CredZK: Verifiable Financial Credentials for Lending
Every loan application asks the same question — can you prove your finances? — and answers it the worst way possible: PDFs, screenshots and portal logins that expose everything. CredZK started at Moca Network's Identity House in Cannes in June 2025 with a narrower idea: prove the one fact the lender needs, cryptographically, and keep the rest private. I founded it there, and it is the company Byzantine Solidus Inc. acquired and brought into Permara.
Born at Moca Network's Identity House
Identity House was a five-day builder sprint that Moca Network ran with HackQuest in Cannes from June 27 to July 1, 2025, in the days before EthCC. The brief was open digital identity infrastructure; my pitch was narrower. I opened with the six-billion-dollar problem: document fraud in lending, weeks of manual review, and the borrowers who abandon applications because they refuse to upload their whole financial life. On Demo Day, July 1, CredZK showed a working answer — a borrower proving a financial fact to a lender without exposing the data behind it — and was recognized as the second-place project.
What we built in five days
The prototype was a Next.js application with one job: turn an authenticated bank session into a reusable, privacy-preserving credential. A zkTLS proof establishes that the balance, income and account data really came from the user's bank. That proof is issued as a W3C Verifiable Credential (BBS+ signatures) through Moca Network's AIR Kit, so it lives in the user's wallet rather than in a lender's database. When a lender asks, it requests only the predicates it needs — an income range, account standing, overdraft history — and the user consents to exactly that. The demo ends with loan offers generated from those credentials and an approval, with no statements ever leaving the user's device. The video above is that flow, unedited.
From prototype to product
After Cannes the hackathon app became a monorepo: a NestJS verification API, a TypeScript SDK, a developer portal and documentation, with the zkTLS layer migrated from RISC Zero to TLSNotary. We demonstrated the verification flow against a live Wells Fargo login, published public demo videos in August 2025, and presented at Moca Network's Demo Day at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. Per credzk.com, the product is positioned around 15-minute, document-free verification — 98% faster than manual review — with 50+ regional and community bank customers and SOC 2 Type II certification, and CredZK reports a $1M seed round in 2025 led by Animoca Brands and Moca Network.
The next chapter: Permara
On September 14, 2026, Byzantine Solidus Inc. announced its acquisition of CredZK Inc., bringing the technology into Permara, its platform for verified payments and executable agreements. With the acquisition I joined Byzantine Solidus as Co-Founder, Product & Technology of Permara. The logic is simple: CredZK proves facts. Permara turns verified facts into action — a credential becomes a condition inside a payment, a purchase-order financing agreement or a loan, and when the conditions everyone agreed to are satisfied, the money moves. The founder letter linked below explains why it makes sense.
What this proves
CredZK is first-hand evidence for the two claims this site makes most often: that I build digital identity and verifiable-credential systems that real users can operate without knowing what zkTLS or a DID is, and that I can take a payments-adjacent product from a five-day prototype to a production stack with a small, AI-native team. It is also why identity and payments belong in the same sentence — the verified fact and the money that moves on it are one workflow.
Building with verifiable credentials?
If your product needs to verify a financial or identity fact without collecting the data behind it, I take a small number of fractional CTO and technical-advisory engagements in exactly this area. Start with the technical consulting page, or reach out directly.