The Origin of VAIRIFY

The Beginning

In the spring of 2020, with much of the world shut down, a story about a young woman in Chicago named Elizabeth Long came through my Facebook feed.

Elizabeth was a 22-year-old sex worker. She had been killed in a hotel room. The man accused of killing her allegedly took her phone and used it to set up and rob several more clients.

The comments were cold and dismissive. Some people were even making jokes. But I could not stop thinking about one thing.

How could anyone feel comfortable using their victim’s phone after a murder to commit more crimes in the same community?

So I started looking for answers.

I found numerous scams, threats, and tragedies. They were all different, but they kept pointing to the same thing: no real accountability.

On the surface, it would be easy to blame anonymity—to say the community was vulnerable because people had to hide who they were. But anonymity wasn’t the problem. It was something many people had good reason to protect.

The stakes were high. We live in a world where exposure can carry serious consequences. Even a misdemeanor arrest could cast a shadow over someone’s life for years, or change it completely.

Anonymity is necessary to protect individuals in the community from that exposure. But the lack of accountability could carry an even higher price. Elizabeth Long’s tragic story was a reminder of just how high.

I’ve always believed that to find an effective solution, you first have to understand the problem.

By then, the problem was crystal clear: we needed technology that would allow a person to remain anonymous while still being accountable.

Finding the Answer

I called Jake, a friend with a background in technology, and asked him to help me solve it.

We researched everything—blockchain, encryption, and technologies far beyond anything commonly available at the time. None of them could provide accountability and guarantee 100 percent anonymity.

Then I opened an account with Binance.

I filled out my information and was sent to a KYC provider, where I submitted my driver’s license and took a live photo. The entire process took about four minutes.

In 2020, KYC was used mostly by financial institutions and governments to validate important transactions and onboard new customers. Today, it is commonplace and considered one of the most secure identity-verification processes available.

I thought: if we used a KYC provider, there would be no reason for a member to submit any personal information to us at all.

We were not processing financial transactions. We simply needed to ensure the person was real.

That would give us the accountability we needed, and from there we could verify the person behind the credential with a facial scan. We would never need to receive any personal information directly from the individual.

Later that night, I picked up my phone, and it recognized me instantly.

It clicked.

If we combined the two facial-recognition technologies, we could use the same secure process banks trust to prove a person is real, then use the technology millions of us use every day to unlock our phones to confirm that person again in seconds by comparing a new live image with the verified photo produced during the verification process.

I called Jake.

He suggested creating a unique seven-character alphanumeric identifier and cryptographically attaching it to the photo. We could attach a history—transactions, contracts, or any other record—to that number, then verify the person behind it with a facial scan without ever receiving their personal information.

That combination—the verified photograph and the seven-character alphanumeric number—would become a Verified Anonymous Identity: a V.A.I.

The Research

I did more research into what was already available.

There were a few companies offering background checks and one company that specialized in verification for the sex work community, so I joined and went through the process.

Membership was $190 for the year. I submitted all of my personal information and waited about 24 hours.

When the process was complete, I received a number. Four of the digits in that number came directly from my Social Security number.

The number I received was simply my ticket into the community—a way to connect with others who had gone through the same verification process.

I wanted to understand how verification was actually being used, so over the next 18 months I interviewed 23 providers, 7 clients, and 4 law-enforcement officers.

It was COVID. The world was shut down, and suddenly I had the time to listen.

During the interviews, only four providers and one client belonged to that verified community. One of the providers I interviewed was kind enough to share my information with one of her clients, who then contacted me.

Across those interviews, the same verification method was shared by only four people.

Every method took time, every method had gaps, and the process had to be repeated with each new encounter.

Verification was a problem, but it was only the tip of the iceberg.

The list of problems and complaints kept growing until a clear pattern emerged.

They fell into two categories: safety and convenience.

Everyone had a story. A close call. A friend who had not been as lucky. Or a complaint. A request that went unanswered for hours. A calendar that needed a workaround.

By the end of those interviews, I was looking at a community whose problems had largely gone unaddressed.

The Framework

Two things happened during those 18 months that began pointing in the same direction.

The first was a conversation with a lifelong friend who worked in law enforcement. He told me that, for the most part, law enforcement was not focused on sex work itself. It was focused on the crime surrounding it.

The second happened while visiting my 80-year-old mother in Las Vegas. She was excited to take me to Planet 13, a marijuana dispensary.

The feeling was surreal.

I found myself standing with my 80-year-old mother in one of the largest marijuana dispensaries in the world. My mother has never touched marijuana. Just five years earlier, the thought of marijuana would have horrified her.

Yet there she was, smiling, intrigued by the energy.

And when I looked around, I saw ordinary people—doctors, schoolteachers, secretaries. People who, only a few years earlier, might never have openly associated themselves with marijuana.

The marijuana had not changed.

The framework around it had.

That framework had changed who felt comfortable participating, how the activity was perceived, and where the criminal element could operate.

That was the revelation.

For the first time, it became clear that while advanced verification by itself would definitely solve some of the problems that had plagued the sex work community for decades, it would not solve the larger problem.

The community needed a complete framework.

V.A.I. could provide the foundation: verified identity, age, continuity, and accountability while preserving anonymity.

VAIRIFY could build the framework around it.

It would not end scams, underage participation, violence, or the other criminal activity surrounding sex work.

Those things would still exist, but they would exist outside VAIRIFY.

During the research, I experienced one of those scams myself.

I found a touring provider visiting my area with five-star reviews going back several months on a local directory and arranged a meeting for an interview.

When I arrived at the location provided, I was asked for a deposit before I would be given the unit number. I knew what it was and left.

The next day, I received a call demanding $1,000.

They had my home address, my wife’s name, and my children’s names, and they threatened to expose me if I did not pay.

I knew what it was. I had read about this exact scam on Reddit while researching.

But I kept thinking about a person who did not know—a person who believed the threat could ruin their life.

The scam made the solution the VAIRIFY Framework would provide easy to understand.

It worked because the scammers had my real phone number. From that, they found my address and my family and turned that information into a threat.

Inside VAIRIFY, they would have had only my V.A.I. number—an anonymous identifier with nothing they could use to identify or threaten me.

And before they could ever reach me, they would have had to verify themselves.

Underage participation was just as straightforward.

Age would be established before a V.A.I. was issued. A minor could not enter the VAIRIFY Framework as a verified adult.

No framework can eliminate every crime or every act of violence.

But the VAIRIFY Framework would change the equation for premeditated bad actors: to operate inside it, they would be required to identify themselves, become accountable, and permanently attach their activity to their V.A.I. number, while the member they approach remains anonymous.

And because the KYC process confirming each user is real is tied to a government-issued ID and biometric verification, a bad actor could not simply discard one V.A.I. number and obtain another.

Each V.A.I. number would be persistent.

One verified identity, one continuing history.

For most premeditated crime, that destroys the advantage before the crime ever begins.

The Decision to Build

What was needed was more than a verification system.

I decided to build a framework around the community that would address every problem and complaint on our list.

Verification and protection would be at its core, with the tools people needed to connect, socialize, and work built around V.A.I.’s zero-knowledge architecture.

I am not a coder, and the development tools available today did not exist yet.

The estimate came back in the mid-six figures, so we brought in a third partner to help carry the financial load.

Six months later, the application was nearing completion and we had begun preparing for launch.

The Split

Specialized legal counsel raised a problem we had not anticipated.

If we wanted to eliminate any risk of being compelled to expose a member’s identity, the identity technology and the community platform could not remain under the same structure.

The lawyers recommended separating the identity technology from VAIRIFY.

Jake and I agreed.

The split was natural.

Jake already had ChainPass, a think tank specializing in blockchain technology, and he had been focusing on the broader applications and possibilities for V.A.I.—how the same credential could work across multiple platforms and communities, far beyond VAIRIFY.

I remained focused on VAIRIFY, the sex work community, and the framework I had set out to build.

I could see the benefit Jake’s vision could have for VAIRIFY, so I licensed the V.A.I. technology to ChainPass under an agreement designed to endure.

ChainPass could take V.A.I. to other platforms and expand its use, while VAIRIFY and its community retained a meaningful voice in decisions affecting the technology.

That broader use also strengthened the anonymity model.

Possessing a V.A.I. number would not, by itself, identify a member as part of VAIRIFY.

The more platforms that used V.A.I. technology, the more value the credential could bring to its users.

Free Safety

There was one issue that had been building tension between our financial partner and me.

We both understood the value of what we were building.

VAIRIFY would be the only product to offer real protection. People who wanted that level of protection would pay for it, and there was no question that many would.

I believed anyone with a valid ChainPass V.A.I. should not be charged for the protection VAIRIFY would provide.

I knew that once we charged for that protection, we would exclude anyone who could not afford it and limit its effectiveness.

My goal was to protect the entire community, not just those who could afford it.

I thought about the verification service I joined during my research.

It was useful to only four of the 30 people I interviewed.

To everyone else, it was just an expensive number.

In the end, neither of us would move.

It was a hard decision, but I returned his investment.

Ultimately, I felt taking the financial hit was better than compromising something that had become fundamental to what I was building.

I had no idea that within days, money would become the least important thing on my mind.

Everything Stopped

Four days later, during what was supposed to be a routine doctor’s visit, my wife was diagnosed with ALS, a terminal neuromuscular disease with no known cure.

Everything changed.

VAIRIFY was close to completion. The application was working. We were in the final stages of testing. Outreach had begun.

We were preparing to introduce something we had spent years researching and building.

And then none of it seemed important.

I stopped.

Not because the project had failed.

Quite the opposite.

We were close.

I stopped because sometimes life makes the decision for you.

The evidence is still there.

The VAIRIFY Official Reddit account is still online, with a cake day from over two years ago and only one post.

The original VAIRIFY launch video is still on YouTube.

Watching it now is like opening a time capsule.

V.A.I., DateGuard, VairiPay, Vairidate, the original framework—the foundation was all there, ready to launch.

Then everything stopped.

For more than two years, I left it untouched.

The problems on the list remain unchanged.

It’s time to finish what began all that time ago with a tragedy.

V.A.I.—that’s the framework.

Background checks. Accurate history. Legal protection. Anonymity. That’s Advanced Protection.

Three seconds—that’s the time it takes to protect every encounter.

Safety is free—that’s the stipulation.

Convenience had to be worth it—that’s the next blog.