Identity & trust
Trust that comes from real relationships
NAOMS follows the First Person Project standards for proving people and communities are real, without a central database holding everyone's identity. The First Person Project is a coalition of the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, Trust Over IP, the Decentralized Identity Foundation and the OpenWallet Foundation, working on what they call the “beinghood problem”: proving you are a real, unique person online without handing your identity to a central authority. NAOMS is named in their whitepaper as a project building to these standards.
How trust is built, step by step
Four pieces, each building on the one before it.
Relationship Card
A verified profile you share with someone you meet, like a business card that carries proof of what you did together. You can hold a different card for each context you show up in — it is self-asserted contact information, exchanged only after two people have already recognised each other.
Verifiable Relationship Credential (VRC)
A signed statement one person makes about their relationship with another. Alice's VRC about Bob and Bob's VRC about Alice are two separate objects — each is one directed edge in a much larger trust graph, not a single shared reputation number.
Hive (a verifiable community)
A group with real membership, proposals and governance, recorded on the group's own chain. A Hive can issue its own VRCs to its members — joining one is itself a credential you hold, not just a row in someone's database.
Trust flow
How far you can trust someone is worked out fresh from your own web of relationships every time you ask — walking the graph of who vouches for whom, decaying with distance. The result is never written down as a stored number. Nobody, including NAOMS itself, holds a permanent trust score on you that could be read, leaked or sold.
Pseudonymous by default: anywhere another person can read what you write — a Hive, a friendship, a chat channel — you sign with a pseudonym computed just for that relationship, never your real identity. If the software can't yet work out the right pseudonym, it refuses to write rather than fall back to your real identity and risk exposing it.
What each piece is for
Personhood, without a central issuer
NAOMS's own bootstrap credential is called greencheck: a small quorum of people who already know you attest that you're real, standing in for a government ID or an employer badge. Today it's linkable — the issuer, subject and attestors are all visible on the credential. A fully unlinkable, zero-knowledge version is planned as later work.
A typed trust graph, not one score
Trust between two people isn't a single number like a credit score. NAOMS keeps typed, weighted edges — vouch, attest, delegate, endorse — and works out how far that trust flows only when someone asks the question.
Hives govern themselves
A Hive picks how it decides — consensus, consent, majority, open, or one steward — with a two-thirds bar for changing that choice later. Membership, proposals and votes are recorded on the Hive's own chain, not a server anyone has to trust.
What this means for the people using your app
None of this shows up as extra work for them.
No login, no leak
There's no password database anywhere to breach. Identity is one seed, split across a person's own devices.
You never build or host an account system.
Trust they can feel
People see who vouches for whom in plain language, not a mystery score. A Relationship Card carries real proof of a real interaction.
Useful anywhere you'd otherwise ask "is this person legit?"
Privacy that fails safe
Wherever another person can read what someone writes, NAOMS signs with a pseudonym by default and refuses to fall back to a real identity if it can't compute one.
You don't have to design the privacy model yourself — it's already the default.