What is Verity?

What Verity Is

Some of you may not know what Verity is, so let’s quickly go over that. Verity is actually three things:

Verity Protocol

Firstly, Verity is a protocol for describing, implementing, and selling reputation and governance solutions. It’s a general standard anybody can build their reputation metrics and governance solutions on. They can also sell their data and reputation calculations, allowing an ecosystem of competing reptation types to flourish. By implementing the Verity Protocol, websites can give users a choice in the algorithms that are used to show them which users they like, groups they should belong to, or content they should see.

For instance, you could go on Facebook and choose the algorithms that show you your feed to prevent fake news, or go on Reddit and choose the algorithms that show you the top posts. Verity at the protocol level provides a powerful way to bring user choice back to the internet.

Verity Universal Metrics

Secondly, Verity is a set of, decentralized, credible, and universal reputation metrics for representation and governance that measure the skills, values, and contributions of an individual across the internet. This allows communities to come to consensus about the users and content that they value. Combined with Verity’s prebuilt governance mechanisms, they also allow communities to make group decisions, and can even allow communities to interact with each other as autonomous agents in higher level governance protocols. Because the metrics are universal, users can take their metrics with them across the internet, never again having to start from scratch when they get to a new website.

Verity DAO

Finally, Verity is a decentralized autonomous organization composed of users, applications, developers, and others whom all add to the platform in their own way. Everyone whom adds value to the Verity ecosystem gets stake in he DAO, which gives them a share in the decisions the platform makes and the rewards that the platform receives.

So that’s Verity in a nutshell, so on to the purpose of this post. In this blog post we’re going to cover three things: Where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how we’ll get there.

Where We’ve Been

Verity has had a pretty awesome year.

You may not have heard much about what we’ve been up to, aside from the occasional odd cryptic comment on reddit. It’s not because we’ve been in stealth mode, but we simply because haven’t been really focusing on communicating with the community. Instead we’ve been focused on building some kickass stuff and an organization that we can be proud of. The lack of communication with the community is definitely an oversight on our part, and something we’d like to get better about in the future. That’s one of the reasons for this blog post .

Awesome Team

We’ve built an awesome team here at Verity, full of seven amazing people.

Verity’s Team

We’ve got a great designer, three great programmers, an accountant, a marketer, and me (focused on business, leadership, and growth). I’m not exaggerating when I say our team is world class, and we’ll be doing the work over the next few months of introducing our team to the world and proving to everyone how truly talented this team is.

At this point I can say every function we need is covered, and we’re very excited to have our last need filled (someone who has an academic background in math) just this past month by the brilliant Drew Blount. We’re always looking for extra contributors, so drop us a line if you’re interested in changing the future of trust.

Great Processes

Over this past year the Verity team has developed some really great processes for working together.

Verity’s Processes

We have useful communication tools like Slack and Meekan that have given us ways to communicate as a distributed team. We have powerful decision tools like Groupmap that give us a way to make group decisions together. We’ve got a good workflow with Trello and Agile that has allowed us to get a lot of stuff done.

Finally and most importantly, we’ve developed a culture of experimentation. We’ve been using data to guide our decisions (even going as far as to test our name, color scheme, and logo) and I think that’s going to serve us really well moving forward.

Kickass Results

Verity’s Results

Combined, the great team and the great processes, have given us some really awesome results.

We have a truly groundbreaking white paper that is in beta stage. It articulates an incredible vision for universal reputation and governance, and shows clear solutions to some of the long standing issues that have plagued reputation and governance on the internet for decades. We can’t wait to show this to you guys over the coming months.