Intuition Spotlights: Sofia

The Intuition Grants Program supports builders exploring new ways to create, curate, and leverage knowledge on top of the Intuition Protocol.

Meet Samuel Chauche

Samuel is a full-stack Web3 developer and core contributor at Sofia.

After spending roughly six years in technical support, he transitioned into software development through The Hacking Project bootcamp. A final-year project introduced him to Intuition and ultimately set the direction for everything that followed.

Samuel builds under the identity Passive Records, inspired by the ActiveRecord pattern that shaped how he thinks about software and data structures. His work focuses on turning everyday actions into verifiable, on-chain knowledge — a philosophy that sits at the heart of Sofia.

Based in the south of France, Samuel spends his time hiking, shooting film photography, and experimenting with modular synthesis. That balance between analog patience and digital experimentation heavily influences how he approaches product design and engineering.

Meet Maxime Saint-Joannis

Maxime is a full-stack Web3 developer and core contributor at Sofia.

Before entering software development through The Hacking Project, he worked in music production and the live events industry. That background continues to shape his approach to building products: iterate quickly, trust feedback, and ship continuously.

Operating under the handle Wieedze, Maxime has spent the past year building across the Intuition, Gnosis, and Base ecosystems. His contributions span Sofia's browser extension, smart-wallet onboarding systems, the Intuition Fee Proxy contracts, and ARP, an on-chain reputation protocol for AI agents.

Outside of development, he designs synthesizer presets, produces sound for psytrance artists, and built TrackHunter, a discovery platform for DJs.

Platforms reward activity. They can't surface judgment.

— Sofia Team

Sofia

Sofia is a reputation layer for the web.

Every time a user saves and certifies a page, Sofia records that action, the moment it happened, and the user's willingness to stand behind that judgment by staking $TRUST on it. Through Intuition, those signals become verifiable, economically backed, and persistent.

Individually, Sofia builds a track record of what someone found valuable and was willing to vouch for.

Collectively, it turns thousands of individual judgments into a shared layer of intelligence and into trust circles, where users follow not who is loudest, but whose judgment they actually rely on.

The result is something larger than a save-it-for-later tool: a system that helps communities understand what they value, who consistently surfaces high-signal information, and how collective knowledge evolves over time.

The Problem

Most online platforms optimize for activity.

Likes, shares, views, impressions, and engagement metrics dominate how information is surfaced and distributed.

Yet activity does not necessarily reflect judgment. And in web3, it doesn't even reliably reflect a real human — bots and Sybil accounts manufacture attention at scale.

Communities often struggle to identify:

Which contributors consistently discover valuable information
What content continues to prove useful over time
Where meaningful signal is emerging
Who is actually contributing knowledge rather than attention
Who is a real, credible person rather than a sophisticated bot

For DAOs, research groups, and online communities, this creates a visibility problem. Valuable curation and genuine expertise disappear into timelines, chat rooms, and private bookmarks.

The Solution

Sofia turns curation itself into a durable signal.

Every saved resource becomes part of a larger graph of attention and judgment.

Rather than measuring who is the loudest, Sofia makes it possible to understand:

What a community values
Who consistently discovers useful information
How knowledge compounds over time
Which signals remain valuable long after they were first shared

This creates a new primitive for collective intelligence: a verifiable record of what people chose to pay attention to.

Building with Intuition

For the Sofia team, Intuition provided a primitive they had been searching for without realizing it.

The protocol's ability to express trust, relationships, and knowledge as structured on-chain data — atoms and triples — aligned naturally with their vision. Reputation in Sofia reflects real, staked on-chain activity, not a follower count.

Rather than building another bookmarking application, Sofia could become a knowledge layer powered by attestations, relationships, and community-driven signals.

The result is a product that treats human judgment as something worth preserving, staking on, and making queryable.

Lessons Learned

One of the biggest lessons from building Sofia was realizing that product development extends far beyond writing code.

The team made a deliberate choice to go deep on the product before opening to a market. That depth came at a cost: community, distribution, and marketing were under-invested, and visible activity slowed while the team rebuilt.

As the team discovered, shipping software is only a fraction of the challenge. Onboarding, fundraising, community building, and customer discovery determine whether a product actually reaches anyone.

Another key lesson was the importance of feedback. Product-market fit cannot be designed in isolation. Real users ultimately define what a product becomes, and that feedback is what pointed toward the next direction.

The team learned adapting quickly often matters more than any initial roadmap.

What's Next?

The Sofia team is focused on turning individual acts of curation into collective intelligence for organizations, starting with DAOs.

Circle Pro brings Sofia's trust circles to communities: a DAO sponsors its members' activity, while gaining the analytics and filtering to see who holds real expertise, who contributes, and who should be trusted with governance.

Near-term work includes onboarding the first partner DAOs, refining onboarding, rebuilding community engagement, and validating how communities will surface this.

As Intuition's Knowledge Graph grows, Sofia aims to become one of the primary ways communities discover, preserve, and coordinate around high-signal information.