What started as a tweet in late 2023 has evolved into the most incredible journey in building Ethos... just last month we raised $8.4m in our ICO, selling 20% of our token and becoming the #1 Sonar sale of the year and #3 token sale of 2026.

But what's next exactly?

Our mission and vision early on were very clear, as highlighted in the original Ethos Thesis in March 2024. We believed that by enabling people to act as social validators, instrumenting social trust cues onchain, you could push the crypto space forward out of the Wild West. Everyone wins.

New estimates from TRM Labs show that fraud and scams are more prevalent than ever, with $35b lost in 2025. That number has tripled since 2022. If the problem is getting worse, why isn’t reputation and Ethos everywhere yet?

So far, we've built Ethos as a platform. We believed distribution would create its flywheel from making the scores available everywhere you are, in every facet of how you use crypto today. That has worked in places: teams use the scores to target marketing spend, make fundraising decisions and run token launches with great success.

But over the last two years, we've found that most teams are cautious about building on top of other platforms, and for good reason. Projects and attention in crypto are ephemeral...

Many teams built their businesses on Farcaster and had nowhere to go when it faded. Startups collapsed. Infra providers disappeared. We see this with developers building on L2s, too. Their caution is rational, but it means building a platform in crypto is inherently difficult.

After 20 months of continuous improvement from REAL usage, we are confident in our scores, their resilience, and their robustness. Our credibility scores are mature enough to be used everywhere, but they aren’t yet.. Being right about the scores isn't enough if they aren't where the decisions happen... if they aren't at the forefront of every decision you make.

And now in October, 2026 we have $WHUF securing the protocol. With a proper incentive mechanism and the ability to fund bounties and the ecosystem, Ethos is better set up than ever to continue to find distribution. We now have the strongest possible alignment with our token, but we need to adjust our future strategy to continue to be successful and realize our vision.

Today we're sharing that we are shifting that strategy. Where we previously focused on being a platform that others extended into their products, we now intend to build those experiences ourselves. We've done this before with Ethos Broker, an OTC trading desk backed by reputation, and Ethos Markets, where we brought novel reputation trading to our own platform. Both work, and both serve niche markets. It's time to think much bigger.

We believe the Ethos Score belongs in nearly every crypto interaction - who launched this token? Who's buying it? Who’s shilling it? Is this project worth funding? Are the people marketing it reputable? Should I follow this trader's thesis? Should I avoid listening to what this person says?

Instead of depending on others to bring scores to their products, we want to own those experiences. We know that we can win those markets by building products with reputation as the foundation. That means showing who's behind transactions and encouraging people to leave reviews, vouches, or slashes for projects or people after interacting with them. Every one of those interactions adds to a more comprehensive dataset of trust, which is a core part of our mission.

Every product we build will be designed so that usage burns $WHUF. Vouching, reviews, broker posts, and trading in reputation markets already burn $WHUF through transactions, but their volume tends to be more limited. Going forward, we're focused on the volume of these social transactions

That ties what we build directly to protocol usage.

So how do we win?

• We solve for the optimal consumer crypto experience. Putting reputation at the center of a product is a better consumer experience and better for crypto's future growth. Many incumbents can't do it, because their revenue depends on the LACK of reputation of their users.
• We grow the market, through trust. People who get rugged stop playing, and people who know who they're dealing with do more. We want to build experiences that your gran will use because she knows it’s the safest place to transact, and that TAM is larger than just CT.
• New experiences push the Ethos protocol flywheel and $WHUF harder. When reputation is at the center of a product, value flows back to Ethos itself. People care more about their scores, which feeds the protocol and turns the flywheel.
• Our holders believe in something. Our earliest community members who understand the vision and want to see crypto become a better place are more aligned than ever with us through $WHUF. Believing in something in crypto is the most powerful force you can have.
• We have a top tier talent when it comes to product building. Over three years we've built one of the richest product experiences in the space, and this team has proven it can ship faster, more compelling experiences than teams with 10x the capital. We understand product and UX better because we average 14 years of experience per employee in web2 products.

The space needs to mature, and people now know Ethos can help. They hold the token in $WHUF that shows that support. Soon, we will meet them where they are.

Serpin (@serpinxbt) is a co-founder of Ethos. This article first appeared on X.