Episode #199: Digital Identity For the Post-Quantum Age with Blerify’s Marcos Allende

Hey everyone,Like many of you, I’ve become more interested in the quantum computing topic over the last few months. To help me better understand, I invited Blerify CEO and co-founder Marcos Allende is CEO and co-founder of Blerify, which is building post-quantum digital identity solutions. Marcos is a quantum physicist by training and has worked at CERN, MIT and the Inter-American Development Bank before becoming a startup founder. As both an academic and a practitioner, he’s incredibly articulate at explaining the how technologies like blockchain and quantum-resistant algorithms can solve real world problems today. We discuss why biometric identity verification will be completely outdated in two years, why digital IDs need to be tied to the hardware in your phone, and where quantum computing stands in 2026.Marcos discusses the looming problem that AI tools can now convincingly fake the selfies, passport scans and liveness checks that banks and crypto platforms rely on to verify customers.In response, governments across the US, Europe and Latin America are rolling out cryptographic digital IDs. Blerify is building the infrastructure to make those credentials verifiable across borders.🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversationBits & Borders is Presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base.Some of the key global highlights include:* Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).* Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.* Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.Key Takeaways* Remote biometric checks, passwords and one-time passcodes are on their way out as a way to prove identity, because AI can now replicate faces, passports and entire biometric footprints.* Blerify’s identity wallet holds a digital ID on the user’s phone, secured by a private key stored in the device hardware, and lets users share only what a service needs, such as proof they are over 18, through selective disclosure or zero-knowledge proofs.* The digital identity shift is already underway: more than 25 US states are launching mobile driver’s licenses, EU member states must release national ID wallets by the end of this year, and about 10 Latin American countries are launching their own.* Latin America has no equivalent of the global registry that makes documents like passports verifiable anywhere, so Blerify built a blockchain-based trust registry where issuers register and publish credential status without putting any personal data on chain.* Blerify layers NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptography on top of traditional algorithms, and Marcos argues every company and government should start that transition now because harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks put today’s encrypted data at risk.* Q-Day is hard to predict because it depends on a hardware breakthrough that hasn’t happened yet, but Marcos says recent progress from Google and Micro