What does trust look like without LinkedIn?

In Web2, reputation is outsourced. You don’t prove your skills yourself

• LinkedIn does it by showing your work history,
• Twitter does it by showing your following,
• GitHub does it by showing your code.

These platforms act as validators, deciding how others see you. Web3 doesn’t work that way. There is no central authority presenting a clean version of who you are.

Your “reputation” lives across many contexts: wallet history, DAO participation, event check-ins, NFT ownership, contributions in community calls. The raw proof is there, but it’s scattered and unreadable.

The problem is not about having too little data. It’s about designing systems that can make that data meaningful to humans.

Fragmentation: On-chain records are precise but siloed. A DAO vote on one chain, a grant contribution on another, an event POAP in a third — no interface ties them together.

Verification gap: A wallet shows you clicked “confirm,” but not whether your contribution mattered. The nuance of expertise and intent is lost.

Lack of context: Blockchain data is objective, but without interpretation it fails as social proof. “Address voted yes” tells you nothing about the credibility of that decision.

This leaves users in a strange position: the most “trustless” systems still require trust in off-chain platforms (Discord, Telegram, Twitter) to build actual confidence.

Portable reputation: Reputation should travel with the user, not reset in every app. Interfaces that plug into a reputation graph could let users carry verifiable context wherever they go.

Composability of signals: Reputation doesn’t need to be one-dimensional. Imagine proposals where users back decisions not just with tokens, but with their proven track record — contributions, reviews, attestations.

Progressive disclosure: Dumping raw logs doesn’t help. A good UX layer would summarize reputation (“20 verified contributions across 5 DAOs”) while letting people drill down for details.

User-controlled visibility: Reputation should be modular. You may want to showcase your governance history in one space, but highlight creative projects in another. Interfaces should allow selective sharing, not all-or-nothing exposure.

Temporal framing: Reputation isn’t static. Showing recency (“active this month”) matters as much as lifetime stats. Good UX balances both.

If reputation in Web3 remains unreadable, people will keep falling back to Web2 platforms to interpret trust, checking a founder’s Twitter, scanning their LinkedIn, or DM’ing them on Telegram.

This defeats the point of decentralized ecosystems. The opportunity here isn’t just technical — it’s design. UX can translate messy, distributed proofs into human-readable signals.

It can make credibility portable across apps, allow people to curate their identity, and let communities weigh contributions without relying on external validators.

Until that happens, trust in Web3 will remain an unfinished promise: technically verifiable, but socially unusable.

What does trust look like without LinkedIn? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.