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We forgot what we were supposed to build
In late 2017, my previous co-founders Jannis Pohlmann, Brandon Ramirez, and I spent six months on nights and weekends working through an idea which eventually became The Graph
. We were trying to make open data usable while keeping control distributed. <a href="https://xpertsstudio.com/ethereum-eth-is-standing-its-ground-the-chart-is-starting-to-point-toward-3k/” title=”Ethereum (ETH) Is Standing Its Ground: The Chart Is Starting to Point Toward $3K”>Ethereum had made transactions public, yet developers still needed servers and custom databases to make sense of what was happening onchain. We wanted open data to remain open all the way through the query.
I still think about those early sessions because the ambition reached beyond blockchain data. Many of us came into crypto believing the internet could support shared information people could inspect, verify, and use under shared rules instead of one company’s permission.
Crypto became exceptionally good, instead, at making dishonesty about money expensive:
- A borrower posts collateral;
- A validator can lose stake;
- A leveraged trader gets liquidated;
- A payment settles against a ledger everyone can inspect.
Entire systems now exist to make financial commitments measurable and enforceable.
We priced dishonesty about money.
Trust in crypto is really about making a claim have an economic value which can be bonded, priced or settled:
- Someone claims an asset exists, so reserves can be verified;
- Someone promises to perform an action, so collateral can be locked;
- Someone behaves maliciously, so stake can be cut.
Money gives the system a unit of account and a penalty. However, most information on the internet comes with a different problem.
A researcher publishes a study, footage emerges from a war zone, an account presents someone as an expert, or a quote spreads across social media. Each makes a claim about reality, yet users have few durable ways to trace it back to its or see the history of the people contributing to it
Reputation suffers from the same fragmentation. Someone can spend years producing valuable work on one platform and arrive on another with almost none of their history intact. LinkedIn, X and Reddit each preserve separate records, leaving expertise and contributions trapped inside individual platforms instead of travelling with the person.
Crypto devoted enormous engineering effort to accountability around financial claims, where regulation and markets already imposed costs for deception. Public knowledge received far less attention.
The result is an internet where a confident error can travel cheaply, and correction remains expensive. A false financial statement may trigger liquidation, litigation or loss of collateral. A false factual claim can earn millions of views and import world conflicts before its
AI, naturally, raises the cost of leaving this unfinished.
Publishing has outgrown human speed.
The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report
puts global trust in news at 37%, the lowest level recorded since its tracking began in 2015. Trust fell across 29 of 48 markets surveyed.
At the same time, machines now generate more requests for web pages than humans. Cloudflare Radar data
from early June showed automated systems producing 57.5% of HTTP requests to HTML content, compared with 42.5% from humans.
Indeed, information production and retrieval are accelerating while accountability remains tied to platforms, publishers and isolated reputations.
Human publishing once imposed friction through time. A person had to write a claim, publish it and persuade others to repeat it. AI systems can generate, remix and distribute claims at machine speed. An error can acquire apparent consensus through repetition long before anyone traces its provenance.
Verification, therefore, needs to become part of how information is organized.
Claims should become entities.
A useful information system should treat a claim as an addressable entity object withon, a company or a historical event should carry its evidence alongside it
Relations deserve equal status. Users and machines should be able to inspect which evidence supports a claim, which evidence contradicts it, and which later findings revise it. Provenance should survive copying and distribution.
Reputation should also accumulate through contribution. A researcher who repeatedly adds useful evidence, corrects errors or improves disputed records should carry a portable history of those actions. Expertise becomes a record of work rather than a badge granted by one platform.
Competing perspectives belong in the same system. Public knowledge often contains disagreement, incomplete evidence, and changing interpretations. Ranking several perspectives by evidence quality, provenance and contributor history gives readers more information than forcing every topic into one canonical page.
The Unfinished Part
Crypto proved people can coordinate around shared records even when participants have different incentives. It proved digital ownership can be enforced and financial commitments can carry consequences.
Comparable seriousness now belongs in knowledge systems.
Another exchange can make trading faster, and another blockchain can make settlement cheaper, and those advances do have value. The larger unfinished project concerns the information people use before they trade, vote, invest, hire, publish or make decisions with each other.
We built systems which make lying about money expensive. The internet, in my view, now needs systems which make claims easier to trace, compare, and evaluate.
After all, our original ambition was global decentralized human coordination, and that’s always been more than finance.
Source: hackernoon.com