What is Intuition?

Intuition is an ethereum-based attestation protocol that makes it easy to store, monetize, and track insights and knowledge. Information gleaned from Intuition helps users make informed decisions and enables developers and users to minimize and assess trust assumptions more effectively, lowering the risk of errors and vulnerabilities across the web.

What is the Portal?

This application, The Portal, is merely an Explorer (akin to Etherscan) for the Intuition ecosystem. At its core, Intuition is developer tooling and a platform of platforms, powered by the Intuition Protocol.

And with the participation of users, our mission was to decouple identities, data, and algorithms from platforms, disinter-mediate trillions in value, and flow the value back to the user.

Problem

As societies scaled beyond tribes of 150 people (Dunbar's number), we lost the ability to personally know everyone we interact with. Instead, we outsource trust and decision-making to fragmented technologies and platforms:

• Instagram for gauging someone before doing business

• Yelp for assessing a restaurant before dining

• Amazon for determining if a product is worth buying

  
  

While these systems are helpful, they have significant flaws:

1. Identity Fragmentation

   • We juggle hundreds of app-specific accounts, each with its own isolated data and reputation.

     • Example: You can’t take your Uber reputation to rent an Airbnb.

     • Your Bank of America credit history doesn’t help you secure an undercollateralized loan in DeFi.

   • There’s no universal identity that connects these contexts, forcing users to repeatedly start from scratch.

   
   

2. Lack of Unique Identifiers

   • Without standardized identifiers for people, places, and things, referencing and organizing information is chaotic.

     • Example: Tagging “Ethereum” could point to a website, Twitter profile, wiki page, or simply the word “CryptoPunk.”

   • A universal system of identifiers would simplify this process, enabling seamless cross-platform references.

   
   

3. Scattered Information

   • We store knowledge in disparate places (browser tabs, Apple Notes, Google Docs) but rarely revisit or effectively organize it.

   • Our personal insights and intuition, often far richer than what’s available online, are never captured or shared.

     
     

4. Lack of Incentives to Share Data

   • Current systems don’t reward users for contributing useful information or insights.

   • Votes, reviews, and activity are siloed within platforms (e.g., Product Hunt or Farecaster), which may vanish in a few years, taking all value with them.

   
   

5. Missed Opportunity for Open Knowledge

   • What if we had an open, permissionless knowledge graph where anyone (users or applications) could contribute data?

   • This would enable:

     • Cross-platform portability of trust, reputation, and insights.

     • Incentivized contributions to a shared pool of knowledge.

     • Long-term data retention and reusability across ecosystems.

Design Challenge

How do we structure and present verifiable data in a way that’s clear and compelling? How do we enable users to stake on this data, signaling their conviction to their audience? To tackle these questions, we broke the data into its core elements - our primitives.

Atoms (Identities)

Atoms, or Identities, are the smallest units of knowledge (building blocks) in the Intuition system.

Triples (Claims)

Triples, or Claims, are three atoms composed in the semantic format of [subject] + [object] + [predicate].

Lists

Organize, search, and query the information that's important to you

The Portal, In Action

Bringing these elements together, here's a quick walkthrough of how the Intuition Portal works, showcasing how users can demonstrate conviction by staking ETH or signaling their beliefs.

Intuition IRL

With the Portal live, it was time to gather user feedback, and ETH Denver 2024 provided the perfect opportunity for some rare in-person product testing. Leading up to the event, my team and I also designed, sourced, and executed the booth and merchandise.

The event was an incredible chance to introduce Intuition to new audiences, showcase the Portal in live demos to gather real-time feedback, and foster organic community growth.

Mission-Driven Work

Intuition was a deeply personal project that aligned closely with my values. When I find work that is fulfilling in this way, it drives me to perform at my highest level and pushes me to achieve even more.

Being part of a small, agile team, I contributed wherever I was needed - whether it was design and product development, growth and marketing, or event production and crypto conference activations, including booth and merchandise design. Each day brought opportunities to learn, contribute, and help move the needle forward with my team.

The Future of Data and Identity

Innovation has stagnated under monopolistic systems, particularly in how data is owned, shared, and monetized. We are on the cusp of a transformative era (similar to the early days of the internet before Google) where decentralized, open knowledge networks have the potential to disrupt trillions of dollars of value. This new paradigm will redefine trust, reputation, and the way we build and innovate applications.

By developing a system of universal identifiers and an open knowledge graph, we can:

• Unlock Human Intuition: Capture the immense value of insights and perspectives that currently remain untapped.

• Incentivize Meaningful Contributions: Create systems that reward users for sharing valuable data.

• Enable Interoperability: Build an ecosystem where apps and users thrive on shared, reliable, and decentralized data.

This vision isn’t just about solving trust issues - it’s about fundamentally reshaping how we connect, share, and innovate on the web.