Originally published at HOL

TrustMesh – Decentralized Trust Signaling with Scend

Problem Statement

Modern digital systems cannot answer a simple question: “Who can I trust, and why?”

Social platforms measure visibility—not integrity. Credential systems measure completion—not character. Blockchains measure value—not context. As a result:

Communities cannot verify real contributions.
Institutions cannot rely on portable reputation.
Civic groups cannot coordinate without centralized gatekeepers.
DAOs cannot distinguish between real humans and noise.
Students, workers, and creators cannot port the trust they’ve earned across apps or organizations.

The world runs on trust, but the internet runs on likes, follows, unverifiable claims, and opaque scoring systems. Nothing ties trust to identity, context, or time—and nothing makes it portable.

TrustMesh exists because the modern internet has no protocol for trust.

By turning trust into a verifiable, contextual, programmable primitive anchored on Hedera Consensus Service, TrustMesh unifies human trust and digital systems.

TrustMesh: Compliance-Grade Trust Infrastructure

Before it could log student recognitions or power campus governance, TrustMesh had to prove itself in a harder arena—one bound by regulators, audits, and financial scrutiny.

TrustMesh wasn’t born out of a whitepaper—it was forged in one of the most complex regulated industries in the world: cannabis finance.

Under a grant to build decentralized infrastructure for the cannabis sector, we didn’t start with theories—we started with regulators, custody, and compliance audits. The space demanded verifiable identity, immutable logs, and real-time audits—requirements that make most Web3 projects fold. But we saw an opportunity:

If we could build programmable trust for cannabis, we could build it for any industry.

That’s where TrustMesh began: not as a social network, but as a compliance-first infrastructure for authentic, sovereign digital trust.

Now, under the pressure and visibility of the Hedera Hackathon, the broader architecture and civic potential of TrustMesh is coming into full view—transforming from a specialized compliance tool into a general-purpose framework for decentralized trust infrastructure.

Using Hedera's Standards for Verifiable Trust

TrustMesh treats trust like a first-class primitive—finite, contextual, and programmable.

Every act of recognition, endorsement, or collaboration becomes an HCS event, immutably logged and signed. Where DeFi tracks value, TrustMesh tracks trust—anchoring social context, not just transactions.

{
  "event_type": "recognition",
  "issuer": "0.0.12345",
  "subject": "0.0.67890",
  "signal_type": "Integrity",
  "context": { "circle_id": "uuid" },
  "signature": "ed25519sig"
}

These events aren’t opinions. They’re audit-grade, cryptographically signed trust statements—instantly queryable from Hedera mirror nodes or subgraphs.

Standards in Action: Deployed Today

TrustMesh is powered entirely by Hedera-native HCS standards. No custom middleware. No walled gardens. Just composable, interoperable protocols:

HCS Standard	Role in TrustMesh	Outcome
HCS-11 – Profile Metadata	Defines portable identity and trust anchors	Self-sovereign, app-independent reputation
HCS-5 – Hashinals	Anchors immutable trust signals	Cross-platform recognition and proof
HCS-2 – Topic Registries	Categorizes signal types and domains	Scalable trust circle taxonomy
HCS-3 – Recursive Links	Trust nodes can reference others	Enables nested, lineage-aware trust
HCS-8/9 – Poll Topics	Governance and civic coordination mechanisms	Trust-weighted voting and verifiable governance

All acknowledgements, polls, and trust links in the demo ride on these open standards.

From Hackathon to Proposed HCS Standard: What’s Next

We’re proposing Decentralized Trust Signaling, an extension designed to unify the schema and structure of social trust events.

Proposed Standard	Purpose
HCS-X – Trust Signaling	Merges recognition, stake, and attestation events into a unified format

HCS-X will enable:

Interoperable civic and social signals across dApps and networks
Wallet-native trust recognition
DAO governance extensions based on verifiable human context

Next steps:

HCS-X draft specification in progress
SDK for developers to log/query trust signals
Seeking integration partners in civic tech, campus orgs, and regulated sectors

A Day in the Life of TrustMesh on Campus

Imagine this:

A student named Maya logs into her campus wallet app. It’s integrated with TrustMesh. On her dashboard, she sees:

A new recognition signal from her Debate Club president: “Maya led with integrity and encouraged diverse voices.”
A governance poll from the campus sustainability council, where only students with ≥3 peer trust signals can vote.
A pending attestation request from the Robotics Lab, asking her to verify mentorship given to a first-year teammate.

Later that day:

Maya attends a hackathon, where participants earn Hashinals for collaboration and ingenuity.
Facilitators mint verifiable trust signals tied to peer-selected attributes like collaboration and integrity.
These signals anchor to her HCS-11 profile, viewable across all Hedera-connected civic and academic platforms.

By semester’s end:

Maya's trust graph reflects her contributions, backed by real peers—not likes or engagement metrics.
She uses this portable reputation to apply for a DAO research grant, where her signals are instantly verifiable by the funding org’s DAO.

All of this—stored immutably on Hedera, composable across applications, and entirely owned by her.

TrustMesh System Architecture

Compliance as Code

Every trust signal is Ed25519-signed, timestamped, and publicly queryable. These aren’t likes or karma points—they’re compliance-grade attestations.

Interoperability by Default

Built entirely on HCS-native standards, TrustMesh allows any compliant dApp, wallet SDK, or civic platform to read or extend the data.

Inner Circle = Bounded Trust

Each user holds a finite number of trust tokens inside their Inner Circle. This introduces scarcity and intentionality into the network—making relationships measurable, portable, and resistant to spam or vanity metrics.

Summary

Where the Guardian measures carbon, TrustMesh measures character.

What began as decentralized infrastructure for a highly regulated market is now proving viable for civic networks, cooperatives, and coordination protocols at scale.

TrustMesh demonstrates that programmable trust isn’t a theory—it’s live, verifiable, and standards-based.

Pull requests welcome.