By Sunny Chan, co-founder of Rexy
Something happens to me a few times a month, and it still bothers me. I open a page for a product I want. Before the page lets me in, it asks me to prove myself. Connect your account. Link your wallet. Share your email. Upload an ID, if it is that kind of page.
You know this offer, because you get it too. Give us everything, and we will decide whether you qualify.
Look at what that asks. I want to show one thing about myself. The price of showing it is my whole account.
Say a platform opens early access for people who trade seriously. I have three ways to answer them. I can send a screenshot of my portfolio, and anyone can make one of those in a photo editor. I can give them an API key, which is my entire account. I can connect my wallet and hope they behave. Every answer gives away far more than the question needs.
The account also stays open afterwards. My email appears in a newsletter I never asked for. Or it reaches a data broker, who sells it to marketing companies I have never heard of. I gave one account to prove one thing. Six months later, strangers are still writing to me.
AI destroyed every way to prove something
A screenshot was never really strong evidence, for sure. But today it is worth nothing, because an Al model can make a convincing one in a second. The same is true of a review, a face, a voice, or a browsing session that looks like a normal person on a normal afternoon. Bots already make most of the traffic on the web.
People call this fraud. The word is too small. Fraud is a few bad actors getting past a system that still works for everyone else. Now, the system is at risk of not working for anyone at all. Old ways of proving yourself don't anymore, and we are at a point of no return.
So this is where we are. The internet asks you for more of your data at the same moment your data proves less.
It is about to get harder. Al has started to make transactions online by itself. Agents book, subscribe and pay for someone, at machine speed, and nobody can check every single transaction. A buying agent cannot tell whether a real business stands behind an offer. A selling agent cannot tell whether it is talking to a customer or to a script. Neither side can finish the deal safely, so a large market stays closed.
All of these are one problem. Someone has to prove that a real person, with a real history, is on the other side. And they have to prove it without giving their life away.
How to fix what Al has broken: Sealed Proofs
Here is how that trading platform could work instead.
I open their page and Rexy notices. Rexy is an agent too. The difference is that he has one client, and it is me. He asks me one question. Do I want to prove that my trading volume on an exchange I already use is above their limit? I say yes. He runs one check inside my own session, seals the answer on my device, and sends the platform a single line. They learn that I am above their limit. My balance, my positions, my trade history and my password never move. I filled in no form. I got in because I am the person they were looking for.
A game studio is choosing players for a tournament and wants people with real hours behind them. Rexy proves the hours played and the age of the account. The studio never sees the friends list.
A brand wants creators with an audience that reads them. Rexy proves the size of the audience, and how long the person has posted without a break. The brand gets a yes, and nothing else.
Each time, you answer the question you were asked, and you keep everything else.
The thing that makes this possible has been in your browser the whole time: the "https" padlock on your URL bar. Behind that padlock is TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security. It puts your session with a website inside an encrypted tunnel. Your bank knows it is talking to you, and nobody in the middle can read anything. That padlock is the reason you can type a card number into a website at all. Online shopping did not grow first and add the padlock later. It waited for the padlock, and then it grew.
The padlock has one gap. It proves that the line between two computers is private. But it says nothing about who sits at the end of the line. So how to fix that without breaking privacy?
What a Sealed Proof is
A newer group of methods closes the gap. The family name is zkTLS, and the methods inside it aim at the same four things. The fact came from the website it claims. Nobody changed it afterwards. Only the part that answers the question is shown. Anyone can check the result without repeating the session.
You start the check yourself, from a session you are already logged into. Your own device does the work. The website you prove from takes no part in it, and never needs to know.
The result is a Sealed Proof: one verified fact that anyone can check in seconds. Think of a stamped envelope. Anyone can look at the stamp and see that it is real. Only you can open the letter. Nobody can see your bank account, but everyone can feel your aura, your energy, what you can flex about.
One Sealed Proof answers one question and stops. A Proof that your account is ten years old says nothing about what the account did, who owns it, or what it is worth. A Proof about your balance never shows the number. The company learns that you are above the line they set. The number stays with you.
Proofs also last. They sit in a passport that belongs to you, with the source, the date, the expiry date, and the list of companies that have seen them. Prove something once, use it for the next offer, and take it back whenever you want.
Who you still have to trust
This is the part I want to be honest about, because it is about proving things about your money, your work, your skills, your passions, and years of your life.
I want to call that process trustless, but it is almost never the right word, so I will not use it here. A Proof, even encrypted, rests on a trust assumption. The honest thing is to say which one is used on Rexy.
The trust assumption behind the TLS technology is between your device and a world-famous brand that signs a report itself for you, through your own session on their platform. They sign an encrypted document you can carry with you, and use the way you want. There, you are trusting the institution and the protocol.
To increase trustworthiness, Rexy helps users seal Proofs from different and independent apps they use. The more they prove, the more their profile is worth. Rexy checks the strongest evidence its source can give, enabling a system where no single party, including us, can create a false Proof.
The six gates before sealing a Proof
Once a Proof exists, it passes six checks before anyone gets paid. Each check refuses by default, so a Proof that fails at one gate goes no further.
A Proof carries an expiry date, and it stops counting when that date passes. It is tied to one company and one purpose, so a brand cannot pass it to another brand, or use it to answer a different question. Every time it is shown it carries a new random challenge, so showing the same Proof twice pays nothing. If you take a Proof back, matching stops immediately. Confirmations from companies arrive signed, dated and counted once, so a fake confirmation goes nowhere.
You hold the other half of the control. One yes covers one Proof, for one offer, for one period. Silence means no. Rexy keeps no readable copy of your record, so there is nothing to sell.
Why Sealed Proofs are worth money, for you
The internet always knew your record had value. It watched what you did, guessed what you might buy, and sold that guess to advertisers. Advertisers spend billions of dollars a year to reach people like you. The ads reached you. The money never did.
Al now produces the exact signals that guess was built on, so the guess costs more and means less every year. A Sealed Proof works differently. It records something you did, checked and true. A company will pay more for that than for any guess about you.
So a brand funds an offer and names the facts that qualify for it. You prove one of them. You do the action the offer asks for. The reward is real: a double-digit discount, cash in stablecoins or ordinary money, an invitation to something most people never see.
Three hundred and twenty thousand people already carry Sealed Proofs of their own lives, and companies already pay to reach them. Next to the whole advertising market, that number is small. New instruments start small. The padlock protected a handful of checkout pages long before it protected the whole web.
Soon the most valuable question on the internet will be a simple one. Who is on the other side?
People will ask it. Companies will ask it. The agents that buy and sell for us will ask it constantly. The mathematics that answers it already exists, and it belongs to nobody.
What was missing was a way for you to use it.
You say you know who you are? Prove it on Rexy.