Building Digital Trust

When I was a kid, my parents told me not to talk to strangers on the internet. Now, as a professional journalist and content creator, I do this everyday.

Just last week, I recorded a podcast with Christie Smythe, the surprisingly nice ex-girlfriend of Martin Shkreli, the infamous pharma bro freed from prison Wednesday.

Christie has a blue checkmark and 10,000 followers on Twitter, so I can trust her, right1? The blue checkmark solves the problem of account ownership, but how do I know if your tweets and you are worth trusting — even if your account is the real you?

Blue checkmarks don’t mean shit for building digital trust if the person behind the checkmark is a liar. Hell, Twitter verified Donald Trump and Amber Heard.

The blue checkmark is what I’m calling explicit verification whereas the 10,000 followers is what I’m calling implicit verification.

Explicit verification is given by the platform. For Twitter, OpenSea, and Instagram, it’s the blue checkmark. Implicit verification is given by the users. Think subscriber counts on YouTube, restaurant reviews on Yelp, and star ratings on Uber.

Twitter is built on implicit verification — mutual followers, number of followers, likes, retweets, and links in bios. By allowing room for implicit verification, platforms give us the power to decide who is worth our time, attention, and money.

I trust someone that is implicitly verified on Twitter via mutual followers more than someone who is explicitly verified via a blue check.

Let’s look at Houck’s profile.

He’s a dropout-turned-founder of a prestigious company. He also owns $0 in fiat. His bio shows credibility and is intriguing, but look below for the kicker.

He has 9,000+ followers and most importantly, he’s followed by people I respect. If I see that people I respect follow X, then I’ll be more inclined to follow X.

This is called mimetic desire, the idea we mimic the desires of people we respect.

It’s like how a guy with a pretty girlfriend is more attractive to women — or when a student goes into investment banking because his high school valedictorian did.

We watch the people we respect — then we copy them.

But, what happens when respectable platforms explicitly verify shitheads?

Retired from gaming? Sold out projects? Who is this bozo? Tbh, he probably bought a blue checked account and changed it to this shitty attempt at web3 success.

Yet he has a blue check — Twitter’s verification that he is legit and trustable.

Scammers use a platform’s social capital to boost their own reputation.

Platforms have been explicitly verifying bozos, scammers, and swindlers forever.

Back in the 1880s, the Sears catalogue featured an electric waistband assuring men that the “invigorating current of galvanic electricity” would help their dick game.

Now, we have influencers like Logan Paul that pump and dump NFTs, the Tinder Swindler who scammed women out of $10M, and Anna Delvey, the Instagram queen who fooled all of New York’s elites.

So in the era of the Logan Paul and Anna Delvey, how can one build trust online?

I could write here about building credibility, posting quality content, and making online friends, but I’ve done this all before in prior articles and threads.

Thus, let’s chat about something that a lot of people seem to be interested in.

A Soulbound Future

This week, I wrote a viral thread about soulbound tokens (SBTs), non-transferrable NFTs that would be held by unique crypto wallets called Souls.

SBTs could theoretically be used by universities to award students with degrees, prove employees worked at companies, and show who attended conferences.

I think soulbound tokens could be the future of building digital trust.

Each university would get a Soul, which would be used for the rest of the university’s existence. Universities would then use their Soul to distribute NFTs to graduates.

The same goes for employers. Let’s say Coinbase has a Soul, which it uses to distribute 1-year anniversary NFTs to their employees.

Pretend you’re applying for a new job at Twitter after graduating from University of Michigan and working at Coinbase for three years.

Rather than a hiring manager needing to call your school and past places of work, he could look at your Soul and see all of your SBTs on-chain.

On-Chain Credentials

While soulbound tokens will probably not be in use until the end of 2022, there are already companies working to make on-chain credentials happen.

Last week, I had a quick phone call with Tim Connors, the founder of 101, a startup offering blockchain-related courses that give students non-transferrable NFTs2.

“When you learn something on 101, the course content and the evidence that you passed are both permanently stored and shareable with anyone in the world,” Tim tweeted. “Instead of having to trust educational institutions, we can just look directly at what was learned. It's all transparent.”

RabbitHole is also doing this. The company raised $3.6M for building an educational platform that awards you in crypto for completing challenges around proposal creation, subgraph development, quest rewards, and content creation.

“Tomorrow, your wallet will be your résumé” - RabbitHole

Not only does RabbitHole provide education, it also provides talent.

Because blockchains are public, RabbitHole students now have public, verifiable resumes they can show web3 companies when applying.

People fudge their resumes all the time3. You can’t do that on-chain. If this system is adopted, the losers will be those unwilling to do the real work.

Downsides

There are potential downsides to this system, namely around privacy and spam.

1. If you go to a conference for a controversial topic, do you waive your privacy?

2. What if you get spammed unwanted NFTs?

I think both of these potential issues are easily solvable.

For #1, Vitalik already wrote about the ability to hide NFTs in your wallet. For #2, perhaps Souls could have receipt acceptance like signing for a package IRL?

There’s a whole lot more to unpack. I’ll be writing more about soulbound tokens and exploring these potential issues in an essay for The Defiant this week.