A Mission to Make Web3 Safe for All
The Web3 Builders Story.
GM to all,
It’s a privilege to be coming out of stealth, and launching a product (TrustCheck) that’s had so much passion and hard work put into it by our talented, driven, and mission-oriented team. In this introductory post, we’ll explain a bit about what we are launching, who we are, and why we’ve embarked on this path. We’re a big fan of blunt FAQ docs internally, so it’s only fitting that our first blog post follows this style.
What are you launching?
TrustCheck is a Chrome browser extension that instantly and automatically analyzes the risk of a wide range of crypto transactions, including NFT transfers, smart contract interactions, permissions approval requests, minting, token purchases and swaps. By simulating transactions before they occur, running checks with our machine-learning engine, and analyzing data from over a dozen sources, TrustCheck offers users personalized, real-time security recommendations prior to finalizing a transaction. The extension is free, and is available for anyone to download here.
Why should I care?
If you’ve ever been scammed interacting with web3, or are worried about getting scammed in web3, this product is for you. We’ve spoken to over 200 scam victims and, based on these interviews, developed a taxonomy of different types of scams as well as methods to address them. While no tool can prevent 100% of scams, with help from our community, brilliant engineers/data scientists, and a customer-obsessed mentality, we think we can make a serious dent.
Why did you decide to build this?
The founding team originally met while at RapidSOS, where we built a system for helping 911 locate emergency victims faster. Simply put, protecting people is firmly in our DNA, and something we are passionate about. We started Web3 Builders in large part because we spotted an opportunity to protect folks in the web3 space, and it’s a problem we can’t wait to throw ourselves into for many years to come.
That’s nice that you are passionate, but how else are you qualified?
Being excited about a problem isn’t enough. Before we set out to build, we wanted to make sure that 1. the problem was meaningful in scope, and 2. determine if we had a realistic chance of solving it.
Item 1 became shockingly clear early on. There are stats on crypto scam volume indicate its increasing relevance, with over half of the $14B of crypto received by illicit addresses in 2021 associated with scams¹, and over $100M of NFTs publicly reported as stolen from July 2021 - July 2022². But what really made it hit home were the 200 customer interviews we conducted with scam victims. Most of them weren’t actually part of massive hacks and widely reported incidents. Instead, they were victims of personalized micro-scams. This could be a DM they got on discord, or a dangerous transaction request from a scam website where they thought they were minting an NFT. Through these interviews, it became clear to us that end user security is one of the biggest barriers to the next billion users adopting crypto, and that it represents a long-term threat to crypto’s ability to be a force for good in the world. That’s a big scope.
Item 2 (can we solve this?) depended on a combination of problem set, team, and skills. Based on our internal research on scam taxonomy, we believe the early stages of scam prevention will be mechanical, and then shift very quickly to becoming a problem best-solved by probabilistic modeling and machine learning. As scams continue to increase in sophistication, these practices will be the crypto ecosystem’s best line of defense. We’ve been fortunate to have had a phenomenal group come together with world-class engineering, data science, and machine learning skills, and team members that have spent time solving some of the most complex data problems out there. We expect the team’s data-heavy approach to position us well for the long-term battle to protect end users.
You’re venture-backed. How are you going to make money?
Our TrustCheck browser extension is free to end users, and will remain so. Our goal up front is to get scam-prevention tech in the hands of as many users as possible. In the near-term, we’ll offer any crypto organization with end users the ability to integrate our functionality. Long-term, as we model risk, there are a variety of future paths for our business to thrive. We’ll write about these more in future posts.
But while it’s important for us to build a strong business, we will always care more about delivering value to customers. As a dogmatically customer-obsessed company, we firmly believe that if we succeed in the latter, the former will follow.
A word of gratitude
To everyone that has been on this journey with us so far, we can’t thank you enough for both supporting us and pushing us to constantly improve. Building meaningful things is hard, and we have a long way to go. Having great people around us means the world, and often is the difference between success or failure. Really, thank you for everything.
Alright, this has been real, and you can expect more updates down the road. That said, it’s time to get back to building.
Ricky
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Learn more about Web3 Builders Inc.
- Chainalysis 2022 Crypto Crime Report.
- Elliptic NFT Report 2022 Edition.
