Introducing Vertex
After many months of ideation, research, and heads-down building, Fran and myself are excited to announce our new project called Vertex.
Vertex’s mission is to provide developers and builders with the most up-to-date and easy-to-use social graph tools.
Our services will enable our future customers to improve the experience they provide by offering:
- Protection against impersonation and DoS attacks
- Personalized discovery and recommendations.
All in an open, transparent and interoperable way.
Open and Interoperable
We have structured our services as NIP-90 Data Vending Machines. We are currently using these DVMs and we are eager to hear what the community thinks and if anyone has suggestions for improvements.
Regardless of their specific structures, using DVMs means one very important thing: no vendor lock-in.
Anyone can start processing the same requests and compete with us to offer the most accurate results at the best price. This is very important for us because we are well aware that services like ours can potentially become a central point of failure. The ease with which we can be replaced by a competitor will keep us on our toes and will continue to motivate us to build better and better experiences for our customers, all while operating in an ethical and open manner.
Speaking of openness, we have released all of our code under the MIT license, which means that anyone can review our algorithms, and any company or power user can run their own copies of Vertex if they so wish.
We are confident in this decision because the value of Vertex is not in the software. It is in the team who designed and implemented it – and now continually improves, manages and runs it to provide the most accurate results with the lowest latency and highest uptime.
What we offer
We currently support three DVMs, but we plan to increase our offering substantially this year.
VerifyReputation: give your users useful and personalized information to asses the reputation of an npub, minimizing the risk of impersonations.RecommendFollows: give your users personalized recommendations about interesting npubs they might want who to follow.SortAuthors: give your users the ability to sort replies, comments, zaps, search results or just about anything using authors’ reputations.
To learn more, watch this 3-minute walk-through video.
We are also considering offering a custom service to help builders clarify and implement their vision for Web of Trust in their own applications or projects. Please reach out if you are interested.