The Battle Against Spam
Spam is the single biggest problem in decentralized networks. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa and OG bitcoiner, has written a brilliant article on the death of decentralized email that paints a vivid picture of what went wrong—and how an originally decentralized protocol was completely captured. The cause? Spam.
The same fate may happen to Nostr, because posting a note is fundamentally cheap. Payments, and to some extent Proof of Work, certainly have their role in fighting spam, but they introduce friction, which doesn’t work everywhere. In particular, they can’t solve every economic problem.
Take free trials, for example. There is a reason why 99% of companies offer them. Sure, you waste resources on users who don’t convert, but it’s a calculated cost, a marketing expense.
Also, some services can’t or don’t want to monetize directly. They offer something for free and monetize elsewhere.
So how do you offer a free trial or giveaway in a hostile decentralized network? Or even, how do you decide which notes to accept on your relay?
At first glance, these may seem like unrelated questions—but they’re not. Generally speaking, these are situations where you have a finite budget, and you want to use it well. You want more of what you value — and less of what you don’t (spam).
Reputation is a powerful shortcut when direct evaluation isn’t practical. It’s hard to earn, easy to lose — and that’s exactly what makes it valuable.
Can a reputable user do bad things? Absolutely. But it’s much less likely, and that’s the point. Heuristics are always imperfect, just like the world we live in.
The legacy Web relies heavily on email-based reputation. If you’ve ever tried to log in with a temporary email, you know what I’m talking about. It just doesn’t work anymore. The problem, as Lopp explains, is that these systems are highly centralized, opaque, and require constant manual intervention.
They also suck. They put annoying roadblocks between the world and your product, often frustrating the very users you’re trying to convert.
At Vertex, we take a different approach.
We transparently analyze Nostr’s open social graph to help companies fight spam while improving the UX for their users. But we don’t take away your agency—we just do the math. You take the decision of what algorithm and criteria to use.
Think of us as a signal provider, not an authority.
You define what reputation means for your use case. Want to rank by global influence? Local or personalized? You’re in control. We give you actionable and transparent analytics so you can build sharper filters, better user experiences, and more resilient systems.
That’s how we fight spam, without sacrificing decentralization.
Are you looking to add Web of Trust capabilities to your app or project?
Take a look at our website or send a DM to Pip.