Humanity Protocol, whose price plunged about 80% or more in a single day due to a hack, was found to have even its core feature, the identity verification service it has touted, working loosely. As questions arise over the project's technical completeness, criticism is also mounting over whether the virtual asset exchanges that listed it went through sufficient vetting procedures.
On the 10th, on the virtual asset exchange Bithumb, Humanity Protocol's native token, Humanity (H), is trading in the 170-won range. That is about 87% below the peak of the 1,290-won range just before the hacking damage occurred. Humanity has been under hacker attack since on the 8th, and is said to have suffered about $31 million (about 42.5 billion won) in damage.
Humanity Protocol has promoted a Blockchain-based innovative identity verification system, fronting palm biometric authentication. It verifies identity by scanning the unique palm veins and patterns of each person. With this pitch, Humanity Protocol also attracted $50 million (about 75 billion won) in investment from global investors including Hashed, Polygon, and CMCC.
Humanity said that when users submit palm images via smartphone or a dedicated scanner, they undergo a process in which artificial intelligence (AI) extracts and verifies features from the palm images. It emphasized that, compared to biometric data such as faces or fingerprints, tampering and forgery are harder, protecting personal information and enabling decentralized identity verification.
However, the market has continued to raise concerns about the reliability of the entity managing biometric data and about actual security. Humanity's verification method was easily breached with copied palm images or the back of the hand.
The hackers who breached Humanity are still exchanging Humanity tokens for Ethereum, continuing the theft. Humanity is listed on Korea's virtual asset exchanges Bithumb, Coinone, and GOPAX.