Keybase moves to stop onslaught of spammers on encrypted message platform

Enlarge / All scammers, all the time: my Keybase message inbox.

Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn’s “hobby project”—a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $ 10.8 million in funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from messaging to file sharing to throwing a few crypto-coins someone’s way.

But because of that level of accessibility, Keybase faces a very OkCupid kind of problem: after drawing in people interested in easy public-key crypto-based communications and then drawing in blockchain lovers with its partnership with (and funding from) Stellar.org, Keybase has also drawn in spammers and scammers. And that has brought a host of alerts and messages that have made what was once a fairly clear communications channel into one clogged with unwanted alerts, messages, and other unpleasantry—raising a chorus of complaints in Keybase’s open chat channel.

It turns out there’s a reason spell check keeps wanting to tell me that Keybase should be spelled “debase.”