Social trust is in free fall. As the internet, smartphones, and social media have made it possible for anyone to spread any idea around the world, it has become much more difficult to determine what is objectively true. Bots and paid spammers are now believed to account for a large portion of content shared online. Powerful revenue models increasingly enable the spread of false, misleading or inflammatory content to large audiences.

Much ink has been spilled on the question of what to do about it. Proposals include censoring “misinformation,” regulating or banning social media platforms and banning smartphones in schools. These remedies are incomplete at best and harmful at worst. But I think I have the answer to the riddle. In this new world of unlimited information, it is time to recognize freedom of trust as a fundamental freedom.

A fifth freedom

In the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared his four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want . The absence of trust updates this framework for the 21st century. And achieving it will require the deployment of 21st century technology.

This may seem counterintuitive. After all, rapid technological change is one of the drivers of deteriorating trust. This can be considered an example of unintended consequences. Why should we double down?

Before I answer, I want to be clear. Lack of confidence does not mean lack of confidence. This means freeing the individual from the need to separately and independently prove the reliability of every other individual, platform or piece of information. It seems counterintuitive, but removing the need to trust a counterparty can increase the overall level of trust in the world.

And with this in mind, I believe we must look to a new generation of technologies that can restore trust in our daily lives and in our civic spaces, both physical and virtual. I’m talking about blockchains.

A future without confidence

Blockchains are the only technologies in our history whose fundamental objective is to answer the question: how can I trust my neighbor? How can I establish a foundation on which I can plan for the future?

The basic design of a blockchain can be thought of as a time chain. This means that we can know with certainty when a certain action was carried out and by whom. We can also program smart contracts that guarantee that actions will be executed at prescribed times and/or conditions. in the future. Essentially, blockchains can guarantee that promises will be kept.

An obvious path for entrepreneurs deploying this technology has been to design increasingly complex decentralized financial systems that use imaginative tokenomic models to deliver attractive returns. This, coupled with the ease of launching a token, was enough to channel much of the creative energy in the space towards financialization.

It’s as if the ancient Greeks invented the steam engine and only used it as a children’s toy.

A new information revolution

The same properties that make cryptography so attractive to financial engineers also have the potential to act as an antidote to our age of trust disintegration. Understanding how requires us to step away from crypto’s most common financial use cases and think about its basic structure. When we do this, we see that the cryptographic proofs underlying blockchain networks don’t need to have anything to do with money, digital or otherwise.

Rather, the underlying architecture can prove any activity. This can prove that the digital content was generated by a human rather than a robot or AI. It can provide automatic fact-checks based on objective criteria, bypassing the subjective and often selective judgments of human arbiters that aggravate distrust as often as they defuse it.

What would such a network actually look like?

The potential variations are almost endless, but the basics are clear. Starting from first principles, these networks would be built simultaneously in two directions. The first can be considered “bottom-up”: developers innovate on the details to create the most robust functionality and the widest range of features and capabilities. The second is “top-down”: entrepreneurs will identify needs (and in the case of digital trust, there are many) and design specific products that use the bottom-up capabilities of blockchains to meet them.

Here, the ease of monetization of blockchains becomes an advantage. It’s not difficult to imagine a service that automatically verifies the source and timing of information. Details can be customized depending on the use case. For example, imagine a news platform that would allow anyone to upload information but would verify their location and professional credentials as well as the accuracy of the statistics they shared.

Importantly, this can be done without compromising the anonymity of individual users and contributors. And the cutting-edge token economy may mean new forms of subscription revenue and new frameworks for micropayments to individual contributors.

This is just one example, but it illustrates how possible it is to reinvent our information ecosystems. We do not have to accept ever-decreasing levels of confidence and a corresponding increase in fear and disorder. Technology has broken an old balance dominated by a few centralized gatekeepers of information. And technology can help create a new balance, built around the absence of trust.

Boris Mamlyuk, a seasoned blockchain governance expert, is CEO and general counsel of Smart Transactions (STXN), a company specializing in verifiable time machines on Ethereum.