Age Assurance

Age assurance is the broader regulatory and industry term for the whole spectrum of methods used to establish, with some level of confidence, how old a person is, deliberately wider than "age verification," which usually implies a hard, document-backed check. The spectrum runs from weak to strong: self-declaration ("enter your birthdate," trivially falsified), AI-driven facial age estimation (a probabilistic guess from a selfie, no document required), account-history or payment-method signals (inferred, not proven), third-party attestation (another service vouches for the age it already established), and full document verification (the strongest, most data-heavy method) at the top end.

Regulators adopted "assurance" rather than "verification" as the umbrella term deliberately, to avoid mandating one specific technology and to let the required strength scale with the risk of the thing being age-gated, a newsletter signup and an adult-content site don't need the same bar. The UK's Online Safety Act 2023 asks platforms to apply "highly effective age assurance" proportionate to risk, without naming a single acceptable method; the EU's Digital Services Act and Australia's 2024 social-media minimum-age law carry comparable, differently-worded obligations. What counts as sufficiently strong, for which category of content or service, is an active and evolving regulatory question, not a settled technical standard.

Who actually built this

No single body owns the term. It was shaped collectively by online-safety regulators (the UK's Ofcom is the most frequently cited source of the "highly effective age assurance" phrasing) alongside industry groups like the Age Verification Providers Association and child-safety advocates like 5Rights Foundation, who pushed for language broad enough to cover non-document methods rather than assuming a passport scan is always the answer. Solidus contributed nothing to this regulatory or terminological history.

Solidus today

Solidus does not offer an age-assurance program in the sense regulators increasingly expect: a layered set of methods, calibrated to risk, that together produce a defensible confidence level. What exists is narrower and sits at the "document-backed" end of the spectrum, a boolean age claim computed once from a verified document at issuance and selectively disclosed later (see Age Verification for the exact, honest mechanics, including the important caveat that this is disclosure of a precomputed value, not a zero-knowledge predicate proof). It runs on Solidus's public testnet, is built on unaudited cryptography, and has never been assessed by any regulator against any age-assurance standard. There is no self-declaration mode, no age estimation model, and no parental-consent flow: Solidus is one point on the spectrum this term describes, not the spectrum itself.

See also

Age Verification is the specific, narrower method Solidus actually runs. Predicate Proof documents the precise cryptographic distinction between what age assurance implies and what Solidus's claim-disclosure mechanism actually delivers. Level of Assurance is the general framework for grading how strong any identity or attribute claim is, age included.