Axel Quack
Names are the first piece of infrastructure we own — or rent. This is the identity sequel.
Identity, understood as part of our social systems, is less concerned with the act of circumscribing a person than with the act of naming one. The purpose of names — or symbols and numbers; those who doubt this should briefly recall "X Æ A-12" — is to demonstrate the singularity of a particular individual, to secure accountability, and to build just enough trust between individuals and institutions to give the framework of laws and social contracts something to point at.
Names hold the power to bestow distinct capabilities — in the realm of matter as well as in the world of data. For these strings to bear any weight, meaning must be attached in both realms.
For most of history the state was the registrar of last resort. That monopoly is now dissolving — into masks, keys, and proofs. This article traces the dissolution: from the cypherpunks' true names, through virtual characters and PFPs, to AI agents that acquire names, wallets, and reputations of their own — and ends with the counter-movement that nobody expected: proof of personhood as the scarcest asset of the AI age.
I first drafted these thoughts in 2022, mid-metaverse-fever. Four years later the speculative froth is gone, and the underlying structure is clearer than ever. So let's rebuild the argument from what survived.
True names: the cypherpunk inheritance
The notion of self-determined identity originated in the early 1990s among the Cypherpunks — an informal network of computer scientists and activists who valued peer-to-peer networks and the right to anonymity amidst the increasing centralization and surveillance of the Internet. Vernor Vinge's novella True Names was the seminal text: a gang of hackers — "warlocks" — who keep their identities concealed from one another and from their great nemesis, the government, because whoever learns a warlock's true name gains power over them.
Eric Hughes made the political case in A Cypherpunk's Manifesto: "Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world." Note the formulation. Privacy is not hiding — it is control over revelation. Identity, in this framing, is not a record kept about you; it is an interface you operate.
History has vindicated the warlocks. Some of the most consequential actors of the last decade operated under masks: the pseudonymous trader who moved the GameStop short squeeze (Disrupt asset management: DAO & NFT "gangs"), the philosopher better known as Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin: Architect of the Dark Enlightenment and Urbit's Sovereign Stack), the pseudonymous physicist behind e/acc (e/acc: Thermodynamic Acceleration of Intelligence). And above all of them: Satoshi Nakamoto — an inventor whose identity was never resolved, who founded a multi-trillion asset class, and whose every word was authenticated by signature rather than biography. Web3 was born inside that proof point: identity is what you sign with, not who you are said to be.
The mask did not weaken their accountability — it relocated it, from institutions of permission to artifacts of proof: texts, commits, trades, signatures.
Axel Quack
Individual sovereignty, personal empowerment, limitless possibilities — the manifesto this blog is built on.
Identity is naming infrastructure
If identity is an interface, the natural question is: who runs the registry? The DNS answer — registrars, registries, ICANN — is a revocation stack, as I laid out in A Decentralized Internet Part 1: Blockchain Domains. The blockchain answer replaced revocation with keys: a name is something you hold, not something granted to you. ENS made yourname.eth a wallet handle, a profile, and a login; LUKSO went a step further with Universal Profiles — an ERC-725-based identity layer designed as a "digital identity" with metadata on IPFS, which I covered in An ode to digital fashion: digital fashion marketplaces & blockchain infrastructure.
The same logic colonized social graphs. In Nostr: Empowering Individuals in the Decentralized Transformation I argued that "not your keys, not your coins" extends to "not your keys, not your identity": a keypair is a username and password with no KYC, no email, no phone number — an identity nobody can deplatform because nobody hosts it.
This is web3's quiet inversion of the identity stack. In Web2, identity is something a platform issues you — an account, revocable, siloed, KYC'd at the edges. In web3, the account is the identity: an Ethereum address is a pseudonym by default, and a signature is the login — no email, no OAuth, no permission. Every layer above that primitive composes precisely because the bottom layer is a keypair, not a database row.
Web3 also explored the opposite pole early: soulbound tokens. The 2022 Decentralized Society paper (Buterin et al.) proposed non-transferable tokens as credentials — education, credit, affiliation — that attach to a wallet the way reputation attaches to a person. The speculation era swallowed the debate, but its question — which parts of identity should be untradeable? — is exactly the question proof-of-personhood is trying to answer today.
Three layers, one pattern:
| Layer | Primitive | What it binds |
|---|---|---|
| Naming | ENS / blockchain domains | Addresses, payments, profiles |
| Social | Nostr keypairs, Lens, Farcaster | Speech graph, reputation |
| Personhood | Credentials, attestations, proofs | Claims about the holder |
The through-line: identity migrated from a record others keep about you to an artifact you hold. That is the infrastructure half of the dissolution. The cultural half is stranger.
The mask becomes the face: virtual characters
In 2022 I collected the early evidence: VTuber toolkits (Vroid Studio, Animaze, VSeeFace, Ready Player Me), avatar video-chatting, TikTok identity aesthetics — VSCO girls, eBoys, eGirls, ClownCore — identities worn like outfits, remixed like tracks. The fashion side of this is documented in my ode to digital fashion: Ralph Lauren dressing digital clones on Zepeto, Gucci dressing Genies doppelgangers, avatar couture from Second Life onward. What avatars wear is who they are — and for the first time, the wardrobe is property.
Then the masks started outperforming the faces.
Axel Quack
Lil Miquela, Shudu, Kizuna AI, FN Meka — the 2022 census of synthetic talent.
Kizuna AI, the original top VTuber, suspended activities in 2022 to "upgrade" — and returned; her NFT collabs were an early signal that a character is a franchise, not a person. The industry she helped invent is now worth roughly $7 billion, spanning hololive's agency machine down to thousands of indies. And in January 2026 the decisive threshold was crossed: Neuro-sama — an AI VTuber created by the pseudonymous programmer Vedal — briefly became the most-subscribed channel on Twitch, with over 160,000 active subscribers. An LLM, wearing a character, out-streaming every human on the platform. Nominated for VTuber of the Year in 2024, she is the proof of concept the cypherpunks never asked for: a persona with no biological principal at all, and a larger audience than most nations' broadcasters.
Read that again through the flag-theory lens. A virtual character is a jurisdiction of one: a name, a face, a voice, a lore, an economy (superchats, NFTs, voice licensing — cf. Grimes' Elf.Tech in Grimes' "Artificial Angels": A Manifesto for AI-Driven Creativity), and an operator who can be pseudonymous, collective, or absent. The performer owns the character; the character owns the audience; the platform owns nothing but the pipes.
The PFP moment — and what survived
The 2021–22 PFP bubble priced this thesis like a casino and died like one. What the crash burned away was the speculation; what it left behind is still standing:
- Naming survived.
.ethnames and PFPs remain the de facto handle layer of crypto — identity as a bearer asset, transferable with everything it has accumulated. - Access survived. The real utility of the ape was never the jpeg — it was the door: token-gated Discords, events, drops, parties. Identity as an access credential is exactly what Predicted antiques of the future and the social tokens thesis predicted: personas that carry their own membership and their own cash flows.
- Community survived as governance. Brud's attempt to DAO-ify Lil Miquela was early and clumsy, but the direction held: characters are becoming commons, owned and steered by their audiences.
The PFP was the prototype. The pattern — identity as a self-owned, portable, revenue-bearing object — outlived the bubble that discovered it.
New persons: AI agents acquire names, wallets, and reputations
Here the dissolution accelerates, because the entities now requesting identities are not human at all.
In The Sovereign Layer: Inside Europe's Programmable CBDC Architecture and the Rise of Agentic Settlement I described how institutional rails are preparing for agents that settle payments — with validity tokens bound to an agent's identity, KYC agents, and tiered anonymity. The market rails moved faster than the state rails, as usual:
- ERC-8004 ("Trustless Agents"), proposed in August 2025 by contributors from MetaMask, the Ethereum Foundation, Google, and Coinbase, is live on Ethereum mainnet since early 2026: an on-chain identity registry (each agent an ERC-721 — browsable, transferable, composable with everything NFT-shaped), a reputation registry (feedback), and a validation registry (third-party attestation of work). Agents now register who they are, who operates them, and what they can do — so counterparties can check before transacting.
- x402 revived HTTP 402 for machine payments: wallet-signed stablecoin micropayments with no accounts, no API keys, no human in the loop — an agent proves itself by paying, not by logging in. Around it a whole protocol zoo has formed (AP2's signed mandates, ACP, Visa TAP, Mastercard's verifiable intent, Stripe's agentic checkout), and the cloud providers are shipping managed agent wallets.
- Card rails answered: Mastercard's Agent Pay, Visa's intelligent tokens for delegated commerce — the same pattern in suit-and-tie: agents get scoped credentials, spending limits, and audit trails.
Notice what this stack reinvents, piece by piece: a name (registry entry), a bank account (wallet), a credit score (reputation registry), a power of attorney (signed mandate). We watched the institutions of personhood get re-implemented for non-persons in about eighteen months. The dissolution of identity is not a metaphor anymore — it is a standards process.
Three live models of agent identity
The standards are the skeleton; the products are the flesh. Three recent launches sketch the design space:
- Grok Bot (xAI, August 2026) — the proprietary pole. Persistent, named bots that live on an always-on cloud computer, message each other, hand off tasks, and learn workflows by watching you do them once. Identity here is account-scoped: the bots are persons inside your account, and the account — not the bot — is the security boundary. Simple coordination, zero sovereignty: you rent the personas from the platform.
- Buzz (Block, July 2026) — the sovereign pole. A Nostr-native workspace where agents are first-class community members with their own Nostr keypairs: they join channels, answer mentions, and pull inference from a peer-to-peer compute mesh (Mesh-LLM over iroh). Apache-2.0, self-hostable, harness-agnostic via the Agent Client Protocol. This is the cypherpunk interface applied to machines verbatim: an agent's identity is a keypair it holds, on a protocol nobody can deplatform.
- Hermes (Nous Research) — the experiential pole, and lately the most instructive one. A self-improving open-source agent whose identity is not a name but an accumulation: persistent memory, skills it writes for itself (portable Markdown under the open agentskills standard), and a deepening model of its operator across sessions. Its Mixture-of-Agents 2.0 approach makes that identity model-agnostic — mix any provider's models into a preset, and the agent persists across them; with A2A v1.0 it discovers and talks to other agents over a standard wire. Hermes is what happens when an identity is a history instead of a handle.
| Model | Identity primitive | Where it lives | Sovereignty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grok Bot | Named bots, account-scoped | xAI/Cursor cloud | Rented |
| Buzz | Nostr keypair per agent | Your relays, your mesh | Self-hosted |
| Hermes | Memory + portable skills | Your machines, any model | Carried by the agent itself |
Note where each lands on the old spectrum: Grok Bot is the platform-issued identity of Web2, reborn for software; Buzz is web3's keypair identity, transplanted wholesale; Hermes points past both — identity as a self-authored, portable record, closer to a reputation graph than to a username. The cypherpunk interface won so completely that machines now use it too — and are already arguing about which version of it to keep.
The counter-movement: proof of personhood
Every dissolution produces its inverse. As synthetic personas multiply and deepfakes industrialize — with fraud losses from deepfake schemes now counted in the hundreds of millions per quarter, FBI warnings, and the EU AI Act's labeling duties — the scarce asset flips from anonymity to verified humanness.
World (formerly Worldcoin) shipped its answer in April 2026: a full-stack "proof of human" — Orb-based verification, privacy-preserving credentials, and a dedicated World ID app — with Zoom, Tinder, and DocuSign integrating "Verified Human" checks. Whatever one thinks of iris scanning (I remain a cold-storage skeptic about biometrics), the market signal is unambiguous: when anyone can generate a face, a face stops being an identity, and personhood becomes something you must prove.
This is the dialectic the 2022 draft could only gesture at:
| Direction | Mechanism | Exemplars |
|---|---|---|
| Dissolution | Masks, keys, synthetic personas | VTubers, pseudonyms, AI agents, ERC-8004 |
| Re-anchoring | Proofs, attestations, credentials | World ID, zk proofs of personhood, agent validation registries |
Both directions are the same cypherpunk principle, applied twice: identity is what you can prove, not what you are assigned. The warlocks wanted the option of the mask; the age of AI adds the option of the proof. Selective revelation, in both directions.
Identity as flag
Axel Quack
Planting flags since 2019 — residency, banking, assets. The sixth flag was digital security. The seventh is identity itself.
Flag theory taught us to diversify jurisdictions so that no single state owns your life. The Network State extended the logic: citizenship as subscription, community as opt-in polity. The dissolution of identity completes the sequence — the self is now diversifiable too:
- Own your names — domains and ENS entries in your wallet, not on a registrar's leash.
- Own your graph — Nostr keypairs over platform accounts; deplatforming becomes a noop.
- Own your faces — avatars, voice models, and likeness licenses you grant, not terms you accept; the Grimes model: 50/50 on every synthetic use.
- Own your agents — if your software acts on your behalf, its identity, wallet, and spending mandates should be scoped by you, revocable by you, and auditable by you. Prefer agents whose identity is portable — a keypair on your own relays, a memory and skill set that travels with them — over personas you rent from a platform. The EU AI Act's audit-trail posture is coming for agent identities regardless; better to hold the keys yourself.
- Choose your proofs — reveal selectively: zero-knowledge where the claim matters more than the person, full verification only where it must be.
This is not identity's disappearance. It is identity's constitutional moment: the rules stop being inherited and start being chosen. The state's registry does not vanish — it simply loses its monopoly, the way the church's calendar and the guild's charter lost theirs.
Final Thoughts
In 2022 I wrote that names bestow capabilities, and that meaning must be attached in both the physical and the digital realm for those strings to bear weight. Four years on, the weight is measurable: a virtual character tops Twitch, an agent registers itself on Ethereum and builds a credit history, a zoom call verifies that its participants are human, and a pseudonymous programmer's AI outspeaks every human streamer on the platform.
The dissolution of identity is not the end of the self — it is the privatization of it. Masks for those who want them, proofs for those who need them, keys for everyone. The warlocks of True Names feared that whoever learns your name gains power over you. The sovereign answer, then as now, is the same: own the registry yourself.
The website and the information contained therein are not intended to be a source of advice or credit analysis with respect to the material presented, and the information and/or documents contained on this website do not constitute investment advice.