In the Next Bull Run, Web3 Digital Identity and Reputation Are Everything

— Benjamin Franklin

It’s hard to imagine an industry where these words ring more true than in web3. It is a place built on transformative technologies, disruptive ideas, and, for lack of a better word, dreamers.

These dreamers have built blockchain-based empires on their revolutionary ideas, game-changing technologies, and oft-radical reputations — empires we’ve witnessed come crumbling down at the drop of a hat.

In web3, we love a daily dose of inspiration to lift our spirits (especially in market headwinds) and remind us why we got into this often difficult and unpredictable business.

We love our GMs, memes, conferences, parties, product announcements, and our leaders, whose daring and often eccentric personalities come to define them and even their products and communities. We have our maxis and bulls — and these spirited communities gravitate towards the technologies and products they believe in and those who have built them.

We’ve learned repeatedly, but especially this year, in web3 that behind every headline and price chart is a human, and humans are defined by not just who they are but what they’ve done.

In the end, reputation and identity are everything. And in web3, we’ve often lost sight of that.

In web3, words — and people — are complicated

User-centricity is a key value proposition when building products and communities on blockchain technology. We build for the many, not the few. Whether it's decentralized finance or decentralized social, what's often most revolutionary about our products and communities is that you don't need to trust a third party (trustlessness), ask for permission to participate (permissionless), and that ideally, you gain complete control over your identity and data (self-sovereignty).

Ironically, however, in an ideally-decentralized industry where we democratize so much power and capabilities to the user, we still put so much (often blind) faith into those who sit on top: the founders, CEOs, and even the developers and product builders whose behind-the-scenes work shapes so much of what happens out in front.

As we see the gradually illuminating horns of a coming bull market, we can't forget how much illusion and dishonesty sent us into the chilling depths of our most recent cycle. We can't forget how much words — and the reputation and identities behind them — matter.

But can we really blame web3 users for following leaders like SBF so blindly into the sunset? While "not your keys, not your crypto" is a mantra every user is responsible for knowing and understanding, web3 is an industry built upon complex technology and people.

In web3, for better or for worse, everyone is shooting for the moon, and people align with tech often without understanding who built it, what happens under the hood, and how those two things are intricately connected.

We say "don't trust, verify," — and I believe that should go for verifying people's identity and reputation just as much as any transaction.

Bringing reputation and identity onchain

From crowded community channels, where the lines between alpha, memes, and menace become blurred, to the words of exchange founders in the global press, it can be hard to weed out the noise in web3. But just like NFTs changed the game for bringing verifiability of assets on-chain, the same can — and should — go for people.

A decentralized reputation and identity system redefines how we measure and verify trust — in a space where anonymity and decentralization is often the reason many got here in the first place. The only way to truly verify trust and reputation is to think about it in the same way as Satoshi did: design and utilize an infrastructure that gives everyone who wants to participate the tools to do so with confidence that’s not reliant on the words or personalities of others but their tokenized actions.

Whether it’s connected to DAOs or Discord, an on-chain network and market centered on measurable credibility, reputation, and identity gives users the toolkit to know their fellow community members as well as the key stakeholders behind companies they decide to engage or invest in.

Let’s do it for the next generation

Life and certainly web3 moves in cycles. Looking back at this moment, what do we want to be remembered for? I, for one, want to be someone who makes things better, safer, and more efficient for those who want to participate in a space and community I am so passionate about. For those who put their heart and soul into web3, we owe them that level of confidence and control.

To make this new future a reality, change is not only warranted but essential. We can’t allow another cycle of devastating loss, bad headlines, dishonest leadership, and careless customer action to occur. Instead, we must work to replace those troubling realities with an emphasis on real, verified reputation and identity across web3’s many environments.

In web3, if we truly don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past, we can — and must — build for the future. And a better future at that.

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Charles Wayn is a serial web3 entrepreneur and the Co-Founder of Galxe, the leading platform for building web3 community. With over 14 million users and integrated across 16 different blockchains, Galxe has propelled the growth of Linea, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, and more than 4,000 partners including Forbes and UFC Strike, with reward-based loyalty programs. Prior to founding Galxe, Charles co-founded and served as CEO of DLive, the largest live streaming platform in the world built with blockchain technology. The platform was acquired by BitTorrent in December 2019 and Charles served as VP of Interactive Entertainment. Galxe is backed by Multicoin Capital, Dragonfly Capital, Spartan Group, Solana Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, etc. Charles is also the advisor of Salad Ventures, the leading P2E (Play to earn) funding firm.