Former basketball player Emanuel “Manu” Ginobili, registered on the Proof Of Humanity (PoH) platform on April 21. It is a project developed on Ethereum that relates addresses in this blockchain with verified human identities and delivers, in exchange, a basic income in the UBI token.

“I certify that I am a real human and that I am not already registered in this registry”, says, in English, the former captain of the Argentine National Team, in the video he provides as proof of identity. As the PoH regulation indicates, in that video he shows his Ethereum address (in which he owns 5.82 ETH, as observed in Etherscan ).

Unlike others interested in getting the UBI, this former San Antonio Spurs player did not have to wait long to be ” vouched ” (that is, for someone to certify that he is a real human). At the time of writing this article, 42 people validated the identity of the athlete . Among them are the developer leading the project, Santiago Siri , and Gino Tubaro, a renowned social entrepreneur from Argentina.

Far from expressing any annoyance about this, in the Telegram groups dedicated to UBI (where some of those who are waiting to be verified mostly congregate) the participation of Ginobili was celebrated. Pia Mancini, a member of Democracy Earth, the organization behind the project , joked about the situation: “Is Manu Ginobili a human? Anyone who has seen him play can legitimately question him! ‘

Although it may be curious, the participation of the athlete in Proof Of Humanity seems to be consistent with their interests outside the world of basketball. Ginobili describes himself as a “lover of new technologies” and has promoted initiatives to disseminate the teaching of programming. In addition, as recently published by an Argentine newspaper , “he is entering the world of cryptocurrencies.”

Among other celebrities who have also tokenized their identity in Ethereum through PoH, there is also the Argentine Marcos Galperin , founder and CEO of MercadoLibre. As reported by CriptoNoticias, the businessman claims to have done it as “a personal experiment.”

UBI: a “sustainable model of digital and sovereign identities”
The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has not certified his humanity on this platform, although he is a member of the Telegram group “Proof of Humanity” and has occasionally interacted with the other participants. As he explained on March 16, “decentralized governance and airdrops like UBI are definitely the two most important use cases,” according to him, for a public registry of this type.

The UBI project is jointly developed by the Democracy Earth Foundation and Kleros. Its mission is to develop a sustainable model of sovereign and digital identities. For this, the platform, which is presented as “the Internet of humans”, uses trust networks, reverse turing tests and dispute resolution mechanisms.