World Open-Sources ProveKit to Bring Private ID Checks to Everyday Smartphones
September 2, 2026 – 8:11 pm
Credit: ProveKit
The technology behind World ID can let people prove their age, nationality, or possession of a valid ID without handing over the personal information behind it.
The Open-Sourcing of ProveKit
World is opening up one of its privacy technologies, giving developers a new way to build identity checks that can happen directly on a user’s phone rather than sending sensitive information to a third party.
The company has introduced ProveKit, an open-source zero-knowledge proving toolkit designed to let people prove facts about themselves—such as being over a certain age, holding a valid identity document, or meeting nationality or residency requirements—without revealing the underlying personal data.
A Safer Alternative
For users, the practical promise is straightforward. Instead of uploading a passport or ID card and trusting another company to store it securely, a person could potentially prove only the information that matters. A service checking whether someone is over 18, for example, could receive confirmation that the requirement has been met without receiving their name, date of birth, or a copy of their ID.
The release comes at a critical time when the risks of the current status quo are hard to ignore. As Brian Krebs reported this week, a dark web service called Nexus is selling digital scans of over 153 million driver’s licenses from people in the United States and Canada—apparently siphoned from a widely used identity verification vendor whose clients include several Fortune 500 companies.
That is exactly the model ProveKit is built to move away from. Rather than a person handing their actual license or passport to a business, which then has to be stored somewhere and becomes a target, ProveKit lets a person prove only the specific fact a service needs, such as being over 18 or holding a valid document, while the underlying ID never leaves their device.
How ProveKit Works
ProveKit generates those proofs locally on a smartphone or browser, meaning the underlying information does not need to be sent to an external server for processing. World says proofs can be generated within seconds on a typical smartphone and in under 30 seconds on a low-end device used in testing. The system can also operate offline and with limited memory.
That distinction could make zero-knowledge technology significantly more practical outside crypto. While privacy-preserving identity systems have existed for years, generating sophisticated cryptographic proofs has traditionally come with computational and infrastructure requirements that can make deployment difficult on ordinary consumer devices. ProveKit is designed specifically to make local proving viable on the hardware people already carry.
Existing Integration
The technology is not purely experimental. ProveKit is already integrated into World ID, where it supports privacy-preserving verification across World’s identity network. World ID Credentials, for example, can store information obtained from NFC-enabled identity documents locally on a user’s device.