Why the room needs them.
Evin McMullen is co-founder and CEO of Billions Network, which verifies people and AI agents with zero-knowledge proofs generated on the user's own device. She spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as a panellist on "Personhood, Provenance, and Verification in the Agentic Age" on the Taostats Stage. Her position is that an autonomous agent cannot be held to account until it can be identified.
The full account.
Evin McMullen is co-founder and chief executive of Billions Network, an identity company that verifies people and AI agents using zero-knowledge proofs generated on the user's own device. She spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 as a panellist on "Personhood, Provenance, and Verification in the Agentic Age", the Agentic AI track session that ran on the Taostats Stage on 3 June, 15:15–15:55, alongside Pierre Aubert of Parity Technologies, Stuart Haber of SureMark Digital and Chi Zhang of Kite. Mohamed Ezeldin of Animoca Brands moderated.
Her route there ran through three companies. She founded Stow Protocol, formerly Linnea, and built it on Ethereum mainnet while she was project lead at ConsenSys, where she also co-led the entertainment practice; she described the protocol to The Politic in 2019 as "an open source protocol that allows app developers to give users end control of their data". Next came Disco.xyz, a verifiable data platform she founded and ran, whose "Data Backpack" consolidated a user's online presence into a single repository. Disco merged with Privado ID in September 2024, and she became co-founder and chief strategy officer there. Privado ID launched Billions Network on 28 February 2025, pitched as verification of humans and AI agents that needs no proprietary hardware.
The consumer app followed in June 2025, incubated in Polygon's AggLayer Breakout Program: an NFC scan of a biometric passport or national ID card, a biometric liveness check, and a cryptographic proof generated on the handset, with the company saying it stores no personal data. In August 2025 Billions disclosed $30 million in total capital from Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Polygon, Liberty City Ventures and Bitkraft, and named Sentient as a partner. It set out Know Your Agent in January 2026, then applied it with Stable.xyz to machine-initiated payments in July 2026.
McMullen's public argument is that more biometric collection is the wrong answer to AI-driven fraud. "We cannot solve AI-driven fraud by creating larger honeypots of biometric information," she wrote in FinTech Weekly in January 2026, in an essay arguing that a verified identity should earn its owner income rather than cost them privacy. She was a director of product marketing at Berkshire Hathaway before ConsenSys, and holds a BA in anthropology of information systems from Yale.
What Evin believes about the next ten years.
Years of shipping.
Lines that keep proving correct.
“AI agents don't have eyes. They are not swayed by the visual decoration on the edges of the main body of information that they seek. The interest is less in finding new surfaces to place display ads on, and more of an existential question of how discovery happens. Are we inverting the internet?”
“We cannot solve AI-driven fraud by creating larger honeypots of biometric information.”
“Blockchains now are not just about currency. They are trust layers that allow us to make verifiable claims, such as the claim of age based on a passport, in a way that is tamper-resistant and verifiable without storing that actual data on-chain.”
What they have built, written, and backed.
Built
- Billions NetworkIdentity verification for people and AI agents, launched by Privado ID in February 2025 and pitched as needing no proprietary hardware. The consumer app, from June 2025, takes an NFC scan of a biometric passport or national ID card plus a biometric liveness check and generates the cryptographic proof on the handset; the company says it stores no personal data. CoinDesk reported in June 2026 that its infrastructure is used by TikTok, HSBC and DeBank, and that it supports the third-largest on-chain agent population, behind Binance and Base.
- Know Your AgentZero-knowledge verification that gives an AI agent a verifiable identity and ties it to the human or organisation behind it. Billions set it out in January 2026, built on its Deep Trust framework. In July 2026 it was applied with Stable.xyz to high-frequency machine-initiated payments settled in USDT, linking each agent to one KYC-verified human without revealing that person's identity and needing only a smartphone and a government-issued ID.
- Disco.xyzVerifiable data platform she founded and led as CEO, building consumer tools for on-chain identity including a "Data Backpack", described at the merger as a virtual repository where users consolidate their online presence. Merged with Privado ID in September 2024.
- Stow ProtocolEthereum mainnet project, formerly Linnea, which she described in 2019 as "an open source protocol that allows app developers to give users end control of their data". Founded and led while she was project lead at ConsenSys.
The next Proof of Talk is in Abu Dhabi.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, 3–4 December 2026. Admission is by application, and the room is capped at 2,000.
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