Self Protocol

• Name: Self Protocol
• URL: https://docs.self.xyz/
• Category: privacy-preserving identity middleware / document-backed zk proof system / proof-of-personhood rail
• Tags: ethereum-ecosystem
• Summary: Self Protocol is a passport-and-ID proof stack, not a generic identity layer. It turns government-document authenticity into selective-disclosure proofs, then exports those proofs through Self Pass, Self Connect, and Self Agent ID.
• What it does:
  • Generates privacy-preserving proofs from passports, NFC-readable ID cards, Aadhaar credentials, and related attestations
  • Lets applications verify attributes such as age, nationality, sanctions status, and unique-human status without receiving the underlying raw document data
  • Offers Self Connect for issuer-backed mappings from offchain identifiers such as phone numbers, email addresses, and social handles to wallet addresses
  • Offers Self Agent ID as an ERC-8004-oriented, soulbound agent identity export backed by Self human proofs and nullifiers
  • Provides frontend, backend, mobile, and smart-contract integration paths for consuming those proofs
• Key claims:
  • The real primitive is passport-and-ID-backed selective disclosure. That is more analytically useful than calling Self a broad identity protocol.
  • Self depends on document-signature infrastructure, supported issuer sets, and public-key coverage, so the trust model is partly inherited from the state-document systems underneath.
  • Self Pass is the cleanest product surface because it exposes narrow attribute checks instead of asking applications to ingest full identity state.
  • Self Connect is a different trust problem entirely: identifier privacy can be preserved while issuer trust, issuer admission, and mapping policy still matter.
  • Self Agent ID is interesting because it turns document-backed human verification into a machine-facing registry instead of stopping at login or app gating.
• Whitepaper: No canonical standalone Self Protocol whitepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official docs, the monorepo README, the Self Pass / Self Connect / Self Agent ID documentation, and linked project repositories; see ../whitepapers/self-protocol-primary-sources-2026-05-10.md.
• Sources:
  • https://docs.self.xyz/
  • https://github.com/selfxyz/self
  • https://github.com/selfxyz/self-docs
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/selfxyz/self/main/README.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/selfxyz/self-docs/main/README.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/selfxyz/self-docs/main/self-pass/README.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/selfxyz/self-docs/main/self-connect/introduction-and-overview.md
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/selfxyz/self-docs/main/agent-id/overview.md
  • https://github.com/selfxyz/self-agent-id

Internal linkages

• Keep the comparison set short: world-id, human-passport, and zkpassport.

Control surface

• The leverage sits in supported-document coverage, issuer trust lists, mobile proof UX, identifier-mapping policy, and whatever downstream systems start treating Self proofs as good enough by default.

• Self is strongest as a document-proof note. Do not let the note sprawl into a catch-all map of proof-of-personhood, social identity, or credential middleware.

• Last reviewed: 2026-06-03 UTC