Chat with your team's network

Now you can chat directly with your personal or your team's network. Ask questions like "Who in my network knows senior engineers at Stripe?" or "Find product managers in San Francisco" and get instant answers pulled from your aggregated connections across LinkedIn, GitHub, X, and more.

No filters. No boolean strings. Just ask.

Use Icebreaker where you already work

Icebreaker now works inside Claude, GPT, Slack and dozens of other tools wherever MCP is supported. Search your network, find warm intro paths, and get network-aware answers without leaving your conversation. Reach out if you'd like to get this set up for your team.

Seamlessly sync your network

We've updated account linking and network syncing to be simpler than ever. Sync your LinkedIn, GitHub, X, or Farcaster accounts and Icebreaker will handle the rest.

Beyond Search: New Enrichment Tools

Finding the right person is only half the battle. We're making it easier to act on this intel with powerful new tools like intro path mapping and enrichment on contacts and companies.

Instead of jumping between tabs, just ask Icebreaker to enrich a profile. It’s the latest in a series of core feature updates we’re rolling out to help you move from "who knows who" to a warm conversation in seconds.

Available now in the Icebreaker Web App and via MCP in Claude, GPT, and more.

That's a wrap! Want to see it in action?

Book a 15 minute demo and we can walk you through.

In the first month since launch, we’ve heard two recurring themes from customers:

1. Simplify data imports: A talent lead should be able to easily onboard and import their entire team’s networks in minutes.

2. Integrate with existing process and tools: The best network intelligence system should seamlessly work with your existing process and tools like Ashby, Slack, and ChatGPT/Claude.

So in addition to continued performance improvements, we’re making it easier to import your data and make it accessible and useful within your existing tools.

Simplify data imports

• [New] Browser extension that auto-syncs your whole team’s connections

• [New] Ability to queue network syncs for your team to run in the background

• [New] GitHub & X graphs now supported & searchable

Integrate seamlessly with existing tools

• [New] Individual & team MCP servers, letting you search your network using your own AI tools

• [New] 1-click “Add to ATS” integration

• [New] Automatic updates to Slack channels

• [New] Create, share, and monitor lead lists for job changes and other updates

What's Next

Over the next month, in addition to populating GitHub and X graphs, we’ll be launching new integrations to make accessing your team’s network data seamless and intelligent.

Want to integrate yours? Drop us a line!

Warmly,
Dan & Jack

I normally ignore cold outreach entirely as it's rarely worth the effort to verify, but the claim of a few billion in AUM piqued my curiosity.

We had no mutual connections, and their company website looked like it was built in 2007. I started asking myself that classic question: "Is this legit?"

I asked them to verify an email address on Icebreaker and they did – good start.

Then a second person emailed me from the same company domain, but something still felt off. They scheduled a meeting without confirming my availability and sent a Zoom link. I declined and called the phone number listed on their website instead.

The receptionist answered. I asked if she could verify this person worked there.

"I think so, but I'm not sure. Email us if you need more info."

I emailed. No response.

As a last effort, I checked the company's LinkedIn page and found an employee with mutual connections. When I asked my mutual if he knew the company or the person, he said, "No, actually. I just mass-connect on LinkedIn."

I can hardly blame him, but it was another dead end.

In total: a few emails, a phone call, a message to a friend, and 30 minutes spent.

Zero verification.

I canceled the meeting, I still don't know if they're legitimate, and now I have a lower opinion of their company than when I started.

This sort of cold outreach scenario happens to me at least three times a week, although I usually don't pursue it this deeply.

The frequency of this experience shows two things:

Traditional trust signals are breaking down.

Email domains can be spoofed, websites can be faked, and phone numbers can be redirected. Even the receptionist at the actual company couldn't confirm their own employee on a phone call. The burden of verification falls entirely on the recipient, and it's only getting harder.

LinkedIn mutuals are losing meaning.

My mutual couldn't vouch for his connection because he doesn't actually know them. He simply accepts any connection request. A LinkedIn connection is now more akin to an Instagram follow, an entirely digital relationship with no previous relational anchor, and thereby a much less useful signal than it used to be.

What I actually needed

Someone in my extended network who worked directly with someone at this company and could give me trusted insight.

Better yet: data surfaced in the original outreach message itself – an alert showing that my mutual connection has never actually met this person, saving me the wasted time entirely.

There's no good way to access this information today.

That's what we're building at Icebreaker: getting semi-private relationship data into trusted environments, where it can inform decisions at the moment you need it most, like when someone cold emails you about investing in your company.

Uncover trusted relationships at icebreaker.xyz

Why doesn't this exist more broadly across social networks?

Social networks strongly prioritize publicly visible content and accounts in order to attract, retain, and monetize users through content discovery, advertising, and sponsored messages. 

But not all sharing fits into a public model. Many situations call for semi-private sharing.

For example:

• Letting trusted contacts know you are open to a new role without broadcasting it to the world

• Sharing a photo or personal update visible only to close friends

At Icebreaker, we believe the most important updates are only shared among trusted groups. The problem is that Close Friends and other forms of trusted contacts are locked inside social networks.

Your Close Friends list on Instagram doesn't help you share semi-privately on LinkedIn, or signal openness to opportunities on a job board. Every social network requires you to rebuild your close friends from scratch.

As a result of recent technical advances that enable adversarial interoperability, it is now possible to port these lists across social networks. We are using these advances to build the system that allows you to pull important parts of your social graph (like Close Friends) out of social networks so you can overlay them elsewhere on the internet. For example, discovering your past colleagues on a new social platform, or seeing only the products recommended by your close friends on an e-commerce site.

As AI systems harvest and reuse public content, many users are pulling back from open posting altogether. In a recent conversation with a fellow founder, we heard what many are feeling: there is less appetite for putting personal or professional content into the public domain.

The answer is not silence, but selective sharing.

Semi-private sharing opens the door to a more expressive, useful, and human digital environment where users retain control over what is shared and with whom.

Join us at icebreaker.xyz

TLDR

Hiring is slow, opaque, and full of guesswork. In the age of AI, talent leaders need tools that let them surface and act on signal faster than ever before.

Icebreaker Teams lets you aggregate and view your trusted team’s Hypernetwork so you can focus on verified, high-trust connections instead of blind sourcing or sifting through noisy inbound.

Learn more about our Beta launch and express interest on our website here. 

Talent is a company’s greatest asset, yet it’s never been harder to find, reach, and hire top candidates.

Over the last several months, we interviewed dozens of talent leaders at technology companies to learn about their recruiting process, from founders hiring solo for the first time, to crypto-native recruiting agencies, to in-house heads of talent with dozens of global job postings. Every conversation reiterates the same bleak reality: talent leaders are operating in a world that is both infinitely noisy and deeply competitive. They all know exceptional talent exists somewhere in their extended network, but have no reliable way to find or reach them.

Two specific problems emerged consistently in our interviews:

1. Talent teams are flooded with fake profiles and AI noise.
   One leader said they “largely disregard all inbound applications” given the volume of low-quality or AI-generated resumes. Another opened a role and saw 6,000 applications overnight and 14,000 over the course of one weekend, largely due to new platforms that advertise heavily on TikTok and Instagram, promising thousands of automated resume submissions for their users. At best, these candidates obfuscate signal and waste valuable resources, at worst, these candidates are using carefully crafted, fake identities, often as part of an elaborate network of malicious actors.  
   

2. Finding the “Golden Egg” candidate still requires lots of guesswork.
   Another leader told us “of course everyone wants the top 1%, but I want the top 0.1%.” Hustling for top talent usually means chasing (mostly lukewarm) leads or spending hours of sourcing on LinkedIn, resulting in an arbitrary candidate list with limited insight into what candidates, if any, come recommended by their peers.

Unsurprisingly, every talent leader reported that their highest-converting candidate channel was warm introductions from their networks.

We know that referrals consistently beat other channels on quality, speed, and candidate close rate, but until now, there hasn’t been a way of mapping, searching, and scaling them. 

That’s why we’re launching Icebreaker Teams: an intelligent network aggregator that gives talent leaders the speed and signal to hire top talent quickly and directly from their team’s trusted network.

Icebreaker lets any user aggregate their existing social networks into a unified social graph. When a company uses Icebreaker Teams, members aggregate their networks to create their team’s Hypernetwork - a verifiable, searchable talent map that instantly surfaces mutuals, quality referrals, and warm introduction paths to top candidates.

Icebreaker Teams brings the scale and coverage of a traditional professional network, with the signal and intelligence of a personal social graph. We’re excited to empower talent leaders with Hypernetwork-driven tools that instantly surface verified, trusted talent and quickly turn “Who do you know?” into “When can they start?”.

Icebreaker Teams is currently live with select design partners at top technology companies. Teams will begin public rollout in October 2025.

Request early access to the Beta here.

Brian Armstrong once asked for "a Web3 version of LinkedIn", calling out Icebreaker.

While Icebreaker does offer a user-owned solution for reputation that will eventually replace traditional networking, Icebreaker is not a social network.

There are plenty of social networks already, with new ones launching every day. The proliferation of social networks and apps has fragmented identities and social graphs. The paradox of increasing connectedness is that it's harder than ever to find people you know and trust.

Icebreaker is not a social network

Icebreaker is a hypernetwork tool that lets you verifiably aggregate your identity and social graph across all your networks.

Have you ever wondered how many total mutual connections you have with someone else, if you knew their whole picture across networks? Who do you know well in common across X, LinkedIn, slack groups, discords, and clubs?

Each social network only shows a part of the picture by design. Networks frequently down-rank content that links to competitors or any other destination, like your personal site.

The established social network business model is to maximize your time on platform. If growing your network means occasionally reaching beyond that platform, your interests are unaligned.

A hypernetwork like Icebreaker, on the other hand, lets you see across social networks, so you can see your trusted mutuals, even when they exist across separate networks.

The opportunities stuck between social graphs

How many companies are you connected with but don’t know about?

How many great engineers are in your team’s immediate network that you can’t easily see?

Professionals, teams, and companies don’t want another social network to manage.

You want to save time by having your existing networks work better, together. You want to stop missing opportunities that are hidden and fragmented across networks.

A hypernetwork like Icebreaker embraces a simple truth: your network already exists across multiple platforms.

With a hypernetwork, you can finally see it whole.

See your hypernetwork at icebreaker.xyz

To make this actionable, we added support for Jobs and Companies.

Icebreaker now indexes 10,000 jobs from 800+ companies backed by the top VCs, updated daily.

Every contact from Icebreaker and every other connected social platform can light up new paths to companies, opportunities, jobs, and candidates.

In seconds, you can find jobs and companies in your network, with powerful filters like:

• Network connectedness. Search by 1st & 2nd, or global

• Investors & Ecosystems. E.g., USV PortCo or Farcaster ecosystem

• Memberships. Like Blockchain at Berkeley alumni companies or jobs at startups with ex-Coinbase founders

If you're hiring, you can reach talented candidates from your trusted network and let them request warm intros.

If you're looking for a role, you can find great companies from your network and the best intro route!

Have a job, ecosystem, or membership you'd like to see added? Let us know. You can connect directly with Jack and Dan on Icebreaker and see how powerful your network really is.

We are more excited than ever about making reputation open and verifiable, especially in the age of AI. Thank you for joining us on this journey.

If you’re building in tech and want to connect with people who are verified by real-world interactions, endorsements, and credentials try Icebreaker.

Icebreaker is rebuilding the professional network from the ground up based on who you actually know and trust.

Our new brand reflects that: Bold. Human. Warm.

What inspires us

We want to feel human in a sea of automation. Something organic and alive.

We want to reflect what real relationships feel like: warm, dynamic, a little chaotic, deeply real.

Why now

Through thousands of conversations, we realized the need for a brand and system that reflects the energy and ambition of the people using Icebreaker.

Our app is getting better and better at making the best connections between people to find the best opportunities and strengthen their network.

This refresh represents us now and moving forward, and gives us the words, visuals, and energy to do it right.

What’s Next

If you're a builder, a job seeker, or someone who just knows people, Icebreaker helps you unlock opportunities through warm intros and trust paths.

No spam. Just signal.

We’re improving the network every week, and you can get started right now.

Try Icebreaker → Make your profile

Huge thanks to the talented minds at Heretic who helped us bring trust to life.

The idea is simple: just as modern tools make it easy to plug into data, payments, or messaging, digital identity should be composable and portable. Your reputation shouldn't be trapped inside individual platforms, it should travel with you.

Identity That Works Where You Work

Today, most professional and social recognition is siloed. You might have:

• Endorsements on LinkedIn

• Membership in a founder Slack group

• Contributions in GitHub repos

• Event participation from Partiful and Luma

• Mutuals in an expert Discord community

• A large network of trusted contacts that exist outside of any of the above

Each of these signals something about who you are, but they’re scattered, hard to verify, and often invisible outside their original context. If someone wanted to know who trusts you, or what you’re known for, they’d have to piece together a fragmented picture.

That’s where interoperable attestations come in.

An attestation is just a structured statement: you were here, you built this, you know them, they trust you. When these claims are portable and verifiable, they become far more useful, not just for proving who you are, but for unlocking access to new communities, opportunities, or collaborators.

Flexible by Design

Not all credentials should look the same. Some recognitions are open, where anyone can vouch for anyone. Others are gated, where you can only endorse someone if you meet certain criteria (e.g. you're part of the same program, or you've worked together before).

This flexibility matters. A good attestation system should let people and organizations:

• Define their own rules for issuing or receiving credentials

• Set privacy boundaries, like whether recognitions are visible only to members

• Use custom logic, such as limiting how far endorsements can spread (e.g. only “2 degrees of separation” from a trusted referrer)

• Group or collapse equivalent credentials, so someone with experience at Stripe or Square can be treated similarly in relevant contexts

• Build reputation gradually, with recurring or progressive credentials, not just one-offs

These aren’t just theoretical ideas. We’ve already seen them unlock real behavior. Startup founders use credentials to show who they’ve collaborated with. Engineers use them to track who’s vouched for their skills across projects. Communities use them to create invite-only spaces based on attendance or membership without maintaining spreadsheets or Slack groups manually. These can seamlessly interoperate with other sources of open data like blockchain events and decentralized social.

The Bigger Picture

When identity is built on flexible, interoperable data, it becomes more than just a profile. It becomes proof of participation, trust, and connection. And when that identity can move with you, doors open faster:

• Introductions get warmer

• Cold outreach becomes credible

• Invisible contributions become visible

• Communities can scale without losing trust

We're building toward a world where identity isn’t locked across platforms but can flow with you, whenever and wherever you choose.

Attestation systems are the infrastructure. Interoperability is the unlock.

If you’re building in tech and want to connect with people who are verified by real-world interactions, endorsements, and credentials try Icebreaker.

It worked, until the offline world caught up.

This case raises a fundamental challenge in the digital age: how do we build trust in a world where people can be anonymous, but still want to be verified and trusted?

We believe that building digital reputation for the future means separating three often-blurred concepts:

• Anonymous vs. Known

• Unverified vs. Verified

• Untrusted vs. Trusted

These are not the same thing.

You can be anonymous but trusted, known but untrusted, or even verified and still untrusted. Reputation systems that lump these together put you at risk of trusting the wrong person or of missing the right one. Both are costly mistakes!

Proving someone is a scammer is fairly easy. Proof can emerge from clear evidence or whistleblowers. This principle applies for many traits. But proving someone is not a scammer is hard. Lack of "proof of bad" does not equate to proof of good.

That’s where time becomes essential. Verifications and peer endorsements over time, specifically.

Continuous signals of legitimacy — verifiable contributions, peer endorsements, in-person confirmations like event check-ins or trusted employment records — make it exponentially harder for fake identities to gain traction.

The takeaway: strong digital reputation is built from consistent, verifiable actions over time, not just well-crafted profiles. If we want trust in a digital world, we need systems that fully integrate privacy, verification, and trust.

If you’re building in tech and want to connect with people who are verified by real-world interactions, endorsements, and credentials try Icebreaker.

High level thoughts

1. Sophisticated deepfakes and state-level hackers are infiltrating remote hiring, especially in crypto. They're getting harder to detect in upper funnel hiring pools. AI is and will continue to accelerate this problem.

2. Everything comes back to trust. It's why we require rigorous referrals and lean on our trust networks to find jobs. In the age of AI and easily spoofed credentials, it's also important to verify ownership of multiple accounts.

3. We're excited about advancements in interoperable identity and cryptography that will make it easy to generate verifiable credentials for a candidate's work history, education, and other achievements in seamless, secure, and privacy-preserving ways.

Emma saw this X post on Farcaster from Paul Frambot at Morpho, which prompted us to quickly discuss our POV on this challenge.

Emma, Dan, and Jack discussed the topic on Dec 17, 2024.

Emma: So earlier this morning, I saw this X post make it over to Farcaster. And it immediately made me think about us, of course, because we're thinking a lot about referrals, trusted networks, hiring, identity verification.

And this tweet from Paul at Morpho is at the intersection of all of those, where he says that 6 out of the 30 candidates they interviewed last week were likely North Korean hackers using deep fakes, and so they're sort of reviewing their hiring protocols and basically asked for suggestions, as to how to avoid the deep fakes and the hackers. So Jack, not sure what your immediate reaction is to that, but, immediately made me think about how we're approaching hiring and trust networks specifically. 

Jack: I had actually accepted a request from somebody that Dan suspected was a North Korean hacker. I had seen the account and I was like, I can't really tell, like they had, you know, they have a LinkedIn, they have a GitHub. Looking at the GitHub, they had weird  commits and I think that's actually one of the things that tipped Dan off. And there was also, a pair of accounts that looked really similar. So those in quick succession kind of tipped us off.

On the one hand, it's really hard to tell. These are state-level actors that are intentionally nefarious. I think I  saw a stat that they've stolen 2 billion plus dollars of crypto  in the last two years or whatever. So they're sophisticated. And they're out to infiltrate. That thing that I read was saying that they've actually gone and become full time employees, and worked at places for 6+ months or longer until they strike.

Emma: Right.

Jack: So, this is a  real problem. Like this is a serious problem. Our POV from Icebreaker is that trust is key, right? So I didn't have any trusted connections with that individual, and since I'm more of a "growth Icebreaker connector," I am more prone to accept connections and not really review these profiles. 

But  Dan was able to tell, with a skeptical eye, that something was amiss with these profiles. I'm actually curious to ask Dan what your advice would be for Paul, given that these are sophisticated state-level actors. And I'm curious for what you would say to  him.

Dan: Yeah, so my advice on how to eliminate the threat from state-sponsored hackers? Well, sometimes they may be trying to get hired at a crypto company in order to do an exploit down the line, but they can also just be making money,  and the  compensation from some of these tech companies is also pretty significant. It's just another source of income for them because post-COVID hiring has become so remote. And crypto is also kind of an ideal industry for  this, but this is, I would say, not  just a crypto problem. Crypto is exposing the frontier of this problem, that is going to explode into other industries that do remote hiring and AI is going to just accelerate this problem.

So I think there are multiple stages during the interview process where your, cost of a false positive is higher or lower. When I say a false positive, it's basically somebody getting through that stage of the process who  shouldn't.

And at the upper funnel, the cost of a false positive, as in letting someone through who ends up being a North Korean hacker, let's say, is fairly low, assuming that you're doing more rigorous background checks more proximate to actually hiring them. And if you don't do that, then make sure before you actually hire someone, you are completing all these requisite checks.

But when it's super upper funnel, whenever you're trying to eliminate false positives, you're also going to end up having some false negatives, as in, accidentally preventing some legitimate people from going through the process, right?

So it's a balance. And that's why I think it matters what level in the funnel you are for where you draw that line. The upper funnel, the cost of letting somebody through is fairly low; its still a cost and it's your recruiter's  time, but it's not like, you getting in trouble with the authorities because you've inadvertently funded North Korea or getting a massive exploit to your business, right? Which happens if you actually hire them. So upper funnel, I would say, use the  basics as effectively as you can. So really lean into referrals because those tend to be based on a web of trust. They tend to be easy to do. And if you're not using them, you should force your team into a room and not let them leave until they've them come up with three candidates that are good for the role. And they have a vested interest in the outcome, too, so it should be table stakes that every single company should be doing every single time they're recruiting for a role. Then you can also lean into the trust of the people in your network, so not only the team that's  hiring, but also, the people that, you know,  leaning into them and helping them source candidates.

And that's one of the things that we're also making easier to do at Icebreaker - the ability to kind of broadcast who, you know and who you trust and then make it easy for other people to find them. There's another table stakes thing that I'm surprised more companies don't do, and that's just ensuring that they have some sort of verified profile that ideally is more than a single channel.

So first of all, just by saying, "this is my GitHub," that's not actually proving that they own that GitHub. You're simply showing me that you know about this  GitHub. And secondly, GitHub and LinkedIn actually are fairly easy to spoof. you can recreate a GitHub and because there's no provable time on GitHub, you can actually trick GitHub into making it look like you've been active for years when actually you just opened this account a couple weeks ago. Recruiters should at least make them use something like  an Icebreaker profile or another profile where it shows which accounts are actually verified when they're reaching out to candidates. And when they reach out to you and say "give me a link to your Icebreaker profile," nine times out of ten, they will not reply, especially if they are a scammer.  So that's an easy way to kind of like weed out a lot of the low quality scammers. But that's not 100%. So I think I'd say like at top of funnel, that's  kind of a good starting point. And  then as you go deeper in the funnel, you can basically increase the resolution of your verifications.

We subscribe to this book Who for our hiring process.

So every single person that we interview goes through a very rigorous interview process. And one of those steps is interviewing with me, where I'd say, "who are the last five people you  worked with, and what are they going to say about you when I talk with them?"  And that becomes very difficult to spoof, because I'm actually going to go and talk with those people.

So that's the other thing you can do is get their references and then actually follow up with those references. And you learn a lot about people by following up with those references, obviously with their permission, the best people are going to give you those references, and just the ability to talk with a real person also can help establish  their credibility as a real person  themselves.

So I'd say that, you know, now by the time you do that step, there should be less than 1% fake profile rates. I think this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem, so there will occasionally be new tactics and surprises, but I think that, practically speaking, you can eliminate this problem by following some basic steps at each step in your hiring funnel. 

Emma: Yeah, it was good to see that a lot of the initial feedback that Paul got was along the same lines that you're talking about, which is essentially referrals and identity verification. There were a handful of people that said you just should make everyone interview in person, which obviously isn't super feasible, although that is a pretty good litmus test. But to your point, like the deep fakes  are either getting really good, or the recruiters are getting  really bad. I don't think it's that the recruiters are getting bad. And especially with all of these jobs being remote, obviously the in person check isn't feasible.

So it sounds like the conventional wisdom, which I guess is a good sign for us that we're, you know, thinking along those lines is that the solution is literally referrals and power of trust and then, being able to do a robust identity verification. 

Dan: Well, I do want to flag that when you recruit purely based on referrals then you do have a different problem, which is that you might end up attracting only a bunch of people that are kind of  the same in certain ways. I don't think you ever  want to close the door completely to people who are not direct referrals coming through the door, but that doesn't mean that you should suspend disbelief and not expect them to have their own network of  people who can vouch for them. Even if you don't  know them directly, you should be able to, with a couple hops, get to a place where you can connect with those people. And if they don't have that, then that's a big red flag. And obviously more  junior applicants are going to have less  developed professional networks, but they're still going to have a network. I think you can still tell a lot from the quality and the nature of the network they bring in figuring out who's not real at all.

Jack: Yeah, I was going to say it's basically just double down on the reference check, right? Like if somebody you don't know gets through to your interview stage and then you ask them, "give me the 5 most recent managers and what they would rate you," that has been illuminating for us  every single time.

And it's hard to get to that question even. Like that question is really, to me, that's like the gauntlet. When Dan asks that questions, I hide a little bit in the corner because I'm  like, "man, that's a hard one." Like to walk through your last five managers and reflect on your performance...it definitely tells you a lot about that person.

It's just such a good question and a hard litmus test, that I even find  it hard to ask. So I'm always glad that Dan does ask  that question. It leads us to find really amazing people that have great references, even if they are somebody that doesn't initially have shared trust with us. If they provide a really solid list for us to start with, that that's a signal in itself. 

Emma: Yeah networks are a really just layered context that you get from an individual. To go back to the original story that we had, I think that was seen in this ironic way when we had two North Korean hackers connect with each other over Icebreaker. It's actually quite easy now, at least compared to a couple of years ago, to have a bot with its own bot friends and connections and network. It's a lot harder to spot. Like I remember in the early  days of Twitter, it was really easy to see who a bot was because they basically followed a thousand accounts and had no followers, or had a few followers who were other bots, but now the tech is so much better and really pervasive. So, taking Paul at his word here, it sounds like for Morpho to suspect that there were 6 deep fakes out of the 30 interviews, they were at least good enough where you couldn't tell if it was real person or now. The fact they're just suspecting they aren't real people, but don't know for sure, shows me that we're maybe past that AI tipping point that, you know, we've been warned about for the last couple of years, which is crazy. 

Dan: Yeah, and it'll get even crazier, too. I also wanted to briefly touch on another idea that's been brought up repeatedly, which is "can you just have a score or credential for people to determine if they're real or not?".

The scores are very tempting, especially in crypto. We have a lot of nerds, so we have a natural gravitation towards putting a number on things and calling it a win. Every  score that we've seen in the past  tends to lose its signaling value as it becomes more widely adopted. Basically like anything that you say is the measure, then becomes gamifiable in one or more ways. Like maybe nobody's doing it now, but if it becomes preponderant, then there will become an incentive for people to game it.

And so I think it's a tempting, but also  a very difficult means of determining who gets access to something. Especially also considering that some of the most talented developers, for example, tend to maybe be quieter and may not have the social presence or kind of onchain  reputation that would permit a really high  score. So sometimes these scores can turn into popularity contests and then you get the people who care rising to the top instead of necessarily the super qualified, talented people. So I think that's a challenge with scores, although they certainly can be useful as part of getting the picture of somebody.

And then the other idea  that I think it more a potential  right now, but we will see it play out, and I'm excited for that, is as we begin to have interoperable identity in a digitally verifiable way.

So what I mean by that is basically taking all of these, offline and sort of closed networks where you're a member of, like your university, your alumni  email, the fact that you graduated from  a particular degree program. Most of the time you kind of have to take the candidate's word for it today, but we are quickly moving to a place, with all this great stuff around interoperable identity (and that's one of the reasons we're building Icebreaker), where you can basically take these pieces of data that exist offline or pseudo-online and make them digitally verifiable.  So, just think about how much more powerful  it will be when you're able to filter candidates and when you can easily check whether or not they have the diploma from the college that they say they do.

I think that's a big unlock too, that I'm excited to see manifest as we onboard more user data in a privacy-preserving way, where it can be digitally  verifiable without having to contact the issuer of  that credential like you do today, by calling up an employer or a college to verify whether what they're saying they did, they actually did. That will be possible to do basically permissionlessly, just when the candidate presents some cryptographically verifiable proof that allows you to establish yes, in fact, they do have a signature from MIT or from Google that says that they indeed worked here. 

Emma: Can't come soon enough. Closing thought, Jack, we will be interviewing at some point in the future for another role. What are you taking away from this when you go and interview, since you don't want to ask the five questions about your last five managers and what they would rate you?

Jack: Yeah, I mean, I can't wait for the verification of credentials, right? Like I have "CEO of Google" as my title on LinkedIn, right?

Emma: You're a bad person to ask then, maybe.

Jack: No, I'm doing that as an example of identity! That anybody can say anything, if I can say that on LinkedIn, people are telling way more white lies than, you know, that you probably think so, you have to take all of these profiles online with a grain  of salt.

Emma: Okay, fair.

Jack: Skepticism is probably the right approach  for every single profile. Humans are still, smarter than AI, for now. You have to get the references. You have to ask the five reference question. Ask for the Icebreaker link to prove multiple account ownership. And I think that'll help you find the right person. 

Emma: Fair enough. We might have to start requiring an Icebreaker link with at least five linked accounts to even get a first interview. This might be our sign. 

Dan: Yeah, I was thinking the next job post, we should actually require Icebreaker for the first time. 

In light of the recent Farcaster conversation on using black box algorithms for access gating based on reputation, we interviewed Dan (web3pm.eth). Below is a summary, followed by the full transcript.

1. While any system for gating access to anything of value (perceived or real) will be divisive, black box reputation scoring systems tend to be frustrating due to their lack of transparency. However, not all open systems are equal either. Systems that rely on behavioral (e.g., did you do X in the last 30 days), as opposed to demographic definitions (e.g., are you a member of Y society) are generally perceived as fairer.

2. Cross-ecosystem reputation scoring is still nascent because interoperable identity is in its infancy. There are only a handful of networks where reputation is open right now, with most of them coming from the crypto ecosystem. As a result, our tools for evaluating reputation are also quite limited and mostly reimplementations of previous generation scoring systems which were built for single closed ecosystems.

3. Future systems for evaluating reputation need to become much more nuanced. We have new data inputs, new evaluation models, and new application surfaces where these models can be used. Every application and ecosystem will ultimately implement its own, though implementations may share inputs, models, or surfaces with others.

4. Trust networks are how the closest knit groups operate in the real world (e.g., invite-only societies and organizations). They also have a unique advantage through the reputational staking that occurs when one member invites another. Only recently have we begun developing the tools to recreate these types of networks digitally. We are very excited about this at Icebreaker because we believe such tools can take the best aspects of the cozy web and make it interoperable, anywhere on the internet.

esteez.eth: So yesterday this cast caught my eye.

I’m curious what your opinion is here.  I think it was in response to David Furlong’s new project Larry, which currently requires a Neynar score of 0.95 or higher to participate. What's your first reaction to that critique? Or maybe an easier way to start is asking if that’s fair criticism? 

web3pm.eth: Yeah.

esteez.eth: And I’m also curious if your POV would be different if the Neynar score was open versus closed, and you had a level of transparency around the algorithm. I’m pretty sure this is your favorite topic.

web3pm.eth: Yeah, so first of all, anytime you have an airdrop, or access to an airdrop, or some sort of trading opportunity that you're using some criteria to gate access to, you're going to have people who don't have access feel very angry that they didn't get it. And so if you are using a gate at all, if it is some sort of objective criteria that a user cannot directly qualify for after the fact, then you're going to have people that are unhappy because of FOMO and the desire for gain. And we see this already with existing airdrops. Every time a new protocol launches a token, there are always people that are very angry. And some of these are even driven by networks of people or bots or organizations that are trying to influence the protocols to change the definitions to benefit them. So, it's also hard to tell what is really authentic or not. But in principle, if you're a user and you do not qualify for whatever the thing is and you feel like then you should, you're going to be angry. So I think this is an inherent challenge with any sort of gate that you employ.

esteez.eth: It’s a great example of why you should study humans, not tech. Especially since it’s a financial incentive.

web3pm.eth: Yeah. I think that right now we are still in the early phases of using interoperable identity and reputation.  I think onchain is certainly an important component here, but there's also offchain data and pseudo-onchain identity data, like Farcaster. So we're still in early phases and we're figuring out that as a result, we don't have that many tools we can use for gating. There's basically Icebreaker, Neynar, and what used to be Airstack but is now Moxie. There's onchain data like token holdings and POAP and ENS, but beyond that, there's nothing that open to use. There’s of course data from closed ecosystems like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google, but none of that is super open, and that means that the set of tools we have right now for determining who can get access to something are limited. The easiest thing to use right now are scores, but these have inherent limitations they are based on some algorithm.

I think that we get into hotter water when we are choosing a score that is based on some sort of closed algorithm that is controlled by a company.  If you think back to one of the reasons Bitcoin was successful, it’s because it had this sort of immaculate conception in the early phases where there was no gating. Anybody could participate and there's this feeling that it was inherently fair the way that it launched.  One of the complaints that Bitcoiners have against Ethereum is almost this sort of “original sin” that it had this insider sale because of the ICO.

So I think with any sort of closed algorithm, people are always going to be unhappy if they're not eligible and they're going to have something to point to as to why it’s unfair. And so that's what I think we saw also manifesting in this cast. Neynar could be doing this as a public good, or not, but the fact that the score is a closed algorithm with no visibility or transparency into what signals they're using to compute the score, is I think what undermines trust in using the scoring system as a way to gate access to something that has value, whether it's a token or an opportunity or an ecosystem something like that. So, I think that not only is the score a challenge, but also the way that the score is made is a problem. This isn't to say that everything needs to always be open. It's just that if you are dealing with gaining access to an opportunity that has financial value, perceived or real, you are going to have a harder time if you are choosing a closed system versus an open system, even if you're using a score to ultimately dictate this. 

esteez.eth: Because of the trust issue. 

web3pm.eth: Yeah, exactly. The trust and transparency issue. I think if we go even further there's one additional distinction that I would make in thinking about fairness from a psychological perspective, and that is the difference between demographic and behavioral data.  Demographics are based on who you are. Usually immutable traits, like what school you went to, how much money is in your bank account, right? These are things that may change slowly over time, but generally it's not something that you can change very quickly.

esteez.eth: Okay.

web3pm.eth: Whereas behavioral traits are based on what you do. So an example of a behavioral trait or just a behavioral signal would be: have you used this protocol 10 times in the last 10 days, or have you used Farcaster at least three times in the last year, or have you gone running for at least five miles in the last year, right? These are things where you can do them regardless of whether you went to Harvard or you're part of a secret society or not. 

And I think that the reason that this distinction matters is because there is a much higher perception of fairness when you choose a behavioral definition as opposed to a demographic definition. And so again, the problem with this score is that it's not clear whether it's a demographic definition or not - like if you have at least $100,000 of onchain assets in your wallet, it’s easy to think about how that's kind of unfair, right? It unfairly privileges the people who've been around for a while, the people who have a lot of money. It's not easy to change if you're coming in new, versus if the main way to get that score is by being active every single day on Farcaster for the last month.

esteez.eth: Which would be a behavioral trait.

web3pm.eth: Right, and I think if you were to break down that score further and you were to say, we're going to make it completely transparent, there's still an argument to be made that the way that you manifest that score has a huge impact on the ultimate trust. Just because it's open does not necessarily mean that it'll be perceived as fair.  And if you think about what makes it perceived as more fair versus less fair, generally demographic based definitions are going to be perceived as less fair and behavioral definitions are going to be perceived as more fair. Now this isn't to say that you should never use demographic based definitions. Right?

If you're trying to create an event for your college alumni association, you probably do want to gate to people who actually graduated from your college. But all else equal, people are generally going to trust behavior-based definitions as more fair. 

esteez.eth: Which makes sense, because you can often influence your behavior but not your demographics. It’s just objectively more fair in that sense. I have another question for you. I reread the cast a handful of times, and of course my immediate takeaway is that it’s a great example of why human powered trust or peer-to-peer trust is just better than any sort of score especially if it's closed.

But it seems like, and perhaps this is why it was deleted, the main gripe of the cast is that ultimately it's a “VC tight grip.” The user made a point to call out that there is an investor overlap with Neynar and Farcaster. And Dan and V have also had a lot of public criticism around “shadow banning”, or lack of transparency into algorithms, like with power badges and boosts.  So to me, I'm taking away something very different from maybe the plain text read of the cast, which is the critique that there is actually a very centralized cabal or center of power here that is actually not even so much an indictment of the lack of transparency around the score, but of the company making it, which I thought was interesting. I’m curious if that resonates with you.

web3pm.eth: Yeah. Mhm.

esteez.eth: I guess I’m thinking that this critique wouldn’t have the same impact if it wasn’’t on Farcaster, where there’s already a lot of chatter around this topic, and where Dan and Varun have faced a lot of feedback around this. 

web3pm.eth: I think crypto in general has a number of very tight communities and there are a lot of ingroup / outgroup dynamics that are at play. I think Farcaster is kind of a particular example, but even if you were to move away from Farcaster and just look at Crypto Twitter, the same arguments can be made if you look at a crypto startup's fundraise page, they will then show all of the crypto insiders that have invested as angels in their projects. It’s almost like the same people are investing in all of each other's projects. I think that there is truth to that. Granted, when you are an outsider, you tend to overestimate the intensity and the closeness of those circles.

esteez.eth: Okay.

web3pm.eth: So I think the criticism would be made regardless of whether it is a practical inhibitor or not. But I think that the criticism is valid in principle, which is that when you have a black box approach in particular, people are always afraid of things that they can't see or understand, more than when they actually see them.  And so I think that that is one of the reasons outsiders always overestimate the insider nature of whatever it is that's in question. We often fear the things that we don't actually understand.

It’s just a human bias that we generally have, which I think we've evolved to exhibit because every one in five times it will cause us to be appropriately paranoid, so it pays off.  But unfortunately, that means the other four out of five times we just are living in a heightened sense of FOMO and anxiety. And that FOMO is basically na underlying worry about being abandoned by our tribe. One of our most deep-seated fears as human beings is this notion of becoming an outcast, and worried about everybody else moving forward without you. So, it's one of our oldest human impulses that evolved even before we became humans.

esteez.eth: Which is kind of a crazy concept to apply, but I do think it contextualizes what’s happening here. There’s a very intense sense of community on Farcaster, especially around builders and people that were early participants.  It’s why having a low FID is still something that's talked about and has a lot of debate and lore around it.

There’s a lot of conversation about Farcaster being sufficiently decentralized. Obviously, it's a massive open protocol, and there have been a lot of people that have built on top of it. And so I wonder based on what you're just saying, if this FOMO is not so much a gut reaction to the Neynar score being unfair and the desire to want to participate in a new product launch, for example, but rather this idea that “I came here to be able to participate because it's open, and I had some sort of expectation that it wasn't going to be some be like every other web2 platform.”

web3pm.eth: Mhm. Yeah.

esteez.eth: I don’t know if you saw that other cast I sent, where someone clearly wants to participate, and is willing to work to influence or improve their score but either can’t or doesn’t know how.

I feel like Rish gets this question on a near daily basis.  My understanding of the answer is that it’s basically “study good users and copy them”, or just simply have good interactions on Farcaster. 

web3pm.eth: Yeah. If you’re an outsider, I don’t think that’s a satisfying response.

esteez.eth: Definitely doesn't do anything for trust either.

web3pm.eth: I mean that the analogy is like saying, "I see all these billionaires with private jets and their own islands. How do I become like them?" 

esteez.eth: Right.

web3pm.eth: And the elite saying, “study them and emulate them,” when really they are who they are because they had all of these advantages to begin with. You can't just copy their behavior, because that's actually a demographic difference, to begin with versus like you can't achieve that by behavior.

In order to get to that demographic, if you even can achieve it, it requires a different set of behaviors than the ones that demographic is currently exhibiting. Which is a common thing with the founders, how when you see them after they become successful, they're living very different lifestyles than the ones they had when they were in the process of becoming successful. And so there's this false signaling.

So yeah, I think that that's not a good answer.  I think it's not very fair and I think people are rightfully dissatisfied with that kind of answer. I think for that reason and also for a number of other reasons, the era of using scores for determining important stuff is maybe not over, but I think that we've essentially reached the limitation of what scores can tell us in many realms. And I think we have become overly reliant on using universal scores in order to dictate things. And we're actually moving towards an era where the more impactful scores are going to be essentially localized ones. So in other words, you shouldn't have to care so much about the Neynar score if you have a bunch of other ways of easily developing scores that are more application specific.

esteez.eth: Right

web3pm.eth: And so in the case of David Furlong's app, he could have launched it in a way where he was using his own score that was based on who the people that he trusts, trust. And that's a much more permeable set of members because there's more than one way to qualify for that list of users. You can get it from David or you could get it from somebody that David trusts, or theoretically, from anybody. And I think that those types of systems have just not been possible before because we haven't even had decentralized identity for more than two years really, in practice.  We are now just developing the tools around making identity and user data interoperable, and usable onchain and offchain.

And that's like where I'm excited to take Icebreaker. Where it’s possible to expand the universe of the types of definitions and rules and scores, and the ways you can use them. 

esteez.eth: Yeah, one thing that I’m realizing too as you’re saying this, is that it would actually be sort of interesting if a founder only let their trusted circle beta test their product, or could even be their trusted circle extended with second degree trust. It’s actually a great group of beta testers, because they’re far more forgiving, and would probably give a lot better signal and product feedback than all of these angry people casting about how they’re excluded from participating.

And then I start thinking around why using trust feels better and more fair? I think it's really because trust is almost entirely based on behavioral experiences and not ever really on demographic traits. I would actually think this happens all the time with Jack because Jack knows so many people where I'm like, “this person looks like a bot or gives me a weird vibe." And he basically says they’re not and knows their whole life story.

web3pm.eth: Yeah.

esteez.eth: And in nearly all cases, I just end up trusting them because I really trust Jack. And there's something really nice and serendipitous about having this transitive trust or de facto trust. And I guess it becomes one of the fairest ways of gaining access to something because it's not based on anything concrete or immutable. It is purely based on human experience.

I also want to touch on something you said around how we're sort of hitting the limit around scores and rankings. And it reminds me how every time we use a new platform or a vendor, right now I’m thinking about Intercom, everything is about being AI-enhanced, or every service has its own AI version. 

There are a lot of companies that I think we used to consider competitors that had AI-driven network matchmaking features, and it always reminds me of a tweet I saw that’s something like “if AI is so good, why are the outputs or recommendations so bad?”  

web3pm.eth: Yeah.

esteez.eth: I guess I should say they’re not all bad, but they’re definitely not all good. And it sort of begs the question, “if we know that these scores or rankings aren't that good or reliable, so is the reason we're still using them just because there hasn't been an alternative?”

web3pm.eth: We're using what we're used to and there hasn't been an alternative. I think AI  will become better given its exponential improvement path. But every culture around the world has its own Golem myth of basically being afraid of what humans create and losing control over it.

And I think that part of what is scary with these automated systems that are black boxes is this underlying evolved fear about building something that we then lose control over, and that no longer does what it's supposed to do. There are plenty of AI systems that are extremely good at doing what they do, so I don't want to rule out technology as a means of achieving high accuracy for whatever it is that we need to do. But, I think that the point I want to emphasize is that we are at the dawn of an era where we now have a new toolkit of data that we can use to inform reputation as well as new algorithms we can use to propagate and calculate reputation, and new methods of applying reputation across different products and applications that previously were not feasible before. And this is largely driven by interoperable data and identity. As AI tools get better and better, it’s going to be extremely important as not only a complement, but also in some ways a solution to the increasing preponderance of AI throughout our digital and physical worlds.

So let me go back to this a concrete example of gating with a minimum Neynar score. There's only one path to get to that score, which is to basically show Neynar enough data that it will give you that score. There may be different things you can do to achieve that score,  but all of those paths go through Neynar. With something like Icebreaker's qBuilder credential, there are actually infinitely many paths that one can take to achieve qBuilder status. And so just from the perspective, there are many more options when you are employing a decentralized architecture. 

And let me also flip it to the perspective of the giver, and think about what types of gating generate the best result for your community. If you essentially outsource it to an algorithm, whether it's operated by your own community or by some third party in this case, like Neynar, you are basically relying on them to do the gating.  But then once the user has passed that bar, they have very little incentive to continue acting well or to uphold the values of that community beyond what's strictly required for them to maintain the score to stay in the community, if you're continuing to evaluate that.

But when you do it with something like recursive trust networks or some other peer-to-peer attestation, you actually have not only the reputation of the person who is in the group on the line, but also the reputation of the people who invited them. They’re both on the line. And so if you think about who you expect to act better once they've been invited into the community, the person that just passed the strength test, or the person who is being vouched for by the three strongest people in the room.

You're going to have a lot more accountability when it's based on essentially a decentralized social attestation graph. 

esteez.eth: I would argue there’s a third reputation, too, which is now the reputation of that group that is relying upon the collective behavior of its members to preserve the group’s integrity. I think about this a lot because there’s a lot of the chatter around there being cabals on Farcaster, and secret group chats on Frens that are pumping and dumping coins together. I remember feeling almost a sense of anxiety when I was invited into what I’ll call a high-signal group chat, like I knew that my reputation and the reputation of the person who added me needed to be upheld, and then by proxy, the reputation or integrity of the group. 

It’s actually one of the reasons we shut down our Telegram and made it an update-only channel. When anyone could join, there isn’t really an incentive to participate or uphold your reputation. It’s why there’s so many tools and jobs around community and content moderation - there’s no incentive to actually behave well. 

web3pm.eth: Yeah. I mean, go back in time before the internet existed and think about the clubs and social networks that existed. All of them, at least in part, are based on this notion that somebody or multiple people who are current members of the group have to essentially vouch for someone to join. And the more important that organization is, generally the more stringent the requirements are. So that not only do you have to be a good person, but also that even if you were thinking of relaxing your standards, you know that other people's reputations are on the line, so you're going to act better in that environment than you might otherwise in a world where there is no such accountability. 

We never achieved that on the internet for a variety of reasons, but now we can start bringing that back. This isn’t to say that we want to recreate every single organization on the internet in this same way; it’s to underscore that the most powerful and trusted environments in the offline world are based on this notion of recursive reputation.

esteez.eth: That's great. It’s basically that classic Munger quote “show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” I would argue there are certain places on the internet where there’s actually an incentive to behave more poorly than you otherwise would have. 

web3pm.eth: Exactly. Yeah.

esteez.eth: Like the places that feel like the wild west. 

web3pm.eth: Right. It’s like that saying “when you're on the internet nobody knows you're a dog,” right? If you have complete anonymity, you can be as mean as you want, whereas in real life, in person, most of these people are often quite nice or at least agreeable. This isn’t to say that in order to have nice places on the internet you need to be doxed, but I think that that's another topic how you can blend aspects of anonymity or pseudonymity with reputation.  And that is a case where zero knowledge cryptography is uniquely suited to help solve those things when you basically want to have aspects of your identity showing that you’re trusted by people that others would find trustworthy, but don’t want to reveal your full name, or address, or handle. 

esteez.eth: Yeah it reminds me of a cast I saw in response to the recent activity from Anoncast, just stating that it’s sort of boring and uninteresting, almost like a “race to the bottom” vibe. The bar to post isn’t very high, the environment is low trust, and you have zero context for who is posting, so it’s just sort of uninteresting. I think it’s a really interesting implementation of anonymity and I’m excited to keep following it. But that critique stuck out to me because it felt like a disappointment with the quality of casts, in an environment with again, low trust, low context, and no incentive to post anything “good.”

web3pm.eth: I think this kind of brings us back to the original discussion around challenges with black box algorithms that determine membership in a community. If you again think pre-internet in the real world, the best communities are the ones where you understand the rules for how you get into the community, and you believe that those rules are good and hard and that they ensure that other people in the community share your values in some aspect. Like in a college community, if you go to the reunion for the class of 2012 at MIT, you can feel like you can go up to anybody else there, and even if you don't know who that person is, you feel like you have a lot in common, and like you have a level of trust with that person. It’s the same thing with a country club where everybody understands the conditions around getting in. They understand that it's hard, and that you can't just get in because you simply bought your way in. 

Crypto is still in its early days and still maturing, but we’re finally getting to the point where we have a better way of creating digital communities where it's easy to know that anybody who is in a given community did something that was hard, and that not everybody necessarily can do or will do. That is how we bring the cozy communities we have in the physical world into the digital world. And it’s finally becoming possible, which is really, really exciting. 

About 2 weeks ago, we had a serendipitous conversation with the Optimism RetroPGF and EAS teams about Casts vs Attestations.

The topic was how to treat Casts and other public verifiable data in the context of building apps that create and consume interoperable attestations.

Many builders have found Farcaster as a rich platform of thoughtful, crypto-native early adopters.

Increasingly, web3 builders are beginning to explore the frontiers of applications based around interoperable data. The emergent primitive for web3 data is the "attestation". Several apps, like CoLinks, Build, Give.eth, and Bountycaster have explored turning casts into EAS attestations.

What is the right model? While every builder should have the option to choose, the more ecosystem alignment around one architecture, the easier it will be for all of us to build useful apps around interoperable data.

Jack and I have been talking about this idea for a while and because we want to treat basically everything in the world as an attestation, we want to focus on creating them on EAS only when necessary, but otherwise relying on the underlying data as sources of truth if we have strong guarantees on data availability and verifiability.

In short, we believe all casts are attestations, but not all attestations are casts.

But are EAS attestations better than Cast attestations?

First, let's narrow the scope of this discussion to offchain attestations.

Contrary to what some in web3 would have you believe, when it comes to attestations (or any data, really) about people, onchain is often an inferior place to initially register them.

While the data may still be public, there is a subtle but significant difference between public vs. onchain.

Onchain data is public and can never be deleted, while offchain public data is deleted all the time. Onchain attestations immediately cause problems with regulation like GDPR where users have the right to erasure. Even if you are not concerned with regulations, because of its permanence, the bar for issuing an onchain attestation should be higher in terms of importance and desired longevity, which we believe introduces friction in building app-like flows where we want to minimize cognitive friction for key actions.

Would you want a permanent public record of every minor profile tweak you've ever made? Would you think twice before updating your profile if you knew that tweak was going to be documented publicly forever? This cognitive friction gets in the way of building seamless apps that use crypto rails.

But that doesn't mean we have to forego onchain verifiability when using offchain attestations. With new protocols like Witness, we can actually achieve superior onchain verifiability and permanence by stamping offchain attestations onchain at whatever level of detail we like, while being able to preserve privacy and user control. All for a fraction of the cost (as 1m attestations can be rolled up into a single transaction which is indexed simultaneously across every blockchain). Therefore, when it comes to user data, we believe offchain attestations are usually superior to onchain.

Let's walk through an example.

Consider this cast:

compared with this offchain public attestation:

Both are me attesting that I endorse Jack for design.

If you look at the underlying Farcaster protocol data (you can use Neynar's Cast lookup and type in the cast URL: https://warpcast.com/web3pm/0xe2e0ea16), you can verify that this is a valid signed cast.

In both cases, you have a unique, deterministic fingerprinting system (a cast hash or UID, respectively), and you have a semi-decentralized network of indexing the content with different availability tradeoffs (Farcaster hubs vs IPFS).

However EAS attestations have a benefit of being tied to a specific schema, which improves interoperability and allows them to be onchain verifiable.

If we wanted to upgrade a Cast with these properties, we could envision have Icebreaker's @rec bot pick up the first "Cast" attestation and generate a second duplicate attestation in an "EAS" schema. However, this approach sacrifices provenance, because the original cast is verifiably from my account, while the attestation is proxied via Icebreaker. And we introduce a data doppelganger (the new attestation), which can lead to syncing problems.

There are ways around the proxy problem (e.g., using delegated proxy wallets, or frame-based EIP-712 signatures), but they all add complexity and/or UX friction, and don't solve the data doppelganger problem.

At Icebreaker, we believe there is a lot of powerful public + verifiable data already on Farcaster, just waiting to be reinterpreted in new, useful ways as attestations.

In order to "unlock" this data, we have two high level options:

Option 1: Treat casts as attestations without requiring them to be transformed. Simply need to be able to parse and interpret the casts. The casts remain the source of truth.

Option 2: Transform casts that fulfill certain criteria into full EAS attestations. The EAS attestations become the source of truth.

If we go with Option 2, then we also introduce a slippery slope. What types of data needs to be transformed into an EAS attestation for us to consider it valid for use in identity? Another non-EAS EIP-712 attestation? An NFT? A blockchain transaction?

Practically, we can always "upgrade" from Option 1 to Option 2 in the future, but it is very hard to "revert" from Option 2 to Option 1.

This is why we prefer to stay with Option 1, for now, until we encounter a compelling use case where we must do Option 2.

I.e., existing casts can be considered valid attestations as-is.

This is going to begin rolling out across Icebreaker over the next few weeks along with a series of other upgrades to be able to treat arbitrary external attestations as equivalent to Icebreaker-issued ones.

We believe identities inherently span multiple networks, and the best networking tool will let you to intelligently aggregate and traverse all your networks, instead of trying to lock you into just one.

-Dan, aka web3pm

PS. For builders getting started with attestations... Early on, we explored taking this idea to the extreme and forcing every attestation to be a cast. This model has advantages, in that your attestations are very public and can help with growth. In Icebreaker's case, we chose to stick with EAS for net new attestations for two reasons: not everyone among our intended audience (web3 builders) has or immediately wants a Farcaster account, and not every attestation should be public, while all casts currently are.

Therefore, we believe EAS currently offers the most flexible and interoperable model for net new attestations.

A few weeks ago, Icebreaker partnered with the organizers at FarCon to power a first-of-its-kind verifiable ticketing, registration, and networking experience over 4 days.

Each of the 500 summit pass attendees received individualized physical icebreaker badges with their Farcaster names and profile pictures, which functioned both as their nametags and their networking badges throughout the conference.

Example of final output on Summit Flagship day:

Farcaster

j4ck 🥶↑ icebreaker on Warpcast

it was really fun to be on stage for a moment today alongside @ted @julien51.eth @web3pm! big thanks to @ted for trusting us with the opportunity to build a one-of-a-kind dynamic NFT checkin flow fully onchain on /base thanks to /unlock-protocol and integrated with /icebreaker x /farcaster networking 🙌 https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/07febfbc-4b4d-4662-d118-02750b3e3400/original https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/34fd9f2a-d2c5-4ed7-d595-8ca5afe1a200/original

Prior to the event, we had never done personalization at-scale before, but thought it would be a great excuse to try since we like launching stuff at FarCon (the original icebreaker pre-alpha launched at the first FarCon) and more importantly, we thought that doing so could make the conference experience richer.

The conference overall was a smashing success (credit to @ted, @mcbain, @heavygweit, @dylsteck.eth and the other organizers), and Icebreaker was able to power the smoothest experience to date, with 94% attendees using their badges, >10 self-sovereign connections per person, and dozens of people telling us how much fun they had.

While the experience felt simple, the tech to make it happen was not.

This post is a reflection on what what we did, the lessons we learned, and some thoughts on what this means for the future of applications built around decentralized identity*.

*For this post, when we say decentralized identity, we mean public identifiers, often crypto wallet addresses, that represent people or social media handles, that any application can reference.

Icebreaker is a digital networking tool that allows you to make verifiable connections with anyone else in-person or remotely using a simple web app (or PWA).

Each user can have multiple profiles- like digital business cards, each of which displays a different subset of verifiable accounts and info. For example, here is my Web3 profile, here is my Web2 profile, and here is my personal card.

Although it's not required to use Icebreaker, there is something magical about blending the digital and physical, so Icebreaker supports physical NFC cards and tokens for making IRL connections by tapping with each other. Each physical card can be mapped to a specific person or one of their sub-profiles.

For FarCon, we wanted "it just works" for every attendee. The happy path. I.e., simply show up, scan your emailed ticket QR code for checkin, and then receive your personalized Icebreaker badge, ready to tap and use.

In order for the "happy path" to work for every attendee, we needed to do the following:

1. For every ticket holder (based on wallet address), get the corresponding Farcaster account

2. Every badge is printed with the Farcaster account's corresponding Farcaster name and pfp

3. Every badge is NFC encoded with a unique tokenID which is mapped to the correct Farcaster user on Icebreaker

4. All Unlock ticket NFTs redirect to Icebreaker for realtime dynamic metadata

5. All attendees had self-sovereign attestations with their badge type displayed on their digital profiles

6. Summit and side event checkins (based on wallet activity) automatically reflect on users's dynamic ticket NFT

7. Every ticket holder exists on icebreaker and is able to instantly log in as themselves, whether they use SIWF or Web3 sign-in

1: Ticket holder data. Difficulty: 🟡

We used a combination of Neynar and Airstack APIs, calling them as custom functions in a Google sheet. Both tools are great, but we still ran into some limits with API ergonomics and data freshness that required manual review of the results before we could print the badges with high accuracy.

2: Badge printing. Difficulty: 🟢

We'd never done automated personalized badge printing before but Emma, our rockstar Operations lead, figured it out and remapped our process to support it.

3: NFC encoding. Difficulty: 🟢

We have developed systems to do NFC encoding in bulk for tens of thousands of devices if needed, using either 2xx or 4xx generation chips. We are happy to consult for anyone looking to do this on their own devices since we believe NFC is one of 3 promising non-biometric approaches to sibyl resistance.

4: Unlock tickets directing to Icebreaker metadata. Difficulty: 🟡

Credit to the Unlock team for the heavy lifting on this one. On the Icebreaker side, we already had the capability to operate a deterministic metadata route for a given event / drop / wallet address combination. Unlock was able to make an onchain redirect for each tokenId to point to the correct Icebreaker metadata url on their side. Unfortunately none of the NFT platforms do a great job visualizing dynamic metadata rerouted using this approach, though they generally work using regular dynamic offchain metadata.

5: Badge attestations on all users. Difficulty: 🟢

We wanted to display each attendee's badge status on their Icebreaker profile if they had a ticket. Unfortunately there were 4 NFT contracts to read from, and we didn't want attendees to have to manually add each credential to their profile. So we batch issued offchain attestations using our Memberships schema, which were automatically pinned on each attendee's main profile. We could spend another post on why we like self-sovereign attestations but we could have done a million of these with omnichain verifiability for $0.01 through our integration with Witness.

6: Decentralized checkins posted to Icebreaker dynamic NFT. Difficulty: 🟢

What could be better than a dynamic event passport that upgrades with your behavior? One that upgrades based on many behaviors.

For FarCon, we had 3 sources of incoming live data- Unlock, Events.xyz, and CheckIn Caster.

We created a new API route where any event can have multiple "tokens" that increment arbitrary counters on icebreaker in the context of that event and without sharing any data aside from wallet address. Unlock QR code checkins pinged Icebreaker with one token, which marked the user as "Attended" for the main event. Events.xyz checkins pinged Icebreaker with a different token, which incremented the user's side events counter. And CheckIn Caster checkins pinged Icebreaker with a 3rd token, which incremented the user's "Checkin badges" counter. Each token can have its own customizable refresh logic and behavior. This allows Icebreaker to easily "wrap" events that can have incoming engagement and data from an unlimited number of sources, onchain and offchain.

We also added native POAP support post-FarCon, so the experience at future conferences where many POAPs are in use will be much richer.

7: Identity deduping across Icebreaker and Privy. Difficulty: 🔴 💀 🔴

This is where it started getting really tricky. Because we wanted "it just works" for both Farcaster addresses and self-custody wallet addresses, and we didn't know beforehand which address each person would sign in with, we had to ensure that either login would go to the same user.

Icebreaker uses Privy for managing logins and defaults to Email (for web2 natives) and Farcaster (for web3 natives), since we've found that SIWF offers the simplest web3-native sign in experience on mobile after obsessive testing over the past year. But, there are always some web3 natives that insist on signing in with an external self-custody address (like my wallet that controls web3pm.eth) from the "More options" section in our login module. The solution (at least until sign-in providers offer this as a default), is to create each user with both Farcaster and external self-custody web3 addresses as linked accounts.

If this were Icebreaker's first conference, then we could have simply pre-created all accounts with the perfect details and all accounts linked in Privy. But over 70% of attendees had used Icebreaker before, just with different logins. And for security reasons which are very reasonable in the context of other apps that manage funds or valuable tokens, once an account has been created in Privy, we are unable to link any additional accounts programmatically in Privy. This worried us, however, that a user would show up, log in with the "wrong" address, and a new doppelganger user would be created in Icebreaker and Privy. Their connections would then be a mess because tapping their phone to someone's badge would connect with the "wrong" address (i.e., the one they just logged in with on their phone), while tapping their badge to someone's phone would connect with the "right" address. And this would be complicated further if the user they're connecting with is also in this state.

So we had to map every user to one of 4 scenarios-

• A. User has one linked account but not the other.

  • Solution: Delete and recreate with both accounts on the same user in Privy. Add missing accounts in Icebreaker and synchronize user ID with Privy.

• B. User has both accounts linked but they're linked to separate Privy and Icebreaker accounts.

  • Solution: Delete both users in Privy and create a new one with both accounts on the same user. Merge both users on Icebreaker and choose the best one for the merge, making sure external self-custody web3 address is the primary wallet for checkins.

• C. User has both accounts linked and they're linked to the same user on Privy and Icebreaker.

  • Solution: No action required. 🦄 🎉

• D. User has neither accounts linked in Privy or Icebreaker

  • Solution: Create user with both accounts in Privy and Icebreaker. Do some manual searching in case this user exists but with a different login.

Why identity deduping was hard

Neither Icebreaker nor Privy had previously found an elegant way to resolve mismatched user states, particularly in scenarios A and B. Handling these required synchronized operations on both privy and icebreaker sides, and the scale was too large to do manually - we both had to create new admin tools and scripts to handle these account merge use cases.

To make this harder, we continued to receive new batches of ticket holders leading up to the event which required rerunning these operations and recategorizing users into scenarios, all while users were logging into icebreaker leading up to FarCon to perfect their profiles, and in doing so, altering their account states.

(Also a huge thanks to the Privy team for working closely with us, including after hours and over weekends to help achieve the "happy path"!)

To proactively resolve the mismatched user accounts, we ended up building an account merge tool and a bulk account creation tool, and gained a lot of practice handling merging across account types in various states- which had been increasingly cropping up as we’d added new sign in options over time. This was essentially accumulated "identity debt".

We also changed the product in two ways to reduce the number of future users who get into this state:

1. We are reducing the number of sign in methods, particularly for new account creation, to be the absolute minimum required.

2. When a user does sign in with a web3 address, we now pull their linked addresses and programmatically create the user in Privy with all known linked accounts, so it's harder to accidentally create a duplicate account later.

A pitfall of multi sign-in is identity fragmentation. Merging users has a ton of edge cases that need to be thought through (which is a reason why so few apps offer multi-account support). And even if we can merge users, it's still frustrating from a user's perspective to ever get into that state.

We deepened our relationship with Privy as a result and have a very good idea of where the existing tools are great for decentralized identity today, and where there are still limitations.

The future has never been brighter for applications building around decentralized identity.

Aside from 2-3 misprinted (but digitally correct) badges, nearly every badged summit attendee reported they experienced the “happy path”.

It just worked!

For existing Icebreaker users, it was magical seeing their ambient activity on other platforms automatically reflected on Icebreaker.

For new Icebreaker users, they were able to show up at a conference and experience a sophisticated physical and digital networking experience with zero onboarding beforehand.

This experience would not have been possible without decentralized identity.

Though the process, particularly the identity deduping we undertook to ensure the smoothest experience possible, was laborious, it was well worth it.

We are now 100x wiser and look forward to the day that interoperable identity protocols provide a smooth and self-sovereign networking experience at every event and conference in the world.

-Dan, co-founder at Icebreaker

Icebreaker: breaks the ice. Simple.

But do you know what Icebreaker really does? 

In early cyberpunk literature, ICE refers to Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, often AIs, that guard large companies' data.

...ICE patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ICE. It was good ICE. Wonderful ICE...

...His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.

The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.

— Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

1984 Icebreaker: break through the ice that protects walled data gardens and the nearly unstoppable AIs within them.

2024 Icebreaker: break through the ice that protects walled data gardens and the nearly unstoppable AIs within them.

We believe closed data ecosystems prevent the creation of many apps and use cases that would greatly empower individuals but aren’t otherwise possible because of how hard it is to start new networks from scratch. While technically available, most big companies bury the tools that let you export your data under deep layers of confusing menus, and employ a variety of techniques to ensure this data is hard to use if you get it out.

Meanwhile, they intertwine identity and content so that you can’t leave without abandoning your network and reputation. You are stuck with their recommendation systems (mediocre for you, lucrative for them), dated UX, sponsored content, egregious pricing, and coercive data practices. They rarely interoperate or link out to other platforms because they profit most when you’re engaging with their on-platform content (cue Jonathan Groff).

At Icebreaker, we’re taking the opposite approach: A contentless user-owned identity network. 

By not hosting our own content or owning user data, Icebreaker doesn't have an incentive to lock you into Icebreaker. It's in Icebreaker’s interest to help surface data from around the internet and help you extract signal from noise using the power of your identity wherever you are. 

Taking inspiration from the best and highly interoperable Web3 wallets and protocols, we believe the best networking app of the future will be the one that builds the best interface for traversing your network and making it useful for you, not the one that best locks you into their platform.

Imagine what it would be like if you could bring your identity and network with you from one app to another. What if you could apply your own content filters based on people you trust professionally when viewing posts on Twitter or reviews on Yelp or Amazon? What if the closed social networks were reduced to pure content platforms so you could pull posts and articles simultaneously from all of them across the internet directly to you, filtered by your trust network?

Or, what if this doesn’t happen? AI-generated content will increasingly take over our feeds with no way of knowing what’s real, while large companies are ambivalent because engagement is all that matters and they would rather extract and hoard our data so they can build more personalized models that subtly and imperceptibly nudge us toward the highest ROI content.

As the world becomes noisier, the answer lies in the people we know and trust.

Our identity and networks are simply too important to be held hostage in closed platforms that we can’t control.

Just as its cyberpunk inspiration, Icebreaker is designed to be your most powerful tool to break the ice and take back control of your data.

What do dynamic NFTs, self-sovereign identity (SSI), zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography — and cats — have in common? 

They’re all part of Aleo and Icebreaker’s interactive dynamic passport experience at Aleo zkHouse, Devconnect, kicking off next week in Istanbul. With a shared passion for ZK technology, Aleo and Icebreaker are teaming up to offer Devconnect attendees a single evolving dynamic and gamified zkNFT — that’s very on-brand for Istanbul.

If you’ll be at Devconnect, head on over to Aleo zkHouse to claim your free collectible zkCat and realize its full potential as you go. By attending seven or more zkHouse events and completing six workshops, you can fully upgrade your zkCat, all while unlocking access to exclusive perks and swag. 

As you participate in zkHouse workshops and events, you might come across these cool zkCats:

Start by activating your Icebreaker wristband 

You’ll receive a colored wristband at the beginning of your Aleo zkHouse-Icebreaker journey. You can tap to claim your wristband on Icebreaker using an NFC or QR code. After completing your onboarding with Icebreaker (you can log in with a Web3 address or Web2 method), your wristband will present you with an exclusive Aleo verifiable credential and your very own zkCat. 

You can tap other attendees' wristbands and vice versa to make self-sovereign connections through Icebreaker; plus, your wristband is yours to keep after the event. 

The more you participate, the more your zkCat evolves 

As you engage in Aleo workshops and events, you’ll find check-in discs encoded with secret keys that will level up your zkCat. Each time you obtain a new code, you’ll be prompted to “evolve” your zkCat, potentially changing its appearance and metadata. 

Fully leveling up your zkCat requires you to code (we are at Devconnect, after all) — so show off your technical skills by building and deploying ZK apps at Aleo workshops and events like Learn & Earn and Hacker House. As you complete events, Aleo team members will reveal secret cards to unlock zkCat upgrades. 

Zero-knowledge drives the zkCat experience  

How does ZK come into play? Well, that’s partly a secret. If you look closely at your zkCat’s metadata, you’ll notice a special field for “Powers of Tau Contributor.” If that rings a bell, it’s because it’s a nod to the early contributors and supporters who participated in the 2021 Aleo Setup Ceremony. Unlike other zkCat metadata, which is based on verifiable behaviors at zkHouse Devconnect, this optional metadata indicates your past (and special) Powers of Tau Contributor activities. 

We don’t expect (or recommend!) that you carry your 2021 wallet, so we built a special zero-knowledge proving flow into Icebreaker. This allows you to privately generate a proof from your original Powers of Tau wallet, which results in a ZK verifiable credential on Icebreaker. Once the credential is generated, your zkCat will upgrade to its secret level and may reveal future surprises. 

Future applications of self-sovereign identity

Aleo and Icebreaker see self-sovereign identity (SSI) as a core pillar of mainstream Web3 adoption. As Aleo prepares to launch mainnet, it envisions integrating Icebreaker’s innovative SSI solution with the Aleo blockchain. This integration will enable additional privacy-preserving use cases made possible by Aleo’s ZK execution environment.

Moreover, we’re exploring coupling Icebreaker’s unique SSIs with zPass, Aleo’s identity verification product. This bi-directional integration would allow Web3 users to have unique credentials generated on Icebreaker and verified via zPass as part of their decentralized identity (or vice versa). 

Also, during this initial phase, zkCats are on Polygon; in future phases, they may be found on other EVM chains or Aleo itself, a testament to the composability of crypto ecosystems and how Aleo channels crypto’s composability ethos. 

These are merely ideas at the moment — Aleo and Icebreaker look to collaborate with builders at Devconnect who might be interested in exploring this topic with us. You can join any of Aleo’s zkHouse workshops or events to connect with our team directly (or you can chat with Aleo on Discord or Icebreaker on Telegram). 

Aleo and Icebreaker are excited to put the latest innovations in decentralized identity, ZK technology, and fun, useful blockchain applications like dynamic NFTs in your hands.

We hope to see you — and your zkCat — at Aleo zkHouse! 

Just like this collaboration, this blog post was co-authored by Aleo and Icebreaker.

About Icebreaker

Icebreaker is on a mission to promote self-sovereign identity by helping people connect and verifiably share things about themselves privately, while giving brands marketing superpowers. If you’d like to prove something privately about yourself or power a dynamic experience for your brand, we’d love to hear from you!

About Aleo

Aleo is zero-knowledge by design— the only full-stack Layer 1 blockchain integrating ZK at every level to build an actually secure internet. Aleo provides a zero-knowledge technology platform with uncompromising speed and privacy, allowing developers to build full-stack, private applications with the power of ZK on L1.

We are proud to present Base Drop, by Icebreaker: A free-to-mint experiential NFT on Base mainnet as a celebration of Onchain Summer.

Base Drop celebrates the connections we make with each other and the world through a dynamic visual and audio NFT that evolves with our digital and physical interactions.

This allowlisted free dynamic NFT initially contains 25 unique audio and visual states based on your wallet’s Base transactions and your connections on Icebreaker.

Connect with other people IRL using Icebreaker and transact on Base to upgrade your NFT! If you don't have an Icebreaker yet, join the waitlist to be onboarded soon.

Mint details

• Mint at https://app.icebreaker.xyz/ens/base.icebreakerlabs.eth

• Price: Free + gas on Base

• 1 per wallet

• Claim opens: Today! (Aug 30, 2023)

• Claim ends: Noon ET Nov 30, 2023

• View the allowlist on Github

How it works

The drop uses a Thirdweb signature-based minting ERC-721a proxy contract deployed on Base Mainnet and uses onchain and offchain data to determine traits and visuals.

Membership uses an allowlist to issue signatures to wallets that can in turn mint directly from the contract.

The in-person connections made on Icebreaker and the transaction volume on Base from the holder’s wallet govern both the NFT colorways and title rank of your NFT. Specifically, the number of records and audio tracks upgrades based on your Base transactions, while the colorway and level is determined by your number of connections on Icebreaker. If you max both, who knows what will happen 👀 🧿

Connections on Icebreaker use a hybrid on/off chain architecture to allow people and brands to connect in richer, self-sovereign ways. Web3 addresses, NFT swaps, and connections are by default posted onchain, while metadata like normal or zero knowledge verifiable credentials and contact info are stored privately offchain and shared directly between addresses. Users can choose how much or little information they wish to share publicly and privately with their connections, while spinning up new stealth addresses is simple, even for non-crypto users.

Base Drop is an example of how we can blend onchain and offchain identity in fun and privacy preserving ways, with the goal of helping people make richer, self-sovereign connections through cryptography.

Allowlist

The initial allowlist for was chosen with the goal of acknowledging projects and communities that have inspired our team or advanced crypto in important ways. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list as we aim to expand access to the platform over the coming months.

The allowlisted communities are:

• Art Blocks Series 1

• Base Day One

• Bored Ape Yacht Club

• Braindrops

• Cryptopunks

• Farcasters

• Icebreaker Collections

• Pooly

• Proof Collective

• Nouns

• Station3 Patrons

• Works by j4ck

You can view the allow list data on Github. You can directly search for your wallet in the raw allowlist with cmd/ctrl+F.

If you believe you or your community should have an address on the allow list and do not see yourself listed, please reach out in our Telegram channel.

What is Icebreaker?

Icebreaker opens doors. We help people form richer connections and unleash the power in their network through blending self-sovereign identity and trust. We're just getting started and would love to invite others interested in self-sovereign data to join.

Thank you!

We hope you enjoy the Base Drop.

To learn more, sign up for the waitlist and join us on Telegram to chat with the founders and team.