What should an ideal digital identity system look like?

In this episode of Coordinate, Soubhik sits down with dcbbuilder, Research Engineer at World Foundation, to unpack the architecture of digital identity from first principles.

We start with the core mental model: credentials, issuers, roots of trust, attestations, and relying parties. From there, we dive into the properties of a strong identity system, privacy, unlinkability, recovery, revocation, self-hosting, and programmable attestations.

In the second half, we go deep into World ID’s design: how the Orb works, how privacy is preserved, why client-side proving matters, how iris uniqueness checks use MPC, and how zero-knowledge proofs enable proof of personhood without revealing identity.

We also explore one of the biggest open questions ahead: identity for AI agents, what it means, why it matters, and how human-linked agents may reshape trust online.

A great episode for anyone interested in digital identity, zero-knowledge proofs, privacy tech, biometrics, MPC, and the future of the internet.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

00:13 Why digital identity matters

01:24 The mental model: credentials, roots of trust, and relying parties

04:28 Can roots of trust be decentralized?

06:56 What an ideal digital identity system should look like

07:28 Privacy, unlinkability, and why they matter

13:21 Recovery, revocation, and self-hosted identity

18:38 Programmable attestations, ZK, MPC, and TEEs

36:30 How World ID works: Orbs, privacy, iris codes, and MPC

47:54 World Chain, mini apps, and identity for agents

Reference links mentioned in the Podcast:

- Future of Digital Identity 1: https://dcbuilder.dev/blog/the-future-of-digital-identity

- Future of Digital Identity 2: https://dcbuilder.dev/blog/a-tidal-change-the-future-of-digital-identity-ii

- AMPC Privacy/ World ID: https://world.org/blog/engineering/introducing-ampc-another-leap-privacy-performance-world-id

- Learn about World Orb: https://world.org/blog/world/orb-faqs

With Episode 6 of The Coordinate, we are taking the podcast to a whole new level by kicking off a series on post-AGI economics.

Recently, there has been a sharp rise in discussions around agents engaging in commercial activity, with some even projecting that agentic commerce could eventually eclipse the human-based commerce we know today.

But many of these conversations stop short of exploring the deeper question: how do markets need to be designed or redesigned to accommodate our silicon-based counterparts?

To unpack the nuances of agentic commerce and the market design it will require, Sreeram Kannan and I had the wonderful opportunity to sit down with the one and only Scott Kominers, Professor at Harvard Business School and Research Partner at A16Z.

What began as a planned 90-minute recording session turned into a 3 hour conversation in aggregate, so we decided to split the episode into two parts. Today, we’re releasing Part 1.

In part 1, we cover:

• what market design is in plain English

• why prices alone are often not enough

• how Uber, Airbnb, food delivery, and auctions reveal deeper market structure

• stable matching and the medical residency match

• privacy, transparency, and information in markets

• why crypto and AI could transform agentic commerce

If you’re curious about market design and the future of agentic commerce, this episode is for you.

This is Part 1 of Episode 6 of TheCoordinate. Hope you enjoy it!

Payments are the electricity of the economy and Stripe’s annual letter even called out Tempo as part of where payments are going.

In Episode 5 of The Coordinate, I sat with Mallesh Pai, Researcher at Tempo and The Lay Family Professor in Department of Economics at Rice University to discuss why Tempo is building a payments-first blockchain:

• TIP-20 (opinionated ERC-20) w/ policies + RBAC + transfer memos
• Passkeys/WebAuthn + native AA via TempoTransactions
• Fees paid in stablecoins
• Payment lanes so payroll & bills don’t break during congestion
• Sub-second finality

Ethereum is starting from the endgame.

Episode 4 of TheCoordinate is a deep dive into Lean Ethereum: a clean-slate rethink of consensus, execution, and data availability.

I sat down with Justin Drake from Ethereum Foundation to unpack:

• need for the rewrite,
• rewrite items: post-quantum security + fast finality,
• endgame finality (3-slot -> 2-slot -> maybe 1-slot),
• slot anatomy, networking constraints, and the "SOL slots" meme,
• real-time ZK proving changing the execution roadmap,
• censorship resistance with FOSSIL,
• role of L2s in the world of Lean Ethereum,
• incentives across proposer, builder, prover, includer, attester.

If you’re building on Ethereum or trying to understand where the base layer is headed, this one is for you.

Solana is rewriting its core.

Episode 3 of TheCoordinate is about one of the most ambitious protocol upgrades in crypto right now: AlpenGlow, a redesign of Solana's consensus + data propagation stack.

I sat down with Roger Wattenhofer, Kobi and Quentin Kniep from Anza Labs to break down:

• what was structurally limited in TowerBFT + PoH?
• how AlpenGlow works end-to-end: Rotor (erasure-coded dissemination via relays) + Voter (a dance of fast and slow paths)
• why they are optimizing for a 20% Byzantine + 20% crash-fault model?
• what changes for validators + RPCs when votes move off-chain (VAT/fee mechanics, different cost structure, and a smaller ledger footprint)?
• what 100s-of-ms finality means in practice for MEV, remote validators, and upcoming multi-proposer designs?

If you’re building or operating on Solana, this is one of those quiet-but-fundamental stack shifts and you may wanna listen to this episode to learn how this upgrade touches you.

This is Episode 3 of TheCoordinate. Hope you enjoy it.

What does state-of-the-art blockchain engineering look like in 2026?

In Episode 2 of TheCoordinate podcast, I sat down with Patrick O’Grady & Brendan Chou (Commonware) to unpack their Anti-Framework philosophy: build chains by composing optimized primitives—not inheriting a monolithic stack.

We go deep on:

• how Commonware is designed in practice (and how to use it)
• who it’s for vs Cosmos-style frameworks
• how their newest consensus protocol Minimit works (arguably the hottest kid in the consensus neighborhood)
• what’s coming with ExoWare

This is Episode 2 of TheCoordinate. Hope you enjoy it.

Most people treats consensus protocols as boring and impenetrable. That’s a mistake.

Under the hood, there’s an intense race to design faster, higher-throughput, and adversary-resilient consensus protocols. That work directly determines retail UX and explains why Ethereum, Solana, and other L1s obsess over consensus.

For Episode 1 of The Coordinate, I sat down with Kartik Nayak, one of the world’s leading consensus researchers, to pull consensus out of the black box and build a first-principles mental model: how consensus actually works, how it evolved over last 50 years, how today’s sprawling protocol families fit together, and what the next frontier of consensus research looks like.

This is Episode 1 of The Coordinate. Hope you enjoy it.