First-Person Trust: The Missing Piece

It’s been a year since our last post. In that time, we have not been idle — we have been listening, learning, and building. The pause was deliberate. We wanted to be sure the path we chose was the right one before laying down more track.

The questions we kept circling back to were always the same. How do regenerative economy projects share data and credentials across organisations without ceding control to a central authority? How do small communities establish trust at the edges, in a way that scales without flattening into surveillance? We had a clear sense of the goal — a decentralized trust graph that regenerative economy projects could safely and reliably build on top of — but we did not yet have a complete story for how the trust itself was bootstrapped.

That changed when we came across the First Person Project. FPP starts from a deceptively simple premise: real trust is grounded in real people vouching for real people, in person. Personhood Credentials and Verifiable Relationship Credentials make that vouching machine-verifiable, while keeping the human encounter at the heart of it. It is the missing piece we had been looking for.

At the same time, the world has been giving us a second, more urgent reason to care. Supply chain attacks on the open source ecosystem have moved from rare incidents to a steady drumbeat. Compromised maintainer accounts, typosquatted packages, social engineering campaigns against contributors — the trust assumptions baked into our package managers and code-signing flows are visibly failing. The pattern is clear: we do not actually know who we are pulling code from. “Know Your Developer” is no longer a nice-to-have.

These two threads — building a regenerative economy and protecting the open source ecosystem — meet at the same point. Both need a way for people to establish verifiable, first-person trust with one another, and to build durable networks of relationships on top of it. That is the work ahead of us, and we are glad to be back at the keyboard.