Digital identity is crucial to how we live our onchain lives. At baseline, taking control of one’s digital identity means you have the authority, autonomy, and tools to manage your personal information, decide who can access it, and control how it is used across digital platforms. It enables you to protect your privacy, verify your identity, and manage how you interact in the digital world without relying on third-party control or centralized entities.

Taking things farther, in web3 you can prove your humanity and leverage your digital reputation for seamless onchain transactions and diverse interactions with dapps; and you can also foster personal connections by expressing your affiliation with onchain communities.

On Linea, we are building a human-centric identity system – composed of Verax, Proof of Humanity (PoH), and Linea Names – empowering you to take full control and optimize the management of your onchain identity in order to set the terms for your digital and financial life.

Read on to learn how.

Verax is an onchain attestation registry, which is a consolidated location onchain for storing pieces of data called attestations. The community-maintained initiative was originally built by teams including Consensys, Clique, Aspecta, Hapi, and Karma3 Labs. Currently, Verax is one of the largest attestation registries in web3 and a major provider of PoH attestations, with nearly 6 million attestations and over 1.5 million unique users.

Attestations are claims or verifiable credentials issued by one entity about another. A government could, for example, attest to a person’s citizenship or age, allowing them to access specific services that require proof of age or residency without revealing sensitive personal data. Employers and educational institutions could issue credentials such as degrees, certificates, and employment history to streamline job application or background check processes.

Within a web3 context specifically, attestations can enable a decentralized reputation system. For users, attestations accumulated over time from different sources can vouch for their behavior, trustworthiness, or skill levels. Dapps or P2P DeFi users could then rely on onchain reputation scores based on attestations to make lending, borrowing, or trading decisions—establishing trust without centralized intermediaries.

While this sort of data is traditionally minted onchain as soulbound tokens (SBTs) / non-transferable NFTs, attestations offer several advantages: they are easily discoverable, structured for easy consumption, and can expire, be revoked, replaced, or linked together.

For builders on Linea, Verax allows them to make one single integration, and subsequently consume and compose attestations from multiple sources.  Human verification attestations in particular are extremely valuable because they enable Linea dapps to confirm they are interacting with real-world humans—something much more interesting than interacting with pseudonymous wallet addresses.

Behavioral attestations could then be used by dapps to create and offer tailored experiences for certain users, including assigning unique rewards and discounts. For example a KYC’d user with a good lending reputation could access undercollaterialized lending offers from DeFi dapps on Linea.

Verax’s unique module architecture means it can be used for virtually any use case, so these examples are really just the beginning.

The first Verax use case to gain traction on Linea is Proof-of-Humanity.

We built Proof of Humanity to help protect communities against sybils and bots. Our PoH system allows users to prove they are human by selecting the verification approach that best suits their individual journeys in web3.

For users, attaining PoH verification provides a credential that can be used across the ecosystem, granting access to increasing benefits. For builders, Linea’s PoH system offers a free-to-use database of real users in the ecosystem, helping protect dapps against bots and sybils.

To obtain PoH, users navigate to the Proof of Humanity portal and select three PoH providers for attestations, choosing at least one from Group A and two from Group B. This flexible approach recognizes that not all methods suit everyone; some may avoid sharing sensitive biometrics, while others may reuse KYC from a CEX or rely on onchain analytics. By offering multiple options, Linea accommodates different preferences and journeys. Whether you are an OG or new to web3, we provide this choice because we recognize everyone’s experience is unique.

Earlier this year, ENS domains launched on Linea, allowing users to begin switching their 42-character Ethereum wallet addresses to a human-readable domain. Now, everyone can obtain an ENS under the Linea ENS subdomain, such as username.linea.eth, by visiting the Linea ENS portal to register their username. The portal requires users to prove their humanity to prevent bot squatting and limits usernames to one per account. Additionally, Linea names are resolvable on L1 via an offchain resolver.

Linea Names represents a significant advancement in enabling users to claim their onchain identity, simplifying the process of registering ENS names and building user profiles. By providing a single canonical identifier for real users across the ecosystem, developers can create consistent and coherent user experiences, making navigating Linea feel natural and intuitive.

For users, registering a *.linea.eth name provides a human-readable identifier that is natively integrated on Linea. This identifier can be associated with your address to receive funds. Moreover, your Linea ENS name allows you to build a profile that can be used by dapps when you log in using your wallet. Once you have your *.linea.eth name, you can click on “Edit profile” and “Add more to profile” to include additional fields.

Expanded use cases of Linea Names have already begun to spring up, serving as identifiers for some of Linea’s strongest communities. Efrogs, an OG PFP collection on Linea, integrated with CCIP Read to automatically provide NFT holders with personalized ENS subdomains like 1.efrogs.eth. Project-specific subnames like this allow users to tie their membership to their web3 identity, serving as a status symbol and enhancing their sense of belonging within the community.

We stand at the frontier of this space, innovating to deliver more exceptional experiences and increased value to both Linea users and dapps.

On top of the foundation of the tools outlined above, we are working to expand utility so that each individual can do more with their digital identity. We aim to create even richer experiences for each person interacting onchain with verified humanity and credentials.