A new startup, called Alien, said it has built a way for people to prove they’re human without surrendering personal information. Alien’s identity system, launched Thursday on iOS and Android, offers a cryptographic method for confirming “unique humanity” at a moment when bots increasingly distort who is real online.
Based in San Francisco, Alien said the app verifies users without storing raw biometrics or collecting government IDs. Its system processes a facial scan inside secure enclaves using multi-party computation, deletes the image immediately, and stores only an anonymized hash-like vector on-chain.
“We started with a simple question: what does it mean to be a human in the age of AI?” Alien CEO Kirill Avery told Decrypt.
Avery said the idea grew out of his early years as an engineer at VK, the Russian social network.
“I worked with hundreds of millions of users and experienced a lot of problems connected to fraud and spam,” he said. “For example, when I was a teenager, I was able to build a bot farm with social accounts that would text people, so I’ve seen what’s possible.”
He said that once modern AI systems began scaling, it became clear those automated behaviors could become far more powerful, and that the internet still lacked a reliable way to confirm who is actually human.
Alien joins a growing number of projects that aim to build decentralized identity frameworks on blockchains, including RariMe, Proof of Humanity, Gitcoin Passport, Billions Network, and Worldcoin’s World ID system. Each approaches the problem differently, but all reflect a broader push to distinguish real people from automated agents—without relying on traditional documents or centralized infrastructure.
The Alien app encrypts a user’s biometric data and keeps it on the device. During verification, different parts of the encrypted data are compared inside secure areas of the app so the network can confirm the person is unique without ever seeing the original face scan. The raw image never leaves the device, cannot be reconstructed, and isn’t accessible to Alien.
To strengthen identity assurance, Alien ID also requires an invitation from someone already verified before a new user can join.
Avery acknowledged the growing debate around digital IDs and who should control the verification layer of the internet.
“The internet will go into two different camps. One is governments and companies that will start incorporating government IDs to verify authenticity, and the other will be decentralized solutions that will create alternatives,” he said. “I believe that the second camp is much safer and much better for humanity than the first camp.
Still, Avery said the goal remains straightforward: enabling trust.
“This is the technology that enables trust online in the age of AI,” he said. “This is my personal mission: to enable trust online. If we don’t, then governments and companies will go to the route they know, the centralized way, which is really scary.”