Imagine opening your phone to find a place to eat, and this is what you see:
Why would anyone choose to eat at Comedor based solely on its profitability and revenue? We don’t choose a restaurant based on its financials.
Using restaurant's financials to determine if they have quality food & service is equivalent to trying to interpret someone's credibility using their onchain history.
We choose a restaurant based on feedback from others, not their financials.
When we want to try a new place, most of us are looking at:
- What is the restaurant’s overall rating?
- How many reviews does it have?
- What are people saying about it?
Those signals are exactly what make Google Maps and reviews helpful and valuable to us. We rely on these signals all the time outside of crypto — whether it's choosing where to eat or picking the best doctor to evaluate your health.
These signals are missing from crypto, and the stakes are much higher than picking a place with a bad burger. Listening to bad advice from a peer, trusting the wrong people on Twitter, or not understanding someone’s history can have significant negative monetary impact to people in crypto.
Some of you may already know what to look for, who to trust, and how to avoid scams. That doesn't scale. If we want new entrants to have a level playing field, we must make this knowledge available to everyone by instrumenting it onchain.
Ethos allows users to leave reviews for others, helping identify who can be trusted and who you might want to think twice about before listening to or working with. It's the first step toward further building consensus around trust between participants – and it’s already live on Testnet, serving as the crypto equivalent of a Google review, fully on-chain for users.
You can check out one of our live profiles here.
Didn’t make the original Testnet cut? Join the standby waitlist.
