By now, many of us must have read about the evolution of the internet from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and then to Web 3.0. I even hear rumours about Web4 now, and I can not wait to hear what it has for us. But that is a topic for another day.
Web1.0 was a library. Pages of static information you could read but not interact with. You visited websites, consumed content, and moved on.
Web2.0 turned that library into a bustling city. Social media, e-commerce, and interactive platforms let people create, share, and connect. But there was a cost. In exchange for free services, you handed over personal data. That data became the fuel for targeted ads, recommendations, and algorithms. Your identity online wasn’t really yours anymore; it was scattered across platforms and controlled by companies.
Now we’re in Web3.0, a version of the internet that hands control back to users. You own your assets, your data, and potentially, your digital identity. But how exactly does that work, and how can you prove something about yourself online without oversharing? I will be covering that in this article.
Your Identity?
Your identity is more than a name or a document. It is a mix of your experiences, skills, relationships, and the trust you’ve built over time. Offline, you can decide what to share and with whom. Online, things work differently. Pieces of your digital self are scattered across countless services. Social media accounts, payment apps, online stores, and work platforms. Each one holds a fragment of who you are, and most are controlled by companies with their own rules.
If one of those services shuts down your account, changes its terms, or suffers a breach, you feel the effects immediately. And even when things go smoothly, you often have to hand over far more personal information than the situation really requires. This is where the idea of a self-owned, private digital identity is leveraged. One that moves with you between platforms and remains under your control at all times.
The Problem with Today’s Digital Identity
Proving something about yourself online, like your age, citizenship, or membership in a group, usually means revealing more than necessary. To confirm you’re over 18, you share your full date of birth. To prove your address, you send a document that contains not only where you live but also other unrelated details. This over-disclosure is a weak point in most current systems.
On top of that, the information you provide often ends up stored on a company’s servers, sometimes without strong safeguards. Once leaked, your personal details are almost impossible to secure again. And since every service manages its own database, you have to repeat the same process over and over, giving your information to more and more places.
A Different Approach in Web3
Web3 takes a different route. Instead of creating a new account for every platform, you keep a single, portable identity that you control. You can prove facts about yourself without showing all the underlying data, and it is a concept known as selective disclosure.
With this setup, you decide what to share, when to share it, and for how long. If you no longer want a service to have access, you can revoke it instantly. Your identity does not depend on any single company’s system, so if a platform disappears, your identity remains intact and ready to use elsewhere.
This vision only works if the blockchain handling your identity can keep sensitive details private while still verifying them when needed. Oasis is known for this!
How Oasis Makes Private Identity Possible
Unlike most blockchains, Oasis can process and store sensitive data without exposing it to the public. This is thanks to its unique design and specialized computing environments known as ParaTimes.
ParaTimes such as Sapphire and Cipher allow smart contracts to run with the data fully encrypted. This means you could store personal details like proof of age, citizenship, or professional status in a secure smart contract. When an application needs to verify one of these details, it sends a request to the contract. The contract confirms the fact privately and returns only the result, either yes or no, without revealing unrelated information.
Because Sapphire is compatible with Ethereum’s tools and programming environment, developers can build privacy-first identity solutions without starting from scratch. They can adapt existing projects to work with encrypted data, making private identity systems more practical to develop and deploy.
A person using such a system could sign up for a service without creating yet another profile. They could verify their age without giving their birth date, confirm a professional qualification without sending full certificates, or prove their location without revealing their full address. Even if a request is intercepted, it contains no sensitive details that could be misused.
This benefits organisations as well. Businesses can onboard customers faster and more securely without holding large amounts of personal data that could be a liability. DAOs can verify members without exposing their wallet balances or personal information. And institutions can comply with regulations while reducing their data storage risks.
Conclusion
The concept of digital identity in Web3 is not limited to individuals. Businesses, DAOs, and other groups can also benefit from privacy-protected identity systems. An organization could share proof of registration, licensing, or compliance without opening its entire internal records to outsiders. This builds trust between parties while safeguarding confidential information.
Of course, challenges remain. Managing your own identity data and keys can be complicated, especially for those new to Web3. User-friendly interfaces will be critical for wider adoption. Standards also need to be agreed upon so that identities can be recognized and used across different platforms. And legal systems will need to catch up with the idea of self-sovereign identity.
Even so, Oasis is in a strong position. It offers something rare in blockchain. The ability to run fully private computations on-chain. For identity, that means combining the security and decentralization of blockchain with the privacy needed for sensitive data.
By enabling privacy-preserving smart contracts and making them accessible to developers with familiar tools, Oasis moves us closer to an internet where your digital self belongs to you, secure, portable, and under your control.
References
https://oasis.net/blog/oasis-101-web3-privacy-what-is-it
https://docs.oasis.io/