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Public trust in digital information remains an important challenge as search engines, social platforms, and artificial intelligence increasingly influence how people discover and interpret content. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's Digital News Report, as highlighted by DPIR, trust in news fell across 29 of the 48 markets surveyed, bringing the global average to 37%.

Its 2026 Generative AI and News Report also found that 57% of respondents across nine countries had encountered AI-generated answers or summaries through search engines during the previous week. These findings point to a changing information environment in which convenience and accessibility increasingly intersect with questions of reliability, transparency, and accountability.

For Jae Kwon, technology entrepreneur, blockchain software architect, and founder of NewTendermint, these questions connect to a longstanding interest in building digital infrastructure that people can independently examine. His work encompasses open-source software, decentralized applications, and infrastructure intended to support transparent human coordination at scale.

Kwon's perspective suggests that information accountability depends partly on the technical systems through which information is collected, organized, and distributed. "Most centralized platforms operate through closed-source code and hidden internal ranking mechanisms, leaving users susceptible to algorithmic manipulation through the ranking of feeds," he says. "The only way to overcome this situation is to adopt decentralized blockchain-based technology, which is still immature. 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."

The challenge becomes particularly relevant as AI-generated summaries influence how people encounter information. Automated systems can consolidate material from numerous sources into concise responses, potentially saving time while making the selection and interpretation of source material less immediately apparent.

In Kwon's view, three considerations help explain why independently verifiable decentralized systems deserve attention: organizations have limited incentives to disclose commercially sensitive mechanisms, consumers have historically placed greater emphasis on convenient services than cryptographic accountability, and conventional centralized architectures may offer limited opportunities for independent verification. "These factors suggest an opportunity to develop infrastructure that allows accountability and transparency to become part of the system's design," he states.

Kwon's work provides a technical foundation for exploring that possibility. His contributions to the Tendermint consensus algorithm and the Cosmos ecosystem include infrastructure associated with Tendermint Core, the Cosmos SDK, and the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol. These technologies support blockchain consensus, application development, and communication between networks.

His earlier experiment with FtNox, the first open-source exchange product focused on transparency and provable reserves, also reflects his mission in making financial records more independently verifiable. Across these projects, a recurring theme emerges: digital systems may offer stronger accountability when their operating rules and relevant records can be examined beyond a single organization maintaining them.

Open-source development extends this principle into how software is created and shared. Kwon's philosophy draws on the collaborative traditions associated with projects such as Linux, where publicly accessible code enables developers to inspect, adapt, and contribute to shared infrastructure. Licensing can also influence how these contributions circulate. The GNO Network General Public License represents an effort to enforce attribution and continued openness in the new-age decentralized environment. Such arrangements may help communities preserve access to shared technical resources while establishing expectations for how derivative work acknowledges its origins.

Cryptography offers another way to translate transparency into a technical capability. Merkle proofs, for example, use cryptographic hashes to connect individual pieces of data to a larger data structure. A compact proof can help a verifier establish that a particular record belongs to a committed dataset without requiring the entire dataset to be reproduced.

"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 notes that their value lies in enabling efficient forms of verification through mathematical evidence, reducing reliance on assurances from a single intermediary.

NewTendermint's development of Gno.land offers a practical setting for these ideas. The open-source smart contract platform uses Gno, an interpreted variation of the Go programming language designed for deterministic execution and composable contracts. Its emphasis on inspectable code may give developers opportunities to understand how applications operate, reuse existing work, and build services around shared infrastructure.

The broader ambition is to make decentralized application development more accessible while supporting systems whose rules can be examined by their participants. For Kwon, this work reflects a wider interest in making technological participation available to communities that want greater control over their digital activities.

Alongside these projects, Kwon has explored AI-assisted engineering and internal security auditing, including work associated with Klash.Pro. He emphasizes that as AI tools become more integrated into engineering workflows, complementary verification and review processes may help developers evaluate generated code and strengthen their security practices.

Over the coming decade, Kwon's concept of "total inversion of control" offers a useful way to consider the relationship between users and digital infrastructure. In a system built around this principle, individuals and communities could have greater freedom to select algorithms, models, and information services according to their needs and preferences.

The broader opportunity lies in treating accountability as an engineering consideration that can be built into digital systems from the outset. Open-source software, cryptographic verification, and decentralized coordination each contribute to that effort, provided their capabilities and limitations remain open to examination.

Through Gno.land and related initiatives, Kwon is pursuing infrastructure intended to give builders and users the ability to co-create the systems they use. For developers, researchers, and users, engaging with these technologies offers an opportunity to tackle the world's biggest challenges by new means of human coordination at scale. Kwon's work can be followed through his X profile.