What if the real bottleneck holding blockchain back—and quietly undermining AI—wasn’t scalability, compute, or capital, but identity? In this deeply technical, wide-ranging conversation, host Lily Dash sits down with Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, a Yale-trained computer scientist who has been working on decentralized identity since long before it was fashionable—or even practical. Evin isn’t a tourist in crypto. She’s been in the trenches since 2010, when she first encountered Bitcoin at Yale in a class taught by Elizabeth Stark (now founder of Lightning Labs), and she has spent the last decade tackling what may be the hardest unsolved problem in decentralized systems: how to reconcile privacy, accountability, and coordination at global scale. Evin’s career reads like a roadmap of where the internet was headed long before the rest of the world noticed. From building with IBM Watson and CERN, to founding Disco (one of the first products that let users carry their own data in a portable “data backpack”), to opening ConsenSys’s first Dubai office in 2017, to ultimately merging identity research teams with Polygon to form Billions Network—her work has consistently lived at the intersection of cryptography, governance, and real-world systems. At the heart of the conversation is a simple but uncomfortable truth: if all you know about someone is a wallet address, your options are extremely limited. You can send money, or you can demand over-collateralization. That’s it. You can’t coordinate, comply, govern, personalize, or trust—at least not in any meaningful way. Identity, Evin argues, is the “genesis block” of everything blockchain claims to enable. This episode unpacks why zero-knowledge proofs are the missing primitive. Evin explains—clearly and without hype—how ZK proofs allow you to prove something about yourself without revealing the underlying data. You can prove you’re over 18 without sharing your birthday. You can prove you’re not from a sanctioned country without revealing your nationality. You can prove you’re a unique human without giving up your name, biometrics, or personal history. The three pillars—zero knowledge, completeness, and soundness—aren’t abstract math concepts here; they’re the foundation of a more private, more functional digital world. The discussion goes far beyond crypto. Evin lays out how governments today are leaking the personal data of over a billion citizens because their identity systems are effectively giant spreadsheets protected by passwords. Hospitals routinely email non-anonymized X-rays to AI startups in exchange for equity. Small businesses now dedicate entire staff just to handle privacy compliance requests. Meanwhile, Americans collectively spend over 50 million hours per year filling out forms—most of them asking for the same information, over and over again. Against this backdrop, Billions Network is building infrastructure that feels almost inevitable in hindsight. By tapping the NFC chip in your passport, users can generate cryptographically verifiable, zero-knowledge proofs on a phone in seconds—something that in 2017 cost hundreds of dollars per transaction and required a desktop computer. The implications are massive: airports, hotels, hospitals, banks, events, borders—all without forms, photocopies, or data leaks. The conversation also confronts the AI elephant in the room. Today, roughly 50% of internet traffic is bots. Trust online is collapsing. Evin introduces the idea of Deep Trust: persistent identities for AI agents that are cryptographically linked to accountable humans or organizations. Without this, we’re heading toward a world where no one knows whether they’re interacting with a person, an AI, or a malicious swarm—and where responsibility evaporates entirely. From Sybil-resistant token airdrops, to privacy-preserving medical identity across clinics, to age verification at a bar without showing ID, to search engines that respond to your preferences without harvesting your data—the episode paints a coherent picture of where identity is headed. Not surveillance. Not anonymity absolutism. But minimum disclosure: sharing only what’s necessary, exactly when it’s needed, and nothing more. Evin doesn’t pretend this is easy. Translating cryptography from academic research into production systems that governments, enterprises, and developers can actually use is slow, unglamorous work. But her thesis is clear: identity isn’t the end goal. Identity is the thing that gets you to the thing. Without it, decentralized systems stall. With it, coordination becomes possible at a scale we’ve never seen. Five years from now, Evin believes, you won’t pull out a passport, fill out a form, or photocopy an ID. The environments around you will respond to who you are based on what you choose to prove.
