As an intern for a crypto project, you’ve been given a $20 budget and a task:

Market the project on Twitter, ensuring it has a reputation that appears credible, trustworthy and, most importantly, popular. You need to generate excitement, increase followers and engagement, and have your audience hyping up its launch.

How do you spend the $20? Do you buy Twitter Ads? Offer your favorite influencers a dollar each to tweet about your project? Do a single $20 twitter giveaway to those who “like and follow?”

How do you build an impressive level of Twitter presence?

You buy it. For $18 on a “social media panel.”

First, you buy your 22.1k followers for $9.94

And for your official project announcement tweet? You buy the engagement:

• 224 retweets for $0.05

• 234 likes for $0.05

• and for a staggering 159k views (usually a strong signal for crypto twitter!) a whole $0.015. That’s right. One and a half cents.

That means for just 11 CENTS a tweet, you can make it look like you have the reach of any top crypto account in the space.

This “spoofed” credibility is one of the easiest ways to market projects today and unfortunately leads to extraction of money out of Crypto through scams and fraud. New participants join and their eyes jump immediately to these metrics as a way to measure popularity of an up-and-coming project. Whether it be engagement metrics on Twitter, likes on TikTok, or members and activity in a Discord, social media panels have found endless ways to sell you popularity, cheaply.

One of the ways that Twitter claims to eventually solve this spam problem is by requiring all users to pay a fee to read, engage and interact on Twitter. This introduces the idea of economic security, where to participate on Twitter as an individual, you have to pay out of pocket as opposed to being able to freely spin up many accounts. With economic security, Twitter becomes more secure because they’ve introduce a financial barrier to participating. Previously 22.1k followers cost $9.90, with economic security, 22.1k followers of bots would cost the marketing company alone $176k monthly to manage and operate.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1779930065469383166

The increase in price (from free) means that Twitter can start to separate signal from noise if they require all users to pay $8/mo.

This isn’t a new concept; one of the major ways that we combat physical spam mail today is through charging a minimum postage fee for every letter that is sent. It’s a small cost ($0.68 per stamp) but if it’s an ad agency trying to reach a million potential buyers of a product, it quickly creates a significant cost increase for reaching that audience with spam (68 cents each versus the few cents it costs to print the letter.)

When Ethos launches, you will see a novel take on an ordinary reviewing system. Ethos introduces the idea of vouching which brings that concept of economic security to credibility and reputation.

When you vouch someone in Ethos, you’re required to stake Ethereum against their name. We believe this provides the ultimate signal to the rest of the network that the person you vouched for can be trusted by putting your money where your mouth is.

Vouching is the strongest source of credibility in web3 because it works the same way crypto does. Transparent financial incentives between peers makes the entire market stronger. This means that becoming credible on the Ethos network requires capital, from someone else vouching for you, just like Twitter will eventually charge $8/mo to be engage on their platform. We believe that by combining economic security with a user’s social reputation, we can get the most clear signal of who can be trusted and who can’t.

Soon, crypto participants will look to Ethos profiles to better understand who is credible and trustworthy in the space. Instead of projects buying retweets, likes and views for $0.11, they will need to build up their credibility on Ethos through both user reviews and reputable participants vouching for their credibility.

This creates that layer of “defense” for Ethos in economic security.

Based on decades of security experience, Ethos' CTO and co-founder Ben Walther will tell you, “Complete protection against all attacks is impossible. Our job is to make it prohibitively expensive for attackers.”