Source: Outlier Ventures; Translated by: AIMan@Jinse Finance
Privacy has not died; it is merely waiting for its moment. And that moment is now.
For years, privacy has been viewed as a compliance checkbox or philosophical ideal, but now it has finally become a practical design choice.
Governments are intensifying AI surveillance. Major lawsuits are investigating how tech giants collect and monetize user data. In the cryptocurrency realm, crackdowns on KYC are conflicting with decentralization principles. Meanwhile, we see a surge in AI agent usage, which increasingly acts on our behalf, but often lacks effective user oversight or consent.
In this environment, trust is the new scalability bottleneck. And privacy is no longer optional.
Thanks to breakthroughs in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), trusted execution environments (TEE), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and multi-party computation (MPC), privacy has finally caught up with performance.
This is no longer just about protecting user data, but about enabling secure delegation, identity verification, and economic coordination in an agent-driven world.
This is why privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) are emerging from the shadows and becoming the cornerstone of reliable technological infrastructure.
Trust Bottleneck
Web3 promised us self-sovereignty—but what we got was signature fatigue, interrupted consent processes, and a user experience cobbled together from browser pop-ups and Discord FAQs.
Today's infrastructure might be decentralized by design, but it's not trustworthy by default.
Wallets leak metadata. DApps rely on opaque backend logic. Login processes provide one-size-fits-all permissions, lacking granularity. Most users still don't know what they're signing or what will be tracked after signing.
Now autonomous agents are added to the layer.
These systems are not just executing transactions. They learn, infer, and take actions—often in ways users cannot fully see or control. In the rush to scale agent applications, we risk rebuilding Web2 surveillance patterns with smarter wrappers.
This is where trust breaks down. Not because people don't care, but because systems haven't provided reliable alternatives. To unlock the next era of intelligent applications, we need infrastructure that allows users to delegate without disappearing. This means:
Verifiable identity without compromising privacy
Dynamically adaptive consent
Selective disclosure, proving without exposing
Portable and anonymous reputation systems
In short, we need PET as core design primitives, not add-ons.
Without them, agent systems become fragile, permissionless applications will hit adoption limits, and the promise of decentralization will collapse under its own weight.
PET is our way of building trust in autonomous systems at the protocol, application, and interaction layers.
[The translation continues in the same manner for the rest of the text]Its periphery is Identity & Reputation, extracting and synthesizing actionable indicators from data, forming the foundation of post-network trust.
Consent & Permission act as gatekeepers, dynamically controlling access to personal data and identity based on user preferences.
Encompassing everything is Privacy, this protective layer regulates information flow and ensures the security of sensitive data. These layers collectively form a coherent framework, enabling secure, controllable, and trustful interactions in the post-network ecosystem.
Let's delve into the different elements of personality in wallets.
"In the next five to ten years, entities will emerge that are 1000 times smarter than humans today, some entirely silicon-based, indicating that in the post-network era, when we extend consciousness to the silicon world, 'if it's not your key, it's not your consciousness'."
—— Trent McConaghy, Founder of Ocean Network
Personal Data
Today, personal data is often stored in isolated silos on Web2 platforms, beyond user control. Much information is redundant and outdated. Moreover, these data are inaccessible to users, undermining their sovereignty.
As mentioned, personal background, or data, is the foundation of personality in post-network wallets. In this vision, personal data will be treated as a bearer asset, securely stored in wallets. As more economic activities move on-chain, wallets will increasingly accommodate transaction and behavioral data, evolving from basic information to complex user profiles. These rich data will support highly personalized services while being protected by robust privacy measures and fine-grained automated consent mechanisms.
In the post-network era, managed by consent and privacy layers, agents will be able to use dynamically portable data enriched with contextual information, optimizing information distribution in real-time based on continuously changing user preferences, location, and environment. Simultaneously, agents will unlock privacy verifiability through privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), thereby preserving the necessary level of privacy.
Identity & Reputation
Identity and Reputation (I&R) are built upon personal data, extracting and synthesizing actionable indicators that form the foundation of post-network trust. Identity provides static verification, serving as a reliable anchor, while reputation acts as a dynamic cumulative credibility indicator that evolves over time with user behaviors and interactions. However, the interaction between static identity and dynamic reputation presents challenges, especially in decentralized systems aiming to balance verifiability with anonymity.
Given that identity and reputation are enablers of trust-based economic transactions, their economic importance in the post-network cannot be overstated. Identity is the static trust layer, while reputation reflects real-time reliability in specific socio-economic contexts. Identity and reputation together enable users to leverage their digital presence for economic gains, promoting a fairer, more trustful internet. However, the reliance on anonymity in many Web3 environments contradicts the growing need for verifiable identity, particularly in regulated industries and agent-based systems.
Identity and reputation in the post-network will transcend individual users, forming contextual associations within their social graphs as social dynamics increasingly migrate to distributed ledger technology (DLT) through trends like SocialFi. By incorporating relationships and interactions within user networks, these systems can create more nuanced, context-specific trust indicators, enhancing credibility and facilitating trust in social and economic interactions.
Today, efforts towards on-chain reputation in Web3 are ongoing but have made little progress, primarily due to the lack of viable on-chain economic use cases for reputation. The dynamic nature of reputation and the need for real-time updates further limit its development, giving users almost no incentive to build this dataset. Moreover, given reputation's high context-specificity, designing systems that accurately reflect credibility across various socio-economic interactions remains a significant challenge. In contrast, identity has achieved greater success, especially in regulated industries adopting DLT and subsequently AI agents. While identity challenges the early Web3 anonymity spirit, it will become increasingly important in enabling agents to operate in these regulated environments, provided privacy and control safeguards are in place.
In the post-network era, as users empower agents, identity and reputation will become critical components requiring robust management to unlock the full potential of trust-based interactions and economic activities. Reputation systems will need to address existing limitations by integrating real-time updates and incentivizing user contributions to dynamic trust frameworks. Simultaneously, identity will need to evolve in a way that balances the needs of regulated systems with Web3 decentralization principles, ensuring that both identity and reputation support a trustful, fair, and adaptable internet.
Consent & Permission
Today, wallets primarily focus on authorization. By clicking "sign", users essentially consent to execute specified transactions. This core aspect of wallets will remain crucial in the post-network era, though the nature of consent will be far more complex than transaction signatures in Web3.
Humans need to improve their ability to manage consent, evident from their reluctance to engage with cookie consent forms or navigate GDPR toggle menus. In recent years, we've also witnessed rapidly increasing consent fatigue, with repetitive consent requests leading to user disengagement and high abandonment rates. While we believe the post-network era offers an opportunity to eliminate many of these poor user experiences, we anticipate similar challenges in human-intervened consent and permission management when delegating activities to agents, unless regulators accept innovation.
Highly automated, granular consent solutions will be essential in the post-network era to ensure users authorize their intended actions. As more economic and meaningful activities are outsourced to agents, consent will become more complex and critical. When agents act on behalf of users, they must also be able to identify themselves as authorized representatives to ensure the trust and verifiability of their actions.
Currently, consent fatigue is managed through intuitive consent user experiences/interfaces and simple language. Given the volume of activities to be delegated in the post-network era, we believe this is not a sustainable solution. Instead, we believe highly granular user profiles created from aggregating extensive personal data and preferences will unlock the required level of automation by enabling systems to act based on these preferences. However, if the algorithms managing these profiles are centrally controlled, this approach risks introducing bias—a challenge that must be carefully managed.
"If users do not progress in their ability to provide informed consent and authorize agents to act on their behalf, the complete vision of the post-network will be unnecessarily constrained."
Therefore, as wallets evolve to carry users' reputations, identities, sensitive personal data, etc., founders have a massive, underdeveloped opportunity to abstract and simplify consent and permission management. This is a bottleneck that must be overcome before we can delegate large-scale commoditized economic activities to agents.
Privacy
Privacy, like consent and permissions, concerns the governance of information and the ability to obscure sensitive or proprietary information. However, it is often mistaken for anonymity, which is a separate concept.
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, trusted execution environments, and multi-party computation are not exclusive to cryptocurrencies and blockchains. However, today they are making rapid progress in areas like cost, throughput, and capacity, making many of these technologies economically viable for the first time.
Privacy verifiability—the ability to prove the authenticity and accuracy of information without revealing underlying data—promises to transform which types of economic activities can be conducted on-chain. In use cases where competitors operate on the same permissionless blockchain, the ability to specify the degree of information asymmetry between economic participants is crucial.
Nevertheless, PETs are one of the most underestimated innovations in today's Web3 and are critical to realizing the post-network and computable economy. This is why we have a dedicated chapter on privacy in Chapter 4 of the post-network paper.
"Considering the cost of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs), the post-network may be open by default, selectively using privacy only where necessary and most effective."
—— Jamie Burke, Founder and Chairman of Outlier Ventures
Launching PETs Accelerator
The future of the internet will be more agency-driven, context-aware, and increasingly autonomous. But such a future can only be realized by establishing trust from the very beginning.
This is why Outlier supports founders working at the intersection of privacy, identity, and intelligent systems.
Through the Post Web Accelerator, and in collaboration with the Midnight Foundation, Outlier Ventures is launching a dedicated accelerator for founders using PET technologies.
Because we believe PET is not too early. In fact, it is right on time.
