Web of Trust and MIR: Two Approaches to Internet Trust at Different Layers

Discussions about internet trust and digital identity often focus on long-running efforts like Web of Trust, which map and contextualize identity infrastructure across the ecosystem. MIR (MIR) is a new project, but it was designed to address a distinct and largely unsolved problem within that broader landscape: how users lose all participation context when moving between platforms, even when no identity verification is required or desired.

Although both projects relate to trust on the internet, they operate at different layers and are aimed at different failure modes.

Web of Trust: Mapping identity infrastructure

Web of Trust functions primarily as a research and visibility initiative. Its central output is an interactive map that documents organizations, standards bodies, public-sector programs, and technology providers involved in decentralized digital identity.

Its role is descriptive rather than operational. By showing who is building identity systems and how those efforts relate to one another, Web of Trust helps:

• Policymakers understand the identity landscape
• Technologists see patterns, overlaps, and gaps
• Researchers contextualize where identity standards are forming and evolving

Web of Trust does not interact with end users or live transactions. Its trust lens is institutional and structural, focused on systems rather than individuals.

MIR: Preserving continuity without identity

MIR approaches trust from a more transactional and practical angle. It starts from a common reality of today's internet: platforms rarely share user context, so when someone moves from one marketplace or service to another, their history effectively resets.

This reset creates several downstream effects:

• Legitimate users are repeatedly treated as brand new
• Platforms lack context during high-risk moments such as orders, payouts, or refunds
• Bad actors can exploit this fragmentation by cycling through platforms

MIR was created to explore whether participation history can move between platforms without moving identity. Through user opt-in linking, MIR allows platforms to learn whether a user has existing history elsewhere—or none at all—without exposing personal data or creating a global identity profile.

Identity versus history

A key distinction between the two projects lies in what they are designed to handle.

Web of Trust is centered on identity infrastructure: credentials, identifiers, standards, and the organizations that issue or manage them. These systems are essential for many regulated, civic, or compliance-driven use cases.

MIR deliberately avoids identity. It does not attempt to prove who someone is. Instead, it focuses on continuity of participation, treating history as something that can exist independently of identity claims. This allows MIR to operate in contexts where identity verification is unnecessary, undesirable, or disproportionate to the risk.

Privacy approaches

Both projects emphasize privacy, but in different ways.

Web of Trust's privacy posture comes from its scope: it maps ecosystems rather than processing individual user data.

MIR's privacy posture is enforced through design constraints. It avoids personal identifiers, does not score or label users, and limits its output to neutral signals about the presence or absence of prior participation. Users retain control over whether their history is linked and shared.

Different problems, complementary roles

Seen together, the two projects address different shortcomings of the modern internet:

• Web of Trust helps the ecosystem understand and coordinate identity infrastructure
• MIR explores how platforms can retain minimal, privacy-preserving context across boundaries

They are not competing solutions. Instead, they illustrate how trust challenges exist at multiple layers—from high-level identity systems to low-level participation continuity—and why no single approach is sufficient on its own.