Public confidence in digital information continues to present a significant challenge as search engines, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence increasingly shape the way people access, discover, and understand content. Research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Digital News Report, referenced by DPIR, found that trust in news declined in 29 of the 48 markets examined, leaving the global average at 37%.
Further findings from its 2026 Generative AI and News Report revealed that 57% of respondents across nine countries had come across AI-generated answers or summaries through search engines in the preceding week. Together, these results highlight how the digital information landscape is evolving, with greater convenience and accessibility bringing renewed concerns about accuracy, openness, and accountability.
For Jae Kwon, technology entrepreneur, blockchain software architect, and founder of NewTendermint, these issues are closely tied to his longstanding commitment to developing digital infrastructure that can be independently inspected. His work spans open-source software, decentralized applications, and systems designed to enable transparent human coordination on a broader scale.
Kwon believes that accountability in the information ecosystem is influenced in part by the underlying technology used to collect, structure, and distribute information. “Most centralized platforms operate through close-sourced code, and hidden internal ranking mechanisms, leaving users susceptible to algorithmic manipulation through, say, the ranking of feeds,” he says. “The only way to overcome this situation is to adopt decentralized blockchain-based technology which is still immature,” he adds. “The challenge is to rebuild the tools and applications we’re familiar with from the ground up within the new paradigm of transparency and freedom of information.”
These concerns take on additional significance as AI-generated summaries become a more common way for people to access information. Automated tools can bring together content from multiple sources and present it in shorter, more accessible formats. While this can make information easier to consume, it can also make the process of selecting, filtering, and interpreting the original material less visible to users.
Kwon identifies three underlying considerations that help explain the growing relevance of independently verifiable decentralized infrastructure. Organizations may have little incentive to reveal mechanisms that contain commercially sensitive information, consumers have traditionally prioritized convenience over cryptographic accountability, and centralized systems can restrict the ability of external parties to verify how information is handled. “These factors suggest an opportunity to develop infrastructure that allows accountability and transparency to become part of the system’s design,” he states.
His technical background provides a foundation for examining how such systems could work in practice. Kwon’s contributions to the Tendermint consensus algorithm and the Cosmos ecosystem include infrastructure connected to Tendermint Core, the Cosmos SDK, and the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol. These technologies play important roles in blockchain consensus, decentralized application development, and enabling communication across separate networks.
An earlier project, FtNox, which was the first open-source exchange product focused on transparency and provable reserves, also demonstrates his interest in making financial information more independently auditable. A common principle runs through these initiatives: digital infrastructure can provide greater accountability when its underlying rules and relevant records are accessible for examination beyond the organization responsible for operating it.
The same approach extends to the development and distribution of software through open-source practices. Kwon’s philosophy reflects the collaborative model established by projects such as Linux, where making source code publicly available allows developers to review, modify, and contribute to shared technological infrastructure. Software licensing plays an important role in determining how these contributions are maintained and distributed. The GNO Network General Public License is one example of an effort to preserve attribution and ongoing openness within the emerging decentralized technology landscape. These types of licensing arrangements can help communities maintain access to shared resources while setting clear expectations for acknowledging the origins of derivative work.
Cryptographic methods provide an additional means of making transparency measurable and verifiable. One example is Merkle proofs, which rely on cryptographic hashes to associate individual data records with a larger structured dataset. Using a relatively compact proof, a verifier can confirm whether a particular record forms part of an authenticated collection without needing access to or reproduction of the entire dataset.
“Depending on the implementation, these techniques can support checks for unauthorized changes and help reveal whether particular records are included in an authenticated collection,” Kwon states. “They don’t independently establish that every original statement is accurate or that every omission constitutes censorship.” He explains that their importance comes from making certain verification processes possible through mathematical evidence, rather than requiring users to depend entirely on the assurances of a central intermediary.
NewTendermint’s work on Gno.land provides a practical environment for putting these principles into action. The open-source smart contract platform is built around Gno, an interpreted variation of the Go programming language developed to support deterministic execution and composable contracts. By prioritizing code that can be openly inspected, the platform gives developers the opportunity to better understand application behavior, build on existing developments, and create services using shared infrastructure.
The wider objective is to lower the barriers to decentralized application development while encouraging the creation of systems in which participants can examine the rules governing their operation. For Kwon, this represents part of a broader effort to give communities greater opportunities to participate in and exercise control over their digital environments.
Kwon has also investigated the use of AI-assisted engineering and internal security auditing, including initiatives associated with Klash.Pro. He points out that as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into software engineering, additional verification and review procedures can play an important role in helping developers assess AI-generated code and improve security practices.
Looking toward the next decade, Kwon’s idea of “total inversion of control” provides a framework for rethinking how individuals interact with the digital infrastructure they depend on. Under this approach, users and communities would have greater autonomy to choose the algorithms, models, and information services that align with their individual requirements and preferences.
At a broader level, this vision involves recognizing accountability as something that can be incorporated into the engineering of digital systems from their earliest stages. Open-source development, cryptographic verification, and decentralized coordination all offer different ways of advancing this objective, as long as their capabilities and limitations remain accessible to scrutiny.
Through Gno.land and its related initiatives, Kwon continues to develop infrastructure intended to empower developers and users to participate in building and shaping the systems they rely on. For developers, researchers, and everyday users, exploring these technologies presents an opportunity to address some of the world’s most significant challenges through new approaches to human coordination at scale. More information about Kwon’s work is available through his X profile here.
