Why Community Building Requires Verifiable Participation

Legacy designs like Uniswap's and Arbitrum's initial drops rewarded simple, automatable on-chain actions, creating a $100M+ industry for Sybil farmers. This dilutes rewards for real users and attracts mercenary capital.

• Key Failure: Rewards wallet quantity over user quality.
• Result: >80% of tokens often sold immediately, crashing price and community morale.

A single snapshot creates a perverse incentive to exit. Projects like Optimism shifted to ongoing "RetroPGF" rounds to fund public goods, proving sustained contribution is more valuable than a one-time check.

• Key Failure: Incentivizes exit liquidity, not long-term alignment.
• Solution: Continuous reward streams (e.g., EigenLayer restaking, Gitcoin rounds) for verifiable, ongoing work.

Vital community work—Discord moderation, content creation, governance discussion—happens off-chain. Legacy designs ignore it, creating a participation gap. Layer3 social platforms and Attestation protocols (e.g., EAS) now enable on-chain proof of contribution.

• Key Failure: On-chain snapshot misses off-chain value.
• Emerging Fix: Verifiable credentials and proof-of-personhood (Worldcoin, BrightID) to attest to real work.

The Problem: Retroactive public goods funding (like Optimism's RPGF) is vulnerable to sybil attacks and subjective claims. The Solution: A base-layer primitive for making off-chain data (e.g., contributor reputation, project milestones) cryptographically attestable on-chain. It creates a universal, portable reputation graph.

• Enables sybil-resistant delegation for voting power.
• Serves as a foundational data layer for Gitcoin Passport and other identity stacks.

The Problem: Trust in web3 is fragmented across isolated platforms with no standard for verifiable statements. The Solution: A public good infrastructure for making any type of attestation on-chain or off-chain. It's the schema standard for verifiable participation, used by projects like Coinbase's Base for builder reputation.

• Permissionless schemas allow any community to define its own merit criteria.
• On-chain proof creates immutable, portable records of contribution and skill.

The Problem: "Community engagement" is a hollow metric measured by likes and follows, not actual protocol usage. The Solution: Framing on-chain transactions as verifiable labor. Their XP system translates specific, measurable actions (e.g., swapping, providing liquidity) into a cryptographically signed reputation score.

• Action-based attestations prove a user's specific skills and history.
• Protocols like Uniswap and Aave use this to identify and reward genuine power users, not airdrop farmers.

The Problem: Anonymous blockchain addresses destroy the concept of unique human identity, making one-person-one-vote impossible. The Solution: Zero-Knowledge proofs of unique humanity (e.g., zk-SEMAPLE, Worldcoin alternative). Allows users to prove they are a unique human without revealing who they are.

• Privacy-preserving sybil resistance for governance and funding rounds.
• Enables quadratic voting and fair launches by cryptographically capping influence.

The Problem: Sybil attackers easily farm airdrops and grants, draining resources from legitimate builders. The Solution: An aggregator of verifiable credentials (like EAS attestations, BrightID) into a single sybil-resistance score. The new Staking Registry allows communities to define custom, stake-weighted scoring.

• Composability: Scores are portable across Gitcoin Grants, Optimism RPGF, and partner apps.
• Economic stake replaces easily-farmed social signals with costly-to-fake financial skin-in-the-game.

The Problem: Compensating contributors in DAOs is a political nightmare with no objective record of work. The Solution: Peer-to-peer recognition circles that generate on-chain attestations for contribution value. Creates a persistent, verifiable graph of who did what and who valued it.

• Turns subjective praise into objective data for payroll and reputation.
• Attestation output integrates directly with EAS and salary streaming protocols like Superfluid.