Nostr WoT Earns a 57 Proof of Usefulness Score by Building a Portable Web of Trust Layer for the Browser

In this interview, we look at a tool designed to decentralize spam protection and reputation management. We are speaking with Leon Acosta, the creator of Nostr WoT, a browser extension that puts the Web of Trust layer directly inside the user's browser.

What does Nostr WoT do? And why is now the time for it to exist?

nostr-wot is a browser extension that puts the Web of Trust layer inside the browser.

Any Nostr app become wot-enabled at download time, and can query the extension with two lines of code. The trust calculation runs on the user's own social graph, with parameters they control, and travels with them across every client they use.

Now’s a good time for Nostr WoT to exist because as decentralized social networks grow, users need portable, self-sovereign tools to manage trust and filter content without relying on the moderation policies of specific client developers.

What is your traction to date? How many people does Nostr WoT reach?

It's a new project. However, we already published in Chrome store and Firefox addons.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/nostr-wot-extension/gfmefgdkmjpjinecjchlangpamhclhdo

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nostr-wot-extension/

Who does your project serve? What’s exciting about your users and customers?

Every Nostr site becomes WoT-enabled the moment a user installs the extension—no client needs to do anything.

It reduces development time for client builders; there’s no need to implement WoT from scratch. With just two lines of code, it works.

Users don’t have to depend on clients to implement trust. One install works everywhere—no more accepting whatever the app decides for you.

What technologies were used in the making of Nostr WoT? And why did you choose the ones most essential to your tech stack?

The core technology driving this project is the Nostr protocol, which facilitates the decentralized exchange of social data. By building this as a cross-browser extension, we chose a stack that allows the software to act as a local oracle; this ensures that complex trust calculations happen on the client side, maintaining user privacy and portability across different web-based Nostr clients.

What excites you about this project's potential usefulness?

What excites me most is that this tackles a long-standing problem—handling transient failures—but does so in a way that feels genuinely underexplored in the Swift ecosystem. While retry logic itself isn’t new, there’s been a gap in how cleanly and natively it integrates with modern async/await workflows. That leaves a lot of room for innovation.