Most online identity checks work the same way: you upload your passport or ID, a company stores it, and you hope it stays safe. Often it doesn't. In 2025, Discord disclosed a breach exposing around 70,000 government IDs [1], and a dating-safety app leaked roughly 13,000 driver's licenses [2].
There's an alternative, and it's the direction large technology companies are now taking. The idea is to prove a single fact - your age, that you're a real person, that you're eligible - without handing over the underlying document. The check runs on your own device, and the data stays with you.
Microsoft Research has published two systems built on this approach: Crescent in 2025 and Vega in 2026. Vega, presented at a leading security conference [3], generates this kind of proof in under a tenth of a second, with the credential never leaving the device.
The technology underneath Crescent isn't generic. Microsoft's workflow diagram [4] shows it compiling its identity circuits with Circom - the zero-knowledge toolset created by the team that built Billions Network. The same toolset already runs beneath Worldcoin, TikTok, and thousands of other applications used by more than 150 million people.
This shows where identity verification is heading and that the approach Billions Network has been building on is the one larger players are now adopting. Billions Network is already operating at that scale today: over 2.5 million verified users, with deployments at HSBC, Sony Bank, and governments worldwide.
Already building on zero-knowledge identity? Talk to the Billions Growth team
Footnotes:
[1] J. Peters, "Discord says 70,000 users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach," The Verge, 2025 https://www.theverge.com/news/797051/discord-government-ids-leaked-data-breach
[2] B. Ortutay (Associated Press), "Tea, an app for women to safely talk about men they date, has been breached, user IDs exposed," 2025 https://apnews.com/article/tea-app-women-breach-ids-selfies-dating-5433d5929bdfeb73f495d4775580a55f
[3] IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2026 in San Francisco, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/vega-zero-knowledge-proofs-for-digital-identity-in-the-age-of-ai/
[4] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/crescent-library-brings-privacy-to-digital-identity-systems
