Insights
Essays on digital identity and trust.
Writing on digital identity, applied AI, verification and the regulation arriving for all three. Written from inside the systems rather than about them.
Platforms
Five products, one question: is this real?
A mark, a person, a conversation, a coin and a tonne of carbon. How VCode, Confrmo, Verus, Solidus and Veridium Carbon each replace a claim with something you can check, why they share two layers, and the film for each.
Verus
We turned dead Helium hotspots into a private network
Verus Relay carries calls it cannot hear and messages when you have no signal, and keeps talking by radio when the internet goes down. It runs in ten countries today, and if your old Helium hotspot is earning next to nothing, it can join.
Compliance
The November deadline most UK directors have not noticed
Six to seven million people must verify their identity by 18 November 2026, and failing to do it is a criminal offence. Most founders I speak to do not have the date.
Authentication
Passkeys prove the device. They do not prove the person.
The best thing to happen to consumer authentication in twenty years, and the industry has started claiming something for it that it does not do.
Privacy engineering
Answer enough questions and you have given away the answer
Selective disclosure is the best idea in digital identity. Sixteen well-chosen yes or no questions will still reconstruct the date of birth that nobody ever disclosed.
Security
What your error message tells an attacker
Every system that refuses someone has to decide what to say. It gets treated as copywriting, and it is frequently the most consequential security decision in the flow.
Verification
How to catch a forgery you cannot inspect
Anti-counterfeiting assumes you get to examine the fake. When the mark itself is forged there is no record to inspect, and the lookups that fail become the only signal.
Regulation
Age checks arrived. Most of them prove the wrong thing.
Ofcom has opened investigations into more than ninety platforms and the regime is working. What most implementations actually establish is not what they think it is.
Applied AI
Know Your Agent: the identity layer AI is about to need
Software is starting to spend money on our behalf. The question nobody has answered is who it answers to, and whether that person still means it.
Digital identity
Britain does not need an ID card. It needs a way to prove you are you.
Three million signatures, a select committee report and a spending inquiry later, the national digital identity debate is still arguing about the wrong noun.
Security
One in five biometric fraud attempts is now a deepfake
Detection accuracy that looks excellent in a laboratory collapses in production. The answer is not a better classifier, because that is an arms race you are structurally losing.
Verification
The QR code was never meant to be trusted
It was invented in 1994 to track car parts through a Toyota factory. We ended up pointing it at our bank accounts.
Regulation
The wallet deadline nobody in Britain is planning for
Every EU member state must offer a digital identity wallet by the end of 2026. If you sell into Europe, the clock that matters is the one a year later.
Institutional, investment and partnership enquiries.
Four kinds of enquiry reach Louis-James Davis at the same address. Say which one you are in the first line and it is answered faster.
- Investors What you invest in and the stage you come in at.
- Partners What you would want to build or integrate.
- Press Your outlet and your deadline in the first line.
- Working together What you have built. Working code beats a CV.