Hi there. I've done a bit of work on specifying human-centric identity goals for the internet over the last 10 years. May I suggest you look at Microsoft Vega? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/vega-zero-know... (I have no affiliation).

In brief, I think they aim to solve the most important needs for online identity-gated services in a maximally private way.

For instance, I'd like to see .self offer the following: a single domain to any person in the world with identity blinded. I can imagine two 'tranches': say xxx.v.self for 'verified' and xxx.u.self for 'unverified'.

Both would use a Zero Knowledge proof to confirm they had not already registered a domain; verified would register with you guys or a data broker some PII in case it was needed for verification / checks / etc, while unverified would maintain the promise of one domain = one person, but not allow the TLD or registrars to be able to unblind which person it is.

Use cases like this would be really fantastic. And, obviously could be tested out and tried on a normal domain name while you make your pitch, and put in for the auction / however ICANN is currently managing TLD launches.

Please submit this to us via our contact form, we will need lots of community input! https://hccf.onmy.cloud/get-involved/

It is good that Microsoft Vega is popularizing zero-knowledge identity-based attestations. It's unfortunate that they're doing so in a relatively inflexible way.

I wish the Vega people had oriented their work around general-purpose zkVMs instead of application-specific ZK circuits. The latter is a fleeting efficiency win; the former is a permanent flexibility advantage. ZK-based privacy advocates shouldn't over-index on proof performance on today's systems when zkVM systems have been making multiple-OOM performance improvements over the past couple of years.

IOW, with Nova, the Vega people are trying to do something very clever (just as the BBS+ people are trying to do something very cleaver) that general-purpose compute wins have made unnecessary.

Something like RISC Zero will let you run arbitrary Rust code under zero knowledge in a few hundred milliseconds with little fuss. Nobody appreciates that identity verification is one special case of a vast set of useful applications enabled by widespread adoption of a ZK compute platform.