A beta test user tried @projectsolo and asked me, "Wait... you never asked for my name. Is this even a real verification?" Best question we get because most people think verification requires you to hand over your name, your documents & personal data - that's a KYC. We don't do things in the same way. To keep bots out, you don't need to know who someone is, you only need to know they're one real, unique human. Those are very different questions.

One design principle I keep coming back to: Identity systems should prove what they need to prove, then forget the rest. In 2015, the US Office of Personnel Management was breached. Among the data taken: 5.6M fingerprint records. Those fingerprints were collected for background checks — not for a permanent biometric database. That’s the failure mode of centralized identity. Data given in one context rarely stays in that context. It gets retained, copied, transferred, and eventually breached. You can reset a password. You can’t reset your fingers. This is why we’re building @projectsolo around a simple rule: Verify. Issue a proof. No “trust us to secure it forever.” The safest data is the data you never keep.

In Mountain View today at a Silicon Valley AI meet-up to talk about what @projectsolo is building. The message is simple: AI agents need real humans. Bots can't fake it anymore. Grateful to be in rooms that get it.

I was at the DECODE AI Conference at Berkeley yesterday — great to meet so many builders working on applied AI, agent systems, and ML infra. A lot of the conversations echoed the same pain points we see at Solo: data integrity, model security, and the need for reliable human-verified inputs as AI systems scale. Takeaway is also very clear: as multimodal models and autonomous agents move closer to production, the infrastructure layer for verifying who is behind data, feedback, and on-chain actions becomes mission-critical. Appreciate the thoughtful discussions with all the outstanding AI founders there. Looking forward to turning some of these sparks into deeper collaborations!!! 🚀