By creating the Ethos protocol, we believe we enable a layer of trust that has long been missing in web3. That foundation empowers us and others to build meaningful products on top, where who and how trusted they are become core to every experience.

Last week, we announced Ethos.network - a way for users to interact with the Ethos protocol and start instrumenting trust through reviews, vouching, and other new onchain mechanisms. Through Ethos.network, we can create things like our Ethos credibility score, helping others objectively understand who they can trust and who to avoid.

Today we’re excited to launch our second product built on the Ethos protocol - Ethos.markets. Leveraging the power and data of Ethos.network as the foundation, we’ve enabled a new type of market that has never existed before- InfoFi for Reputation.

For the first time ever, you can buy both trust and distrust in someone’s reputation. Using a novel double sided bonding curve as an AMM, a reputation markets starts at 50%/50% trust and distrust.. As users buy trust, the price of trust goes up… and the cost of distrust goes down.

This type of market unlocks a new kind of trading we’ve never seen before…

• If you believe someone’s reputation is undervalued, you can buy trust votes and sell them later if you think the price of trust in that user or market will rise.
• If you believe the market is overvaluing someone’s reputation, and that person is actually untrusted, you can “short” them and buy distrust votes (or sell your trust votes!)
• If someone had some knowledge that someone’s reputation was at risk (and thus, they were about to lose a lot of trust), a market now exists where that info can reach the market and reveal the truth.
• We can see real-time reactions to how markets perceive trust - project owner crashing out? Influencer clearly dumping on their friends? We can now observe this in real-time through a financialized market.
• A new type of market exists where “sharps” can evaluate someone’s trust, uncover truths, and try interpret the public’s perception of someone’s reputation.. and trade on that.

We’re also excited to launch this with aixbt as one of our introductory markets, where we’ll see how markets react in real-time to trust in AI agents. Not only will people be able to buy and sell distrust as Aixbt tweets, but you could imagine how one day Aixbt and other agents could consume that data-

• Agent tweets something about conviction in Moonbirds as an asset that’s undervalued
• Trust market loses confidence in agent’s reputation
• Agent realizes “Oh no, I lost 5% trust after that tweet! Maybe I won’t tweet that again.”

We think this sort of information cycle can help us more objectively understand trust for agents and feed information back to agents for decision-making.

One important technical call-out on reputation markets: they never resolve; they’re perpetual. This means there’s never a need for any type of resolution service or 3rd party needed to resolve markets, and the markets go on forever. This enables us to build even more things on top of Ethos.markets.

Today we’re launching with just nine markets for notable people in the space, with the intent to keep liquidity constrained and focused. While Ethos.network and the Ethos protocol are intended for everyone,  markets are more oriented around trading and thus will be limited to specific markets to trade on. Here’s our starting 9:

These market owners will get 1% of all buys on their market as a tip for letting the market trade their reputation. All market participants have given consent to Ethos to create their markets. At a later date, we will consider adding more markets for people, companies or agents you might want to see on the platform.

Most importantly, our product needs to be where YOU are, and we’re looking at ways to extend our Chrome extension to Ethos.markets, too. You can imagine being able to see this trust in real time and even have the ability to buy and sell that trust directly from Twitter. We’re working on this now.

Accountability is key, and Ethos.markets is a social-first product. Users sign up with their Twitter account and their trades as associated with their names for others to see. We also add our Ethos scores on top of user's avatars, to help get everyone insight not just in who’s buying, but how reputable are they, and what have others said about them in the past? This helps us realize the Ethos vision that products like Ethos.markets are made even better when built on a foundation of trust and reputation.

Ethos.markets is available to everyone, and does not require an invite. This new product also gives users the opportunity to earn Contributor XP for holding positions in markets. Remember! Contributor XP is based on a multiplier of how reputable you are, so it might be time to start working on that Ethos score…

Ethos.markets is the first of many more products that we hope to build on the Ethos protocol, so stay tuned!

Quick last note: we just wanted to shout out to @CL207, who casually mentioned the idea - once back in ‘23 (when we didn’t quite understand how to do it) and again in Sep ‘24. It was initially his thesis; we figured out how to implement it to make it happen. CL will always be a “contributor” to Ethos.markets for sharing that idea with us, and it wouldn’t feel right not to mention him.

If you want to read more, you can see our whitepaper in the section "Ethos.markets"