We’ve noticed the adoption of the term “dox” in the crypto space to mean publicly and transparently connecting your Web3 persona to your “real-world” information like your name, your resume, and in some cases, your photo.

We celebrate transparency and strongly believe that it’s crucial to evaluating a project. In fact, before investing our time (or hard-won ETH!), we aim to have a thorough understanding of who is involved and their track record. A trustless ecosystem may sound good in theory, but foregoing this simple due diligence means blindly handing your wallet details to just anyone. And that leaves you open to rug pulls – or worse.

Despite this, we believe doxxing is not the right term and cringe when we hear it used.

Why?

Doxxing is an act that has an established, generally negative, and frequently misogynistic meaning. For those who aren’t aware, it is to non-consensually reveal who an anonymous or pseudonymous person is in real life, for example publishing legal names, phone numbers, or home addresses online. It’s often combined with stalking, brigading, and other types of harassment.  For many, doxxing encapsulates some of the worst tendencies – the most toxic, the most violent – of internet culture today.

While it is true that we are interested in a team's background, accomplishments, and qualifications, we could care less about their faces, genders, locations, real names or other personal information.  This is because reputation transparency does not require human identification.

Take, for example, one of the many pseudonymous denizens of Web3 – Punk 6529 has more than 250K Twitter followers and has started an NFT fund without being “doxxed.” Knowing he’s involved with the project gives credibility. He has put his reputation on the line; in every way that matters, he has staked his name against this project.

This is why Buzzfeed’s doxxing of BAYC founders was such an unnecessarily shitty thing to do. Web3 already “knew” them, their  “identity,” their work, and their real-life events. We knew they’d created one of the most successful projects in Web3, and we had proof they could push the boundaries of what is possible with NFTs. Their reputations are at stake in nearly everything they do, and what they have built has so much value that owners of individual bored apes often get reputational clout just from having one.

And while weeding out bad actors is important, here again, it’s about connecting someone with their past work. Revealing BeanieMaxie was actually Charles Moscoe wasn’t important because we now know his name is Charles. It’s because connecting his Web3 reputation with his history of fraud unmasked a number of schemes as scams, not the least of which was the monkey bet.

So let’s step away from sussing out personal, IRL identifiers for their own sake. Instead, let’s shift the conversation.

Staked, not doxxed

We want teams to be staking themselves — their reputations — on projects.

Staking is common vernacular in Web3, whereby people lock up an asset into contract to provide valuable resources a project needs and are rewarded by growing their asset (if all goes well). What is a reputation, if not our most important asset when teams are considering working with us, or people are deciding rather they are going to invest with us?

Both of us are transparent with who we are in the Web3 world, and as regular conference speakers, each time we get on stage, our reputation is staked. If we do a great job, that reputation goes up, and we will get better opportunities at cooler conferences in the future; if we flub, quite the opposite happens. The same is true for the work we do in DAOs and the posts we make on the internet.

Staking also has the benefit of being common vernacular that non-Web3 communities would understand.  Hedge fund managers are often asked by investors how much stake each one personally has in the fund. And while the answer is from a monetary position (a large % of our net worth), it’s so much more than that. Our careers and our names — and those of all of our investors — are truly what’s staked in opportunities we work on.

That said, it’s not just about changing the language.

With the power of Web3, we think there’s real opportunity to create a new industry standard — and systematically equip teams and investors with the information they need. We also think the principles of staking tokens apply nicely to staking reputation.

Here are a few ways this might look:

1. Reputation escrow services: Encrypt an NFT with real ID information that’s only unlocked if arbitration determines the project was rugged.
2. Project confidence rating: Trustless staked identities as an equivalent to “accredited” projects.
3. Accrue staked reputation credits: Stake the same persona to build a transparent, on-chain résumé over time.
4. Differentiate “tiers” of staking: Reflect different levels of involvement by making distinctions between founders, contributors, advisors, and evangelists.

There are pros and cons to different approaches, and we’ll need to work together as a community to determine which work best for us.

But one thing’s clear — doxxing isn’t just cringey, it’s limited, and we can do so much better.

Interested in continuing the conversation?

We’d love to hear from you.

Twitter: @TheSilber, @The_Manther

In Summary

• We think you should use the term stake rather than dox to ask if there is transparency in a team.
• Are the founders' reputations staked?
  • While this might mean revealing their real world names and resumes, especially for founders new to Web3, it’s rarely necessary.
  • If you don’t have a Web3 reputation to stake, build one! There are hundreds of DAOs you could go put work into, and hundreds of projects you could build for that wouldn’t require anyone taking a chance on you.
• Doxxing means to non-consensually reveal the real-life identity of someone who is at least pseudonymous online. While there may be valid ethical reasons for someone to be doxxed, it is rarely used this way, and has strong associations with a history of misogynistic abuse.
• Wen staked identity credits, devs?

Appendix

• Bored Ape Gazette, Two of the Bored Ape Yacht Club Founders Were Doxed by Buzzfeed
• Buzzfeed, We Found The Real Names Of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders
• Know Your Meme, Doxxing
• Gabe Carhart, The first organized battle of the Culture War: #Gamergate, Breitbart, and the framing of politicization
• NY Times, How to Dox Yourself on the Internet
• Pew Research, The State of Online Harassment
• The Atlantic, Doxing: An Etymology
• Time Magazine, Zoë Quinn: What Happened After GamerGate Hacked Me