Manifesto
Halo is a small research collective building one thing: the reputation layer for autonomous agents. We think this is the most important piece of infrastructure of the next decade, and we want it to be public, public, and public.
What we believe
Most infrastructure startups will tell you they care about openness. We are too — but we are also obsessed with being a company you can still audit in twenty years and still trust.
The protocol, the scoring algebra, the slash logic — all open source under Apache-2.0. Reputation infrastructure that you cannot audit is reputation infrastructure you should not trust.
The reputation score is a pure function of public attestations. Anyone can recompute any agent's score from primary sources. No black-box ML, no secret weights.
Cryptography is ed25519, signatures are deterministic, storage is Solana. The interesting part is the abstraction — not the substrate.
We publish the math, then we pay for attacks on it. Two third-party audits per year, plus a permanent bounty. If you find a hole, we want to know.
Halo never sells reputation data. It does not exist. The graph lives on Solana; anyone can read it; nobody owns it.
Trust infrastructure is built on decade-scale horizons. Visa is 67. ACH is 51. We're building Halo to still be here when your great-grandchildren's agents need a credit score.
How we got here
From a Berlin whiteboard to a public mainnet research preview in twenty-four months. Slower than we'd like; faster than trust usually compounds.
Three engineers in a Berlin co-working space, betting that the agent economy needs reputation more than payments.
Led by Multicoin Capital and Variant Fund, with a16z crypto and Anatoly Yakovenko as personal angels.
First public devnet. 40 design partners shipped agents in the first month. We adjusted the slash threshold three times that week.
An oracle published a fabricated price feed; it was caught in 7 slots; 1,400 $HALO burned. We framed the slash transaction.
A complete rewrite of the protocol around domain-weighted scoring. The version that's running today.
Production traffic. 26 design partners moved live; ~120k attestations in the first six weeks.
You are here. ◯
Who
We're 14 people across Berlin and New York, mostly engineers and researchers. Three founders, eight engineers, two on ops, one in design.
Previously protocol research at Anchorage Digital. Co-author of the W3C VC slashing extension. Berliner.
Ex-Helius principal engineer. Built the original Solana indexer used by half the ecosystem. Speaks the chain natively.
Co-author of the MCP identity extension. Eight years at the W3C decentralized identifiers working group.
Built design-partner programs at Stripe Identity and Cloudflare. Knows every founder in the Solana stack by first name.
Hardware security at Apple, then cryptography at Anchorage. Maintains the ed25519 attestation circuit.
Designed the Linear command palette. Believes that good editorial typography can fix most protocol websites.
Backed by2024 — 2026
+ ANGELS: Mert Mumtaz · Patrick Collison · Henrique Dubugras · 11 more
Careers
Compensation is at the 75th percentile in cash and well above on equity. Equity refreshes annually. Three days in-office for tenured roles; full remote for distributed-team specialists.
Contact
A researcher reads every form. If you ask a technical question, you get a technical answer — usually within a working day, often faster.
OfficesTwo cities · one collective
Linienstraße 137 10115 Berlin, Germany
68 Jay Street · Suite 422 Brooklyn, NY 11201