The internet became inseparable from real life years ago. We build careers there, move money, find partners, and organize communities that shape elections and markets. The culmination of our online activity impacts us in ways that were once reserved for the offline world.

But we're still running on anonymous participation by default, a trust model designed for '90s chatrooms. That worked fine when online spaces were supplementary to physical life, low-stakes chatrooms for discussing the latest video game releases. It fails now that platforms host billions of dollars in transactions and the largest drivers of social thought. It further becomes untenable when generative AI makes faking human participation essentially free.

A few years ago, coordinating bot networks or manufacturing fake engagement required human effort and real money. Now a single operator can run thousands of convincing fake accounts with minimal investment. Platform defenses like CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and behavioral detection were designed to catch humans cutting corners. They're increasingly useless against AI that doesn't cut corners at all.

Platforms central to people's actual lives are therefore structurally defenseless. Moderators play whack-a-mole with banned users who just create new accounts to continue to perpetuate fraud. Marketplaces hemorrhage money to fraud they can't prevent. AI hasn't just made the problem worse, it's broken the old approach entirely.

Why Existing Solutions Don't Translate

The standard regulatory answer to high-stakes trust problems is Know Your Customer (KYC). Born from anti-money laundering efforts in the '80s, KYC forces banks and financial institutions to verify user identity through government IDs, biometric checks, and document validation. If you've performed any significant financial action online, you've experienced the drill.

KYC works for banking because the stakes justify the friction. But it's a terrible fit for most of the internet. Requiring passport uploads to post on Reddit or sell furniture on Facebook Marketplace is absurd on its face. It's invasive, expensive to implement, and people simply won't do it. KYC was built for regulated financial institutions, not the communities and platforms where most of the internet actually happens.

There's a vast middle ground between anonymous imageboards and investment banks. Platforms where trust genuinely matters but surveillance-grade verification is massive overkill: gaming communities, political discourse, peer-to-peer marketplaces, professional networks, dating apps. These spaces are stuck between a rock and a hard place, to either allow unrestricted anonymous access and drown in bots or implement invasive checks that drive their legitimate users away. This is where VerifyYou comes in.

Separating Verification from Identification

VerifyYou splits apart two things that KYC conflates: proving you're a unique human, and revealing who you are. Platforms need to know participants are real people, not which people they are.

Users prove their humanness and uniqueness to VerifyYou by performing a simple face scan. Platforms can then receive attestation of verification status, but not identity information. Critically, uniqueness is scoped per-platform, ensuring more anonymity for the end user.

A verified user on Reddit, for example, could not create multiple Reddit accounts to evade bans or manipulate votes. Reddit would know you're a verified unique human on Reddit. But Reddit could not tell if you're the same verified person on Twitter or any other platform. You stay pseudonymous across the internet while being accountable within individual communities.

This unlocks two essential capabilities for platforms:

Bans that actually stick. When platforms remove bad actors, those actors can't immediately return with a new account. Consequences for violating community norms become real rather than performative. The game changes entirely when ban evasion stops being trivial.

Trust-based access without gatekeeping. Verified users can receive immediate posting privileges, marketplace access, or voting rights, while unverified users still participate at lower-stakes levels. This creates a meaningful distinction between human and synthetic participation without binary exclusion.

Variable Assurance for Different Stakes

The demand for trust online isn’t uniform. The threat model for a gaming community differs vastly from political discourse communities or peer-to-peer marketplaces. Therefore the rigor of humanness check is quantifiably variable across users in our network based on how sure we are of their humanness + uniqueness. This allows users to meet platforms where they are in terms of the rigor of the verification they undergo.

A social platform worried about bot armies needs different guarantees than a marketplace losing money to coordinated fraud rings. One-size-fits-all verification either overshoots for casual contexts or undershoots for high-stakes ones. Scaling assurance to actual threat levels is the only approach that works across the entire middle ground.

Building Trust Infrastructure

The old trust model assumed online actions had minimal real-world consequences and bad actors were humans operating at human scale. The internet becoming essential for economic and social life, colliding with AI making synthetic participation essentially free and infinitely scalable, has put incredible pressure on this system.
This mounting pressure necessitates a purpose-built trust layer for online platforms. A trust layer in the form of a network of verified humans who control the extent of what they share and can carry variable trust signals across platforms. It shouldn’t be a universal ID that tracks you everywhere, and certainly not banking-grade verification for every interaction. It’s critical to foster genuine human participation in online communities, commerce, and discourse without forcing a choice between total anonymity and comprehensive surveillance..

The internet needs a third option.