ECF Newsletter October 2021

How we're cracking the legitimacy nut

Dear Subscriber. Are you legitimate? I’m sure you think you are, but how do you prove that to folks you never met or interacted with before? It’s a tricky subject, one we’ve been thinking a lot about at ECF. Ultimately that’s why we’re here: to develop and provide a platform which you can utilise to provide the information needed to make others feel comfortable with your project, or for you as a potential contributor to find credible and legitimate crypto projects to engage with.

If you are legitimate, you’re the ultimate scarce asset. This means you’re valuable. If your project is legitimate, and therefor scarce and valuable, it also is attractive. People will want to interact and cooperate with you. Like bees to honey.

Proving legitimacy is a hard nut to crack, if ever it can be cracked. Legitimacy is hard to measure and quantify because there’s lot of subjectivity involved and ultimately people. And men are weak, as the elves say in Lord of the Rings. Legitimacy is something that many times boils down to trust in people.

Nevertheless, there are many things that are measurable and solid that contribute to the legitimacy of a person or a project. If you paid your bills on time for years, it’s likely you will continue to pay your bills. A crypto projects that is open and transparent and are willing to provide a host of verifiable data and protection mechanisms, is unlikely to pull the rug.

In everyday life there are people who trust you, that find you legitimate. But why exactly is that? Maybe you’re involved in a crypto projects of sorts and some people outside of the project trust it. Maybe they invested in you, maybe they contribute to your DAO. How is it that they trust you?

Likewise, you put trust in some people, for some reason, and you trust some organisations. But why? What is it with people or organisations that make you trust them, make them legitimate to you? Then, how common is that, and how valuable? Take some time and think about it, and feel free to reach out to us and tell us what you’re thinking.

ECF is in essence a research project aiming to crack the legitimacy nut; we put a lot of thinking into this matter and our work will ultimately manifest in a decentralised credibility platform, a crypto project research, assessment and education platform. Our goal is to provide the ultimate credibility scoring mechanism, to help the community prove credibility and build trust in projects. This, in turn, will create value and attract contributors and bolster cooperation.

To that end we are growing our team to accelerate development. The last months has seen work at ECF really getting up to speed. We are now seven team members with various experiences and skill which means we can specialise and focus on our individual capabilities to achieve our goal. Since last month we’ve onboarded Zita Fekete as our UX/UI designer, and as of this writing we’ve just recruited a full stack developer lead. We’ll be back with more information soon.

We keep looking for more people, though. We need developers and a marketing manager. Please reach out to us if you have any questions or like to contribute to the ECF project. Send us an email, or follow us on Twitter.