Reputation Without a Kill Switch

“Web of Trust is any network of relationship where trust is distributed and emergent—it’s not imposed by someone else.” Pip builds the infrastructure that makes decentralized reputation actually work. While platforms like Twitter sell verification for $8, he’s applying Google’s PageRank algorithm to Nostr—and giving it away for free.

Web of Trust is any network of relationship where trust is distributed and emergent. It emerges organically from interaction and connections—it's not imposed by someone else.
— Pip

Timestamps

00:44 What Vertex is and the problem it solves
03:23 Why centralized trust verification is failing—the Twitter/X model
05:11 Pip's definition of Web of Trust: distributed and emergent trust
06:49 Why PGP's web of trust failed after 30 years
10:32 How Twitter's paid verification made identity meaningless
14:19 Meta's perverse incentives—when scammers pay more than spam costs
18:42 The primitives needed for healthy online discourse
21:26 Why reputation depends on point of view, not absolute values
27:13 How Nostr makes your audience portable and permanent
29:36 Can Web of Trust be weaponized? The exclusion question
34:52 Vertex's business model: freemium credits based on reputation
39:49 Why app store review models are going obsolete
41:57 Zapstore: using Web of Trust to verify app developers
49:00 What traditional developers get wrong about decentralized identity
55:21 What's next: explicit content detection and filtering
1:00:46 Personalized recommendations and onboarding without surveillance

Resources

About Pippellia

Pip (Pippellia) is the co-founder of Vertex, a Web of Trust service for Nostr developers. He builds the infrastructure layer that helps decentralized apps solve their hardest problem: figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority. Vertex uses PageRank-style algorithms to compute reputation scores, enabling spam filtering, personalized recommendations, and impersonation protection. He received an OpenSats grant in 2025 and made Vertex free to drive adoption, prioritizing network growth over immediate revenue.

Nostr X GitHub