Recognizing strong Intuition use cases

Not every product needs Intuition. Shared protocols add coordination power, but they also introduce wallets, public state, economic mechanics, indexing boundaries, and new interpretation risks. A strong use case gains enough from the shared graph to justify those costs.

The four-part fit test

1. Shared identity

Do independent participants or applications need to refer to the same people, projects, concepts, or artifacts? If every record matters only inside one private workflow, a conventional database may be simpler.

2. Portable claims

Would statements become more useful if they could travel with their attribution across products? Credentials, recommendations, classifications, moderation decisions, and dependency relationships often benefit from portability.

3. Plural signal

Does the product benefit from visible support and opposition by multiple parties? Intuition is strongest when disagreement and source context matter. If one trusted authority simply publishes a fixed registry, economic positions may add little.

4. Composition

Can future applications reuse and extend the knowledge? A graph earns leverage when one contributor's identifier or claim becomes a building block for others.

Promising families of use cases

• Reputation and credentials: contextual, attributable evidence of skills or experience.
• Curation and discovery: shared directories where communities coordinate around useful resources.
• Question and answer systems: structured claims, competing answers, and source-aware confidence.
• Identity and social context: portable relationships rather than one platform's follower graph.
• Agent knowledge: attributable context that software agents can query and evaluate.

These are families, not guarantees. A reputation product that collapses all context into one score can still be harmful. An agent that treats high signal as fact can still produce unreliable decisions.

Weak fits and anti-patterns

Use caution when the data is private, highly sensitive, short-lived, controlled by one authority, or valuable only to one application. Payroll records, draft documents, ephemeral UI state, and internal analytics usually do not become better merely by being public and economically signalable.

Another anti-pattern is “protocol decoration”: storing a token reference onchain while all meaningful identity, semantics, and provenance remain in a closed database. The integration exists, but the shared knowledge layer provides little value.

What is the clearest sign that a normal database may be enough?Reveal answer

The information has one legitimate owner, serves one application, needs no portable provenance or plural positions, and gains little from reuse by independent parties.

Official references

• Intuition use cases
• Why Intuition