Proof of Personhood evaluated across measured cost to farm an identity, uniqueness checkable without the issuer, biometric data collected and deletable, and verified population you can count.
SE
#1 of 8 · published ranking
Self
81ChainChoice Score
4199
Why it leads
2 points ahead of Idena: +3.7 pts verified population you can count, +1.6 pts issuer independent uniqueness check
Cost
Not priced· No comparable price is published
No provider can pay for a position in this table. The code that computes this order cannot read which links earn us a commission, and every build proves it. Every score below rebuilds from the published criteria.Ranking 2026.08 · 4 criteria · 8 products · same inputs, same order
Personal comparison
Proof of Personhood ranked comparison
No comparable price is published; ranking still uses verified product evidence.
RankProviderBest fitScore
1
SESelfZero-knowledge proofs over NFC governme...Top ranked
Uniqueness checkable without the issuer — 9/10Trade-off: The on-chain registries held 4,369 identity commitments in total on 2026-08-11 agains...
Ranked on 4 published criteria weighted 32/26/22/20, which set goal alignment — 30 of the 86 points. The rest: regional access 20, evidence depth 18, ease of use 10, institutional trust 8. Profile match is shown in breakdowns but carries no weight.
Audit
Infrastructure
Methodology
2026.09.15
published 2026-09-16
Providers tracked
980+
across 119 categories
Last verified
2026-08-11
newest dated pricing or sentiment read
Named on the roster
2 people
managing directors · 6 automated processes
Decision guide
What matters most before choosing in this category
The buyer here is an airdrop, a governance vote or a faucet trying to price out sybils, so the only number that matters is what it costs an attacker to be counted twice — and the second number that matters is how many humans the gate can actually admit. Both are worse than the marketing. Every registry in this category that can be counted is two to three orders of magnitude smaller than what the category advertises: Self's three Celo registries held 4,369 identity commitments on 2026-08-11 against a claim of infrastructure "already accessible to billions of people across 180+ countries", and Proof of Humanity held 3,384 live humanities on Gnosis and 55 on Ethereum. The systems claiming millions are precisely the ones exposing no counter at all, and the one "live" home-page counter in the pool sat at exactly 2,560,606 on two separate read dates. Even the largest operator cannot state its own figure: World's FAQ still serves the unrendered placeholder "Already, [insert verified human ticker] people have verified their World ID at an Orb." while three different World-sourced totals run simultaneously. Choose on the cost of the marginal fake identity and on a population you can read yourself — a small honest number beats a large unverifiable one.
What matters most before choosing in this category
The buyer here is an airdrop, a governance vote or a faucet trying to price out sybils, so the only number that matters is what it costs an attacker to be counted twice — and the second number that matters is how many humans the gate can actually admit. Both are worse than the marketing. Every registry in this category that can be counted is two to three orders of magnitude smaller than what the category advertises: Self's three Celo registries held 4,369 identity commitments on 2026-08-11 against a claim of infrastructure "already accessible to billions of people across 180+ countries", and Proof of Humanity held 3,384 live humanities on Gnosis and 55 on Ethereum. The systems claiming millions are precisely the ones exposing no counter at all, and the one "live" home-page counter in the pool sat at exactly 2,560,606 on two separate read dates. Even the largest operator cannot state its own figure: World's FAQ still serves the unrendered placeholder "Already, [insert verified human ticker] people have verified their World ID at an Orb." while three different World-sourced totals run simultaneously. Choose on the cost of the marginal fake identity and on a population you can read yourself — a small honest number beats a large unverifiable one.
What does it cost an attacker to produce one more accepted identity — and is that cost physically rate-limited or just a software fee?
Can a relying party settle the uniqueness question from public state, without the issuer's cooperation or uptime?
How many humans has this actually verified, and can you read that number without taking the vendor's word for it?
Default starting point
Expert review and scoring weights
SE
SelfData checked Aug 2026
Zero-knowledge proofs over NFC government document chips, with a per-scope nullifier and an identity commitment registry on Celo.
Zero-knowledge proofs over NFC government document chips, with a per-scope nullifier and an identity commitment registry on Celo. Strongest on uniqueness checkable without the issuer (9/10): Corrected during verification: the draft said an integrator faces "two live hubs and no page telling them which is current", implying the two are interchangeable. They are not. Re-reading Celo mainnet at block 74,547,238 on 2026-08-11, the hub at 0xe57F4773bd9c9d8b6Cd70431117d353298B9f5BF answered registry(bytes32)… Weakest on measured cost to farm an identity (7/10): The unit of scarcity is a genuine government document chip, and the docs describe the binding as "document-backed nullifiers: one person, one account", with the Aadhaar path noted as deriving "a nullifier from limited signed fields" (both quotes re-verified character-exact on docs.self.xyz/llms.txt, HTTP 200… Published price: "Get started for free" (re-fetched 2026-08-11, HTTP 200).
Best forUniqueness checkable without the issuer — 9/10
Main tradeoffThe on-chain registries held 4,369 identity commitments in total on 2026-08-11 against site copy citing accessibility to "billions of people across 180+ countries" — and because nullifiers are derived per document rather than per person, anyone holding two valid passports can enrol twice without the buyer being able to tell.
Verify before signup"Get started for free" (re-fetched 2026-08-11, HTTP 200). The marketing site publishes no rate card, per-verification price or enterprise tier pricing; the only cost stated anywhere on the page is the customer benefit "Screen out ineligible users before they become billable."
Methodology
How this category is reviewed
Reviewed on measured cost to farm an identity, uniqueness checkable without the issuer, biometric data collected and deletable, and verified population you can count.
The order on this page is the published ranking for this category. Every criterion, weight and source behind it is on the methodology page.
Frequently asked
Questions people ask before choosing proof of personhood
How much does it actually cost to farm one more identity?
It depends entirely on whether the gate is a physical ceremony or an arithmetic threshold, and the score-based gate is the cheap one. Human Passport publishes both its threshold and its weights: threshold() returned 200000 (20.0000) on all six mainnet decoders on 2026-08-11 and the published weights re-verified digit for digit, which means the cost of clearing it is the cheapest basket of credentials that sums past 20. NFTScore#50 at 16.246 plus ETHScore#50 at 16.021 — two pure on-chain-activity credentials drawn from two separately capped categories — sum to 32.267, and neither requires a human to be identified at any point. Deduplication does not close the gap either, because the documentation binds it to "a given scoring instance", so the same evidence counts again for the next buyer. Note what was NOT claimed here: an earlier draft paired that NFT credential with an exchange-issued account-bound token, which was wrong, because that token is minted only after the exchange completes KYC, so a human genuinely is identified. The systems at the other end of the range price the marginal identity in physical scarcity — a distinct iris presented in person, a distinct government document chip, or a live synchronous ceremony — which is the only cost a farmer cannot simply pay in software.
Can a relying party check uniqueness without the issuer?
Sometimes, and the failure modes are worth reading before you integrate. Proof of Humanity is the clean case: there is no issuer to ask, because the verdict is a view function on a deployed contract that a third party can call directly. Human Passport puts both the verdict and the threshold on chain, but its decoder does not fail closed — calling isHuman on an address that has never created a passport reverted with data 0x120a2e77 on all six mainnet decoders, and keccak256("AttestationNotFound()") independently produces those same leading four bytes. An integrator who writes the obvious `if (decoder.isHuman(user))` gets a reverted transaction rather than a rejection for the overwhelming majority of addresses. At the other extreme, Humanity Protocol's verification oracle is a single private key: on 2026-08-11 both the mainnet HumanityVerificationOracle and its FeeEscrow returned the same owner(), an address with no bytecode and a transaction count of zero — one externally owned account controlling both the contract that certifies humanity and the contract holding applications' prepaid balances, on a chain whose own documentation is headed "Mainnet temporarily offline" while it was in fact producing blocks one second apart.
What biometric data does each system take, and can you get rid of it?
The range runs from nothing at all to permanent public exposure, and three of this file's asserted absences turned out to be false on re-verification — which moved scores in both directions rather than only downward. The draft claimed Self published no retention or deletion policy, that BrightID published none for its social graph, and that no Humanity Protocol page said where the palm template is stored or for how long. All three policies exist and return HTTP 200 from links on the vendors' own home pages. Self's and BrightID's were favourable enough to raise their scores. Humanity's lowered its own: it reserves the right to "transfer and store your Biometric Data to our or our service providers' servers" and to retain personal information for "a period of five (5) years after the termination of such business relationship". At the bottom of this criterion sits the only system whose enrolment requirement is permanent public exposure of the user's face, which is not deletable by any mechanism the vendor offers.
Not financial advice · For informational purposes only · Always do your own research
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