Vertical stacks are powerful. But the stablecoin economy needs open coordination layers – not just better platforms. @arbitrum and @0xPolygon understand this and are investing aggressively to build a real alternative to closed platform plays.

Zero to One: idOS in 2025 — and What’s Ahead It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but it’s everything. In 2025, idOS went from zero to one. You may have divergent opinions about Peter Thiel, but his core thesis in Zero to One matters here: progress is not about copying what already exists — it’s about creating something fundamentally new that actually works in the real world. For idOS, “one” is not a whitepaper, a testnet, or a promise. “One” is real usage in production. This year, idOS crossed that line. That may sound modest by crypto’s historical standards — but in decentralized identity, this is the hardest milestone to reach. Because decentralized identity has not crossed this line before. Why “one” matters in identity Identity is uniquely hard — not because of cryptography, but because of incentives. For years, decentralized identity struggled with a classic market-for-lemons problem: users don’t want to care about identity unless they must, applications don’t integrate unless users already exist, and teams try to paper over the gap with incentives, points, or ideology. That approach fails. Identity only works when it is operationally invisible and economically necessary — when real businesses depend on it to function. That’s what changed in 2025. Crypto is splitting in two — and only one half is crossing the chasm Crypto is bifurcating. One side remains speculative, narrative-driven, and reflexive. The other — the stablecoin economy — is boring by design and operational by necessity: payments, accounts, compliance, and scale. The second is now crossing the chasm. Recent market signals make this clear: infrastructure for the stablecoin economy is becoming strategic. And in that stack, identity is not optional. It is the last unresolved bottleneck. The stablecoin economy only scales if onboarding scales. If identity is captured by closed, rent-seeking platforms, the stablecoin economy simply recreates Web2 — just on-chain. That’s the risk. And that’s why identity must remain open infrastructure, not an extractive layer. It was a bad idea to build your business on Facebook in 2016. It will be a bad idea to build your stablecoin application on a closed identity platform. Platform risk is real. What happened this year In 2025, idOS shipped a full, production-ready protocol. We saw real users onboard, real integrations move forward, real regulatory constraints applied, and real lessons learned — including some painful ones. This was a year of proof: proof that decentralized identity can operate in the stablecoin economy, and proof that the hard parts are not theoretical. What’s next 2025 was about proof of existence. 2026 is about scaling inevitability. What comes next is execution: integrations, productization, developer experience, and the unglamorous work of making identity disappear into the background because it just works. This year feels different The market is deflated, and the cycle many hoped for never arrived. The casino-tokenomics loop appears to be breaking. Today, there are hundreds of millions of crypto users. The last time the internet had a similar number, the hype was gone and the hangover had set in — but real adoption followed. A nerdy phenomenon became infrastructure. It had gone from zero to one. Now it had to become useful. Some would say that was the point all along. Have a great rest of 2025 wherever you are, and a successful 2026.

This is bigger than it seems: Partnering with @billions_ntwk unlocks zkKYC — but this time, for real. Remember: without guaranteed access to the underlying data, zkKYC doesn’t work. It’s not compliant. No financial institution will use it. Look around — none do today. Because most “zkKYC” solutions either don’t store data at all (and pray someone will still use them) or rely on opaque centralized vaults. Anyone serious about regulation says “no thanks.” Might as well store it centrally if that’s what it boils down to. Now, with a little help from our friends, we’re combining the heavy lift of storage (@idOS_network) with deep zk expertise (@PrivadoID) to finally deliver a compliant, privacy-preserving solution. And this isn’t years away — we’re talking production in the coming weeks. On a personal note: I’m thrilled to finally work with @davidsrz, @provenauthority, and the Billions team. We’ve known and collaborated for years. People assume we’re competitors, but identity people are different — we care about making decentralized identity work. Evin and David are true OGs. Their feedback since the Polygon ID days helped shape idOS, and it’s exciting to see this come full circle. Identity has been written off by many after wave after wave of failed projects. But it’s one of the oldest ideas in crypto — going back to Bitcoin’s earliest discussions. It’s been through the trough of disillusionment. Now, as adoption grows, it’s becoming one of the most underestimated markets out there. Identity is everywhere.