Why we started Secure Salt

By John Waller, Co-Founder & CEO
May 2026

The internet was built on a beautiful premise: that information should flow freely. Open protocols, no gatekeepers, no friction. For many years, it worked. Until it didn't. Back when these protocols were developed, an actual human was behind virtually every message sent. The people who designed these protocols never had to imagine a world where machines would send messages on their own. Nor was there a need to build a mechanism to verify who was sending them.

Today automation, and increasingly AI, has removed any human friction. That same openness that made digital communication transformative also made it exploitable. When sending a message costs nothing (in time or money), the economics favor whoever is willing to send the most, regardless of whether anyone wants to receive it. When sending a message is easily spoofed or anonymous, everyone suffers at the hands of a relatively few bad actors.

Spam, phishing, bot networks, impersonation, AI-generated noise… These aren't bugs. They are the logical outcome of a system where sending is free and accountability is optional.

This isn't just an email problem. It's a problem with how we communicate, create, and connect online. Every inbox, every social feed, every messaging platform, every comment section; they all suffer from the same structural flaw. The cost of reaching someone is zero, and the proof that you're a real person acting in good faith is absent. As an industry, we have spent decades building increasingly sophisticated filters to sort through the wreckage, but we've never addressed why the wreckage exists in the first place. At least not at scale.

Chris Econn and I founded Secure Salt with a team of experts in cybersecurity, cryptography, and defense because we believe we can fix this—not by building a better filter, but by changing the underlying incentives of digital interaction itself.

The idea is disarmingly simple: attach a tiny proof of intent to every digital action. A fraction of a cent and a verified identity. That's it. For any individual, the cost is negligible, a tenth of a penny or less. But for someone trying to send a million messages, obfuscate their identity, or flood a platform with synthetic content, the math changes completely. Abuse becomes uneconomic. Trust becomes the default. Because behind every automated message, every bot, every AI-generated campaign, there is still a person. We make that person accountable.

I'm scratching my own itch here. Like most people, I've watched my inbox become less useful every year. I've had friends and colleagues hacked and scammed. I've watched social platforms drown in bots. I've watched AI bury signal under an avalanche of noise. All the while I've searched for a solution that actually addresses the root cause, not just the symptoms. I couldn't find one. So now, we're building it.

This is not a small problem, and it's getting worse fast. AI is accelerating the volume and sophistication of digital abuse at a pace that reactive defenses simply cannot match. This solution should exist. It's necessary. And it's good for the world.

We're starting with email because that's where the pain is sharpest and the path to adoption is clearest. But the vision is much larger. Any system where people communicate, create, or transact digitally will benefit from lightweight proof of intent. Social platforms. Messaging. Content creation. AI interactions. The same primitive, a tiny cost and a real identity, will restore trust across all of them.

I believe Secure Salt can and will become a culturally significant company – one that changes how people relate to digital communication the way HTTPS changed how people relate to web security. Not through force or disruption, but by making the right thing easy and the wrong thing expensive. It is a subtle shift in incentives with enormous consequences.

We're early. We're deliberate. And we're building something that the internet has needed for a very long time. If that resonates with you, I'd love to have you join us.

— John

P.S. Why "Secure Salt"? In ancient Rome, soldiers were paid in salt. In fact, it's where the word "salary" comes from. A single grain was nearly worthless. But enough grains moved empires. We liked the parallel.