ecosystem. It works in three layers:

1. Verification providers (modular and pluggable)
Self Protocol provides zero-knowledge passport proofs: the human taps their passport's NFC chip, a ZK-SNARK is generated on-device, and the proof is submitted without any images or documents being stored. For higher security tiers, Didit adds biometric liveness detection, face-document matching, and AML/sanctions screening. Human Passport provides on-chain reputation scoring. New identity providers can be connected at any time without changing the schema or API.

2. Venice AI as the core reasoning engine
All provider signals are sent to Venice AI for holistic analysis. Venice makes the actual pass/fail decision, not hard-coded if/else logic. It catches patterns that threshold rules miss: "liveness passed but wallet is 2 hours old," "document valid but biometric confidence is borderline," "multiple providers disagree." Venice retains zero data. The privacy guarantee is structural: data flows through, the decision is made, and everything is forgotten. This is private cognition applied to identity verification.

3. On-chain credentials + off-chain claims layer
KYH issues an EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) attestation directly to the human's wallet on Celo. Valid for 90 days. The on-chain schema is deliberately lean and unopinionated (level, provider, demoMode) so it never needs migrations.

The structured claims live off-chain in a versioned evidence layer: uniqueHuman, over18, livenessConfirmed, faceMatch, notSanctioned, nationality, etc. Each claim traces back to which provider verified it. The evidence hash is stored in the attestation as evidenceRef.

Any agent can query the free /api/check/:address endpoint and get structured claims directly: "is this person over 18?" returns claims.over18: true. The full evidence blob is available at /api/evidence/:hash. New claims (phone, email, residency) just need a key added. No on-chain schema changes.

Pricing: Agents pay per verification in cUSD via x402 micropayments. Reputation tier is free (no gas required). Document tier is $0.01. Biometric is $0.25. Full KYC with AML screening is $0.75. No API keys, no sign-ups, no subscriptions. The wallet IS the identity.

Agent identity: Agents identify via ERC-8004 and/or Self Protocol. Agents verified via Self Agent ID get 20% off all verification fees. Both sides of the human-agent equation have identity.

ENS integration: Every API endpoint accepts ENS names (e.g. vitalik.eth) and every response enriches wallet addresses with ENS names and avatars when available.

Per-verification fees in cUSD via x402 micropayments

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