Vega: Zero-knowledge proofs for digital identity in the age of AI

At a glance - Vega lets users prove facts from government-issued credentials — age, personhood, professional status — without revealing the credential itself. The credential never leaves the device. - Zero-knowledge proofs are generated in under 100 ms on a commodity client device with no trusted setup, making private identity verification practical at scale. - Fold-and-reuse proving means repeated presentations — to different services or through AI agents — skip most of the expensive work after the first proof. - Vega targets real-world formats like mobile driver’s licenses and the EU Digital Identity Wallet, is built in Rust, and will be open sourced soon. AI is transforming how people interact with digital, from AI-powered assistants to autonomous agents that act on a user’s behalf. As these capabilities grow, so does the value of strong digital identity: users need reliable ways to establish trust, whether proving they are human or sharing a credential with an AI-mediated service. Government-issued credentials are still the strongest foundation for trust, but today’s verification methods often require people to hand them over. As AI agents begin acting on behalf of humans and interacting with decentralized systems, the need for fast, privacy-preserving ways to prove credentials will only grow. These needs are already materializing in policy. Governments are moving quickly to formalize digital identity. The EU Digital Identity (EUDI) framework aims to make digital wallets available to all EU citizens, and efforts like the EU’s age-verification blueprint and the UK’s Online Safety Act mandate government ID-based methods for age checks. Application providers face a double bind: they must either use less accurate approaches like AI-based age estimation, or compromise user privacy by requiring ID uploads. The credential gets uploaded, processed, sometimes stored, and eventually (hopefully) deleted. But high-profile breaches have repeatedly exposed government IDs that users shared for routine verification. These are not edge cases. They are the predictable consequence of a system that asks users to share their most sensitive documents to prove a single bit of information. This is the question we set out to answer with Vega: Can we make it practical to prove something about a credential without ever revealing the credential itself? The path to Vega: From idea to practice Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are the cryptographic tool that makes this possible. The idea is simple: they allow a user to prove a claim, such as “I am over 21”, without revealing anything else.. In practice, this means a user could prove their age from their driver’s license without the verifier ever seeing the license, whether to a website, an app, or a service mediated by an AI agent. The proof works directly on the credential as issued, so the issuer does not need to change anything. so the issuer does not need to change anything. This is not a new idea. The challenge has always been practicality. Prior systems either require a trusted setup that had to be repeated whenever the logic changed, or they sacrificed performance to avoid the trusted setup,…