In 2007, I helped write something called A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. The internet was young. Social networks were just taking off. And a small group of us saw a problem coming: as people moved their lives online, they were losing control of something fundamental — their own identity, their own data, their own voice.
We believed that people should own their personal information. That they should control how it's shared. And that they should have the freedom to carry their identity wherever they go online.
That was almost twenty years ago. We were right about the problem. But the problem got much, much worse than any of us imagined.
The Trust Crisis
Today, artificial intelligence can clone your voice in seconds. It can generate a video of your face saying things you never said. It can forge documents that look identical to the real thing. It can impersonate you to your bank, your employer, your family.
The numbers are staggering. Deepfake fraud has increased over 2,000% in three years. Identity theft costs more than $50 billion a year. More than half of Americans have been scammed. And this is just the beginning — the tools are getting cheaper, faster, and more convincing every day.
This isn't just a technology problem. It's a trust problem. When you receive a document, you can't be sure it's real. When a business receives a wire authorization, they can't be sure it's actually from their client. When a doctor reviews a medical record, when a bank processes a payment, when a company hires a new employee — none of them can be fully certain they're dealing with who they think they're dealing with.
The entire infrastructure of trust that the digital economy is built on — passwords, Social Security numbers, security questions, one-time codes — all of it was designed for a world before AI. All of it is broken.
What I've Spent My Career On
I've been working on this problem, in different forms, for nearly two decades. After the Bill of Rights, I went to Microsoft and built a product called Docs.com in partnership with Facebook. We gave people granular control over what they share and with whom.
Then I founded this company. Originally called Notarize, our first mission was deceptively simple: make it possible to notarize a document online. But to do that, we had to solve a much harder problem first. We had to prove, with legal certainty, that the person on the other side of the screen was who they claimed to be. Not probably. Not likely. Proven.
That took ten years of changing laws in 47 states. It took building identity verification that meets the highest federal standard. It took creating a network of live fraud agents, deepfake detection, and real-time monitoring. And it took earning the trust of Fortune 100 companies who put $640 billion in transactions through our platform.
But notarization was never the destination. It was proof of concept. What we actually built was identity infrastructure.
"The only thing AI cannot generate is you. We're making that provable."
What Proof Is Building
The solution to the trust crisis is surprisingly clear once you see it: every person and every business needs a real, verified digital identity — not a username, not a password, not a number that can be stolen. A cryptographic identity that is mathematically yours, bound to your biometrics, and impossible to forge.
First, we verify who you are. You go through a one-time enrollment — scanning your ID, confirming your face, proving you're a real person. This meets the highest legal standard for identity verification in the country.
Then, we give you a digital key that is uniquely yours — a personal cryptographic certificate tied to your fingerprint or your face. No one can copy it. No one can steal it. It's not a password that can be guessed or a number that can be leaked. It's math.
From that point forward, you use that identity everywhere. Sign a contract. Authorize a payment. Approve an AI agent to act on your behalf. Every action creates an unforgeable record that proves it was really you, that the content hasn't been tampered with, and exactly what you authorized.
The Network
None of this works if it's limited to one company. Trust has to be universal to be useful. That's why Proof operates as a network — what we call the Identity Authorization Network. The model is similar to what Visa built for payments. Visa didn't issue every credit card or process every transaction alone. They built the network that connected banks who issue cards with merchants who accept them.
We're doing the same for identity. Major financial institutions verify and enroll their customers onto the network through their existing banking relationships. The more people and institutions that join, the more valuable and secure the network becomes for everyone.
What This Makes Possible
Payments you can trust. When you pay with a verified identity instead of just a card number, the payment network knows it's really you. Fewer declined transactions, lower fees, an end to the fraud that costs the economy billions.
AI agents you can control. As artificial intelligence begins to shop, book, and transact on our behalf, a critical question emerges: how does anyone know the agent was actually authorized by you? Proof lets you sign a specific mandate — a set of permissions — with your verified identity, so every agent action traces back to a real person who really approved it.
Records that can't be faked. Medical records, legal contracts, financial authorizations, images, videos — anything can be signed with verified identity so that any recipient can independently confirm it's authentic and unaltered.
Businesses that can be believed. Wire fraud, invoice scams, and business email compromise depend on impersonating companies and employees. When a business and its authorized signers carry verified cryptographic identities, impersonation becomes mathematically impossible.
The World We're Building
I started this work because I believe people deserve to own and control their identity online. That conviction hasn't changed in twenty years. What's changed is the urgency.
The world we're building is one where you verify your identity once and carry it with you everywhere — like a passport for the internet, except it can't be forged. Where you decide what to share and with whom. Where every important document, transaction, and authorization comes with mathematical proof of who created it and that it hasn't been changed.
A world where businesses can trust the people they transact with, and people can trust the businesses that serve them. Where AI makes us more productive without making us more vulnerable. Where the answer to the question "Is this real?" is never a guess.
This is not a small ambition. It is the foundational infrastructure problem of the digital economy. Someone has to solve it, and we intend to be the ones who do.
We've spent ten years proving we can build the hardest parts. Now we're building the network that makes it universal.
