Identity: The Final Threshold for Blockchain to Enter the Real World
Blockchain has never stopped moving forward.
Performance keeps breaking new ground, costs continue to fall, and modular architectures, rollups, and cross-chain systems are steadily maturing. The industry is moving closer to a much broader real-world horizon.
But this expansion has also exposed a problem that is both fundamental and stubborn: identity.
In the early days, when participants were mostly technical enthusiasts, the idea that “an address is an identity” was simple and workable. Once blockchain starts supporting real economic activity, public coordination, and long-term governance, that assumption breaks down quickly.
Incentives get farmed. Governance gets diluted. Real-world assets struggle to connect smoothly. These are not isolated symptoms. They point to the same long-postponed structural flaw: the system cannot reliably recognize, or remember, who is a real person that persists over time.
The DID Dilemma: Not a Lack of Technology, but a Structural Misplacement
From a technical standpoint, decentralized identity (DID) has never been a blank slate. Standards, protocols, and tools have existed for years, and so have debates.
The real disagreement isn’t whether DID is possible. It’s something deeper:
Where does identity sit in the system’s architecture?
In most projects, identity is positioned at the gateway: for login, access control, or compliance. It’s optional, replaceable, and rarely affects the system’s core operating logic.
As a result, even with DID in place, economic models still revolve around capital scale, and governance still defaults to token-weighted power. Identity exists, but only as “extra metadata,” not as a structural component.
That’s one of the key reasons the DID market has struggled to scale.
Meta Earth’s Foundational Choice: No System Works Without Recognizing People First
From day one, Meta Earth began with a simple question: if a system is meant to serve real people over the long term, rather than short-term market participants, what must it solve first?
The answer is straightforward. It isn’t transaction speed. It isn’t financial engineering. It’s this: how do you verify, acknowledge, and consistently treat a “real individual” as a lasting participant?
That’s why, in Meta Earth’s architecture, identity is not an add-on. It is a prerequisite:
- The network runs the system
- The economic model allocates value
- Identity confirms who is participating
ME ID isn’t “one more feature.” It’s what keeps the system coherent over time.
By the end of 2025, more than one million users had registered and used ME IDs across multiple regions. This isn’t just growth in numbers. It reflects the emergence of a critical capability: the system can remember real participation and continue to recognize it.
When Identity Enters the Economic Model, Incentives Start Rewarding “Long-Term Presence”
Most on-chain systems share a common trait: participation is frictionless, and staying costs even less. Addresses can be created endlessly. People can enter and exit with near-zero resistance. Rewards naturally favor fast movers over long-term contributors.
This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a structural one.
Meta Earth embeds identity directly into the economic model to break that default. If a system can’t distinguish short-term speculation from long-term participation, incentives will eventually collapse into imbalance.
Once ME ID becomes a prerequisite, economic logic shifts:
- Rewards move from one-off distribution to accumulation tied to time and sustained contribution
- Rights begin to favor those who truly stay
- The network can clearly distinguish “brief appearances” from “persistent participation”
This design doesn’t make the system more aggressive. It makes it more restrained and more sustainable, because it finally serves real people, not anonymous addresses.
From DID to UBI: Distribution Only Works If You Can Identify Real Individuals
Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) isn’t a new idea. The real challenge has never been “sending money.” It’s this: How do you distribute consistently, over the long term, to real and unique individuals?
Without uniqueness and continuity, UBI collapses into two extremes: it gets abused, or it becomes heavily centralized.
Meta Earth’s choice is straightforward: Make identity the foundation of distribution rights, not a post-hoc verification tool. Under this structure, UBI is no longer a campaign. It becomes an institutional arrangement that unfolds over time.
You don’t need to constantly prove you’re “active enough.”
The system recognizes you as a participant by default.
Governance Isn’t About Voting Mechanics — It’s About Who Is Recognized
Many failures of decentralized governance don’t come from voting methods or complex rules. They come from an earlier question: Who is actually eligible to participate?
When identity is ignored, governance naturally concentrates around capital, and decisions get dominated by short-term forces. When identity is recognized, governance can return to real coordination and long-term responsibility.
Meta Earth doesn’t try to solve every governance problem with complicated rules. It starts at the foundation: confirm participants first, then build decision-making.
That’s how governance becomes more than a cold procedural flow. It becomes a living structure rooted in long-term relationships. Real individuals are seen, and their voices carry real weight.
The Real World Won’t Wait for “Identity Later”
As blockchain begins to connect real-world assets, public affairs, and cross-regional cooperation, identity stops being philosophical and becomes operational.
The real world doesn’t care how decentralized a system claims to be. It cares about who is participating, who is accountable, and who holds persistent rights.
Meta Earth isn’t trying to replace reality with blockchain. It is building a digital infrastructure that runs alongside the real world, designed to be complementary, interoperable, and aligned.
With modular design and ME ID’s scalable structure, that infrastructure is increasingly aligned with real-world needs. To date, more than one million users have completed verification across many countries and regions. Identity-first is no longer just a vision. It is already taking shape.
The Future of DID Won’t Belong to Isolated Products
From Meta Earth’s perspective, DID will not reach its end state as a standalone category or an isolated product. It will be woven into every layer of the system:
- Tightly bound to economic models, so incentives reward long-term participation
- Co-evolving with governance, so decisions return to real coordination
- Becoming the network’s default underlying state, present as naturally as air
Without a solid identity structure, a system may run loudly in the short term, but it cannot carry the long-term weight of the real world. Economies, relationships, and responsibility are built by countless individuals, and they demand recognition that persists over time.
Reality is already proving this. By early 2026, ME ID had surpassed three million verified users across more than 40 countries and regions. This is not merely a numerical increase. It shows that real individuals are being continuously remembered by the system. It also signals a broader shift, with DID moving from an edge tool toward a core pillar of blockchain infrastructure.
As this scale moves toward tens of millions, more systems will begin to recognize a simple truth. Sustainability is not about how dazzling technology appears. It depends on whether people were placed at the center from the very beginning.
Conclusion: Identity Isn’t Information — It’s a System’s Commitment to People
On Meta Earth, identity is never treated as cold data or a simple label.
What truly matters is this: as time stretches forward, will the system still firmly recognize your existence, your participation, and the share of rights you’ve earned by staying?
The deeper value of decentralized identity is not the concept itself. It’s whether it gives a system the ability to treat real individuals with long-term care, stability, and responsibility.
That’s why Meta Earth placed identity at the very start of its design, from the very beginning.
This commitment is already taking shape in the growth of three million verified users: each participant is experiencing a lasting sense of belonging and dignity enabled by identity.
No matter how large the system becomes, we will hold to the same principle: let identity become the bridge between every “you” and a wider world.
That is Meta Earth’s commitment to identity and to every real individual.
About Meta Earth
Meta Earth (ME) is based on a modular, high-performance, infinitely scalable multi-dimensional fusion underlying value network — ME Network, which supports the high-concurrency big data processing needs of traditional industrial applications.
And through an encrypted DID (Decentralized Identifier) system — ME ID & ME Pass which can effectively protect user privacy data, and a co-construction & co-governance mechanism which can fully reflect personal sovereignty and equality for all, as well as an economic model which can guarantee UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) without any distinction, Meta Earth is fully dedicated to enhancing happiness for a better life and maintaining ecological balance to promote sustainability.
If you want to receive more airdrops or rewards, please download the ME Pass and complete advanced verification. See more on the poster! 👇👇👇
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