Why we invested in Big Whale Labs, the future of web3 pseudonymity
Web 3 communities, such as Telegram and Discord, are largely dominated by users with pseudonymous handles. But existing social platforms weren’t built to optimize for pseudonymous identities, and that interferes with the trust-building and reputation ranking needed to build online communities.
Big Whale Labs, a web 3 social startup, is using blockchain technologies to reimagine what digital identity, the social graph, and a network can be. The company’s first product, SealCred, enables people to build pseudonymous NFT identities based on verified credentials.
Samsung Next invested in Big Whale Labs because it is building an identity layer on the Ethereum blockchain that enables users to verify their social profiles — generating reputation scores to establish baseline trust across existing channels. We participated in a $3.8 million seed round co-led by M13 and Road, with participation from Slow Ventures, C2, Goodwater, Panache, NFR, and Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase.
Pseudonyms are going to play an important role in web3, enabling reputation and metadata to be shared across social platforms. Big Whale’s goals are to enhance how web3 communities interact on web2 platforms and to introduce new web3-native tools for owning verified credentials, such as fractional identities, social graphs, and pseudonyms.
The team at Big Whale Labs has the experience and expertise to grow the company. The founders were college friends who worked on iOS apps together nearly a decade ago. Jason Kim, co-founder and CEO, is a former Y Combinator founder who left Taloflow to start the new venture. Nikita Kolmogorov, co-founder and CTO, recently sold his Telegram bot, Shieldy, to 1inch Networks, after scaling it to 20 million users worldwide.
Open blockchains, such as Ethereum, are public ledgers in which the details of a transaction are publicly available for anyone to see. Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, such as those being developed by Big Whale Labs, enable users to verify their identities without having to reveal the underlying data in their web3 transactions.
Big Whales Labs believes that anonymous, but verified, ZK NFTs are optimal for privacy-preserving identity mechanisms because NFTs are composable and permissionless to build on top of by default. Composability is the ability to combine or link different components, such as decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols or identity applications.
SealCred is the flagship product being developed by Big Whale Labs. It enables verification of credentials through ZK NFTs, while enabling the owner to remain anonymous. SealCred facilitates the creation of tokens that can be used to verify a user’s reputation and credibility. Another Big Whale Labs solution in development is Dosu, a pseudonymous social network that will enable users to interact based on verification using ZK NFT badges.
As the web3 ecosystem grows, we believe that Big Whale Labs has the technology to meet increasing demand for pseudonymous identities. Moreover, as more people work and play remotely, pseudonyms will protect individual identities while maintaining trust and credibility through a verifiable blockchain-based NFT.
Joan Kim is an Investor at Samsung Next. Samsung Next's investment strategy is limited to its own views and does not reflect the vision or strategy of any other Samsung business unit, including, but not limited to, Samsung Electronics.