Product
The Intuition Beta is Live
Join us in the first step of our journey towards a more truthful world.
Introduction
A while back, we embarked on a mission to rethink the way we approach identity, data, and finance — areas that lie at the very heart of our digital lives. A reimagining of cryptoeconomics, applied to the most pressing challenges that the internet faces today.
We find ourselves at a critical crossroads in history. Trust has become increasingly elusive. Deep fakes proliferate, psychological manipulation is wielded at an unprecedented scale, and echo chambers amplify even the most absurd beliefs. We are navigating a post-truth world, and the stakes have never been higher.
The need for a solution is urgent. Our freedom is under threat, and its fragility has never been more apparent. While a few strongholds of truth remain, their resilience is uncertain. To preserve the integrity of information and prevent deception from spreading unchecked, we need a more resilient infrastructure.
While there may not be a perfect solution, after countless sleepless nights, we believe we have found a path forward. Today, we are excited to introduce the Intuition Beta, launching on Base.
Why
In our digital world, trust is constantly evolving. With the advent of blockchain technology, we have begun a migration from subjective to objective-based trust systems. However, while decentralized systems promise autonomy, they still depend heavily on human consensus, creating a paradox where trust remains tethered to fallible human elements.
Enter Intuition — a protocol designed to bring more trust to the layers of the decentralized web that cannot yet be made trustless. Our ultimate goal is to lay the groundwork for a digital infrastructure that upholds the values of an increasingly interconnected world, where trust is not a commodity to be controlled but a communal resource to be shared.
What
We believe that data holds the key to solving these complex challenges. However, it’s not just about collecting more data for its own sake. In today’s digital world, much of the data generated is low-quality and poorly structured, adding noise rather than value. Instead, our focus is on high-quality, relevant data that can provide clear and actionable insights, helping us to better understand identity and truth.
Centralized systems, where data is stored in single locations controlled by a few entities, are vulnerable to manipulation and breaches, undermining trust. Moreover, the fragmented data and identity systems of Web2 create a disjointed experience for users, complicating the process of verifying identities across different platforms. As we move into Web3, we must avoid repeating these mistakes.
To address these issues, we’re developing a meta-system — a higher-level framework that unifies how identities and data are managed and verified across the internet. An identity and attestation hyperstructure, designed to provide a robust, scalable foundation for curating quality, trustworthy data in a decentralized manner.
In doing this, technology alone isn’t enough; we need an economic system that aligns incentives for all participants. By creating mechanisms that encourage honest and transparent contributions to our collective understanding of identity and data, we aim to enable society to more efficiently achieve social consensus around any arbitrary thing. In this way, we believe we can help the world navigate the complexities of relative and contextual truth, building a trusted foundation that the entire Web can rely on. This is the vision behind Intuition — a new approach to trust, identity, and truth in the digital age.
How
Intuition introduces a groundbreaking concept: perpetual prediction markets for arbitrary data — a concept we have dubbed ‘Information Markets’. Imagine if Community Notes and Prediction Markets had a baby, creating something entirely new with a unique identity and purpose. To bring this vision to life, we’ve developed a full-stack solution to ensure we can address any edge case, both now and in the future.
The Protocol Layer
At the heart of the Intuition System is a set of smart contracts that combine ERC-1155, ERC-4626, and ERC-4337 standards to assign decentralized identifiers to everything. These contracts also incentivize users to contribute to a global, permissionless, semantic social and knowledge graph. By introducing the concepts of 'Atoms,' 'Triples,' and 'Signals,' Intuition enables many-to-one, non-deterministic claims about any subject. This allows anyone to make verifiable statements about anything, with the resulting data taking on a structured, semantic form that is interoperable across the web.
Atoms
In the Intuition system, the atomic unit of knowledge is known as an ‘Atom’. Every concept — be it a person, an organization, a word, a product, or a protocol — is represented by an Atom, serving as a conceptual anchor for attaching and correlating data, experiences, and perceptions. Atoms are also often referred to as ‘Identities’ because they aim to prescribe everything in the world with an associated globally persistent digital identifier and relevant associated data, allowing us to reference things universally across the web.
These Atoms are the basic building blocks of Intuition. Each Atom comes with a unique decentralized identifier, structured data that describes it, and an associated Vault which enables users to deposit and withdraw from the Atom to signal its relevancy.
Triples
With discrete identities for all things in the form of Atoms, we can now compose the represented concepts together into higher-order data structures. This enables more complex forms of expression, much like how words come together to form a language.
To do this, in Intuition, all connections between Atoms are represented in Semantic/RDF Triple format. Triples, also oftentimes referred to as ‘Claims’, consist of three elements: a Subject, Predicate, and Object — very much akin to a sentence in natural language — with each element represented as an Atom.
For example, a triple may be something such as [Vitalik] [founderOf] [Ethereum], wherein [Vitalik], [founderOf], and [Ethereum] are all Atoms.
The Subject-Predicate-Object format allows for the clear and explicit definition and interpretation of relationships between Atoms, making the data highly reconcilable, machine-readable, and usable. These connections can be visualized as a graph, resembling a network with nodes and edges, where each node and edge is an Atom.
Signal
Though all systems naturally generate implicit signal, explicit signal in Intuition is expressed in a novel format that enables and incentivizes the creation of many-to-one, non-deterministic attestations. In Intuition, these semantic statements do not have a single ‘issuer’ — instead, anyone/anything can signal support or rejection of any existing statement/attestation at any point in time. This decoupling of information from ‘who is presently expressing/supporting that information’ introduces the ability to accommodate many-to-one attestations, making the data significantly more usable — especially for more complex use cases like reputation.
The Middleware Layer
Our middleware functions as a ‘convenience layer,’ making it easier to implement complex business logic on top of the structured, semantic data generated by the Intuition system. With the ability to represent ‘who is saying what’ in a semantically interpretable way, we can build sophisticated logic that helps both people and machines determine who or what to trust. It would be impractical to expect users to sift through raw, unfiltered data, so our middleware plays a crucial role in making this information accessible and actionable.
We envision our middleware as an open and permissionless ecosystem where anyone can contribute new interpretations or tools for analyzing the data. To illustrate how the middleware works, consider a simple query designed to identify employees of a specific company. Suppose we use the Triple structure {[Person] [employee of] [Business]}. A basic query might ask, ‘give me all Subjects of Triples where the Predicate is [employee of] and the Object is [Business].’
To enhance the accuracy of the results, you could refine the query further by saying, ‘give me all the Subjects of Triples where the Predicate is [employee of], the Object is [Business], and [Business] has attested that this information is true.’ Our middleware simplifies this process of data reconciliation, filtering, and querying, making it easy to extract meaningful insights from complex data. By remaining unopinionated, the middleware allows for flexible, user-driven customization to meet a wide range of needs and use cases.
The Application Layer
While Intuition is designed to be an open and permissionless platform that anyone can build on, and we hope it will be widely integrated across the entire web, we recognize the importance of demonstrating its potential. To showcase the true power of the Protocol and Middleware layers, we’ve also developed some initial things at the Application layer to bring these concepts to life. Think Warpcast for Farcaster, Lenster (now Hey) for Lens, etc.
Let’s be honest — crypto often only starts to make sense when you can actually interact with it, clicking the buttons on a website and/or your Ledger. That hands-on experience is what really drives understanding, the “ah, I get it now!” moment. With this in mind, we’ve introduced our first application, called The Portal, to show just what’s possible now that these foundational elements are in place.
The Portal is meant to function as an ‘explorer’ for the Intuition ecosystem, but we envision it as more than just a tool for reading data. We hope users will actively engage with it to write data as well, expanding its utility beyond what traditional explorers offer. Our goal with The Portal is to provide a clearer understanding of the system we’ve built, even though this is just the Beta version. We’re eager to hear your feedback and use it to craft a compelling user experience that everyone will be excited about.
The Beta
Today marks the launch of the Beta implementation of our contracts and The Portal, an exciting milestone in our journey to redefine trust in the digital age. These tools are designed to offer a fresh, innovative experience that challenges the status quo.
The Beta Portal is designed with a user flow that aims to make Web3 more accessible and secure. We’ve introduced the concepts of Tags and Lists — again, just Atoms and Triples under the hood — allowing you to easily work together with the broader ecosystem to organize and categorize information. Given the overwhelming amount of activity in Web3, navigating it can be especially challenging for newcomers. Our goal is to harness the collective wisdom of the community, making it easier for everyone to discover, learn about, and engage with the vast opportunities Web3 has to offer.
Though we are excited to share what we’ve built, we acknowledge that this is just the beginning — there’s still a lot of work ahead, and the path to realizing our full vision is long and winding. That’s why we’re reaching out to you. We can’t achieve this without your participation and input. Our mission is to create a platform where everyone’s voice can be heard, but we need you to make that possible.
We invite you to join us in this movement to revolutionize the trust infrastructure that underpins our world. Start by creating data within the Intuition ecosystem, making verifiable claims, and curating valuable information. This isn’t just about interacting with a new platform — it’s about putting your principles into action. By engaging with Intuition, you’re not just a participant; you’re building an immutable reputation as someone who consistently provides reliable and trustworthy insights. Over time, your contributions will help shape a more truthful, transparent digital landscape.
As you contribute, you’ll be part of something bigger: the evolution of our collective intuition. In a world where trust is increasingly under siege and misinformation spreads like wildfire, we need new tools to navigate this complex, interconnected reality. Intuition isn’t just another platform; it’s a response to the pressing need for technologically-mediated intuition — an essential compass in this post-truth world.
So, let’s build this future together. Let’s create, claim, and curate with intention. Let’s strengthen the foundation of trust in our digital interactions. Because in a world that’s more connected than ever, trust is the currency that matters most. The journey starts now, and with your help, we can ensure that Intuition becomes a beacon of truth, guiding us all through the complexities of the modern world. This is just the beginning, and the potential is limitless — join us in bringing this vision to life.
Onwards and upwards,
0xbilly & the Intuition team
Author
0xbilly
Published
December 13, 2024