The Future of Social Media: ZK Attestations for Trust and Safety

Platforms use phone numbers or KYC, sacrificing privacy and excluding billions. The cost to launch a credible attack is negligible, leading to rampant bot networks and misinformation campaigns.

• Centralized Data: Your identity is a product sold to advertisers.
• Low Attack Cost: Fake accounts can be spun up for < $0.10.
• Global Exclusion: ~3.2B people lack formal ID required for verification.

Prove you're human or reputable without revealing who you are. Use on-chain activity (e.g., Ethereum gas spent, Gitcoin Passport scores) or biometric ZK proofs (e.g., Worldcoin) to generate a private credential.

• Privacy-Preserving: Prove a trait (e.g., ">10 txs") without exposing your address.
• Composable: Use the same attestation across Farcaster, Lens, and new apps.
• User-Owned: The credential lives in your wallet, not a corporate database.

Your Reddit karma or Twitter followers are worthless elsewhere. This creates high switching costs and allows platforms to extract maximum rent from your social capital.

• Vendor Lock-in: Your influence is non-transferable and platform-dependent.
• Arbitrary Sanctioning: Platforms can de-platform users, erasing years of reputation overnight.
• Fragmented Identity: You rebuild your social proof from zero on every new app.

Reputation as non-transferable NFTs. Endorsements from credible entities (e.g., Proof of Humanity, ENS holders) become verifiable, composable assets. Projects like CyberConnect and Lens Protocol are building the primitive.

• Immutable Record: Contributions and endorsements are permanently attested.
• Cross-Platform Utility: A developer's Gitcoin Grant history proves credibility in a DAO.
• Anti-Financialization: Non-transferability prevents reputation farming and mercenary attacks.

A handful of companies and AI models decide global speech norms. The process is opaque, inconsistent, and politically vulnerable, leading to arbitrary censorship and creator insecurity.

• Opaque Algorithms: Removal decisions lack appeal or clear justification.
• Scale Failure: ~500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute makes human review impossible.
• Adversarial ML: Bad actors constantly probe and game automated systems.

Delegate moderation to user-curated, transparent allow/block lists (e.g., Farcaster's on-chain frames). Prove your content adheres to a chosen set's rules without revealing the content itself to the network. Projects like Anoma explore this.

• User Sovereignty: Choose your moderation layer, not have it chosen for you.
• Transparent Rules: List curation and updates are on-chain and auditable.
• Scalable Enforcement: ZK proofs allow verification of compliance in ~100ms without full data exposure.

The foundational schema registry for on- and off-chain attestations. It's the base layer for social trust graphs.

• Permissionless Schema Creation: Anyone can define a new attestation type (e.g., 'human verified', 'content fact-checked').
• Immutable & Portable: Attestations are stored on-chain or in decentralized storage, owned by the user.
• Composable Trust: Protocols like Worldcoin and Gitcoin Passport build on EAS schemas to create aggregate identity scores.

Social platforms are overrun by bots and fake engagement, destroying signal and enabling manipulation.

• Ad-Driven Incentives: Platforms profit from inflated user counts, creating perverse alignment.
• Unportable Reputation: Your followers and credibility are locked inside a corporate silo.
• Trust Through Obscurity: Moderation is a black box, leading to arbitrary censorship and inconsistent safety.

ZK proofs allow users to reveal specific credentials (e.g., 'over 18', 'KYC'd', 'unique human') without exposing underlying data.

• Selective Disclosure: Prove you're a accredited investor without revealing your name or net worth.
• Cross-Platform Safety: A 'trusted reporter' attestation from Farcaster could carry weight on Lens Protocol.
• Automated Moderation: Communities can set rules like 'only accounts with ≥10 positive attestations can post', enforced by smart contracts.

Platforms act as judge, jury, and executioner, with opaque algorithms making irreversible decisions.

• Context Collapse: A joke in one community is seen as hate speech in another, with no nuance.
• Adversarial Flagging: Bad actors weaponize reporting systems to silence opponents.
• No Due Process: Appeals are handled by underpaid contractors or automated systems, not neutral arbiters.

Reputation becomes a tradable, stakeable asset based on verifiable on-chain history.

• Skin in the Game: To become a moderator, stake tokens that can be slashed for bad decisions.
• Curation Markets: Users can atteste to high-quality content, with top curators earning fees (see Karma3 Labs).
• Dynamic Trust Scores: Your reputation is a composite of attestations from EAS, Verax, and other registries, weighted by source credibility.

A shared registry for attestations across multiple L2s, solving fragmentation for cross-chain social.

• Cross-Rollup Portability: An attestation made on Optimism is queryable on Arbitrum and Base.
• Cost-Efficient: Batches and compresses attestations, reducing L1 footprint and cost.
• Developer Primitive: Provides a unified GraphQL API for querying attestations across the superchain, essential for apps like Phi and CyberConnect.

Platforms like X and Facebook spend billions annually on heuristic moderation that is easily gamed. ZK attestations allow for cryptographically provable uniqueness and reputation portability.

• Key Benefit: Enables programmable trust for governance (e.g., Optimism's AttestationStation) and airdrops.
• Key Benefit: Reduces platform moderation overhead by ~70% by shifting the burden of proof to the user.

Projects like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax are becoming the de facto standard for on-chain reputation. This creates a composable social layer where a user's history (e.g., Gitcoin Passport score) is a verifiable asset.

• Key Benefit: Unlocks cross-platform identity; a user's Reddit karma can attest to their credibility on a new DeFi forum.
• Key Benefit: Enables soulbound token (SBT) use cases without the permanent on-chain storage bloat.

The $15B+ content moderation market is ripe for disruption. ZK-powered attestation networks can offer real-time, privacy-preserving age/identity checks, replacing brittle KYC vendors.

• Key Benefit: Builders can integrate trust signals (e.g., "proven human over 18") in <100ms via a simple API call to a verifier.
• Key Benefit: Creates a new revenue model for attestation issuers (e.g., universities, employers) and aggregators.

Value accrual will follow the infrastructure layer, not the front-end apps. Invest in protocols that standardize schemas (EAS), provide scalable proving (RISC Zero, Succinct), or offer critical attestation oracles (Witness Chain, HyperOracle).

• Key Benefit: Infrastructure has protocol-level moats and captures fees from all applications built on top.
• Key Benefit: Avoids the winner-take-all dynamics of social apps, focusing on the plumbing of Web3.