The Cost of Ignoring Context in Reputation Portability

Reputation is not fungible. A user's credit score in a DeFi lending pool is irrelevant to their governance participation in MakerDAO. Each protocol's risk models and incentive structures create unique, non-transferable trust graphs.

The portability promise is a trap. Projects like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Gitcoin Passport attempt to standardize credentials, but they merely transport data, not context. A Sybil-resistant score for airdrops fails to predict on-chain trading behavior.

Evidence: The failure of Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) as universal reputation illustrates this. They became static records, not dynamic risk signals, because the consensus mechanism for interpreting them never existed across different applications like Aave and Uniswap.

Reputation is not fungible. A user's standing in a DeFi lending pool like Aave is a function of their specific collateral and borrowing history within that market. Exporting this as a generic 'credit score' to a gaming DAO like Yield Guild Games is meaningless and creates false equivalence.

Context stripping invites Sybil attacks. A global reputation layer like Gitcoin Passport aggregates attestations but flattens them into a composite score. This creates a single, high-value target for manipulation, unlike the distributed cost of attacking reputation within each isolated protocol like Uniswap or Compound.

The local maximum is efficiency, not truth. Protocols optimize for their own risk models, not universal truth. A user banned from a DEX for MEV extraction might be a prized user for an intent-based relayer like UniswapX. Portable reputation forces a consensus where none is needed.

Evidence: The failure of 'social graph' portability. Projects like Lens Protocol and Farcaster demonstrate that social connections and follower counts are not valuable when divorced from the specific community and content that created them. A follower on Lens is not a voter in a DAO.

Reputation portability fails without context. Protocols like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Gitcoin Passport treat on-chain actions as universal signals, ignoring the specific market conditions, counterparty risk, or protocol logic that defined the original interaction.

Context abstraction creates systemic risk. A lending reputation from Aave on Arbitrum is not fungible with a trading reputation from Uniswap on Base. Aggregating these into a single score, as attempted by Karma3 Labs' OpenRank, produces a meaningless average that misprices risk for protocols like Marginfi or EigenLayer.

The market is optimizing for volume, not fidelity. Bridge protocols like LayerZero and Axelar prioritize cheap, fast message passing for DeFi, not the nuanced state attestation required for reputation. This creates a data availability-completeness tradeoff where portable reputation is cheap but worthless.

Evidence: The total value secured by restaking protocols like EigenLayer exceeds $15B, yet their delegated security model relies on staker reputation scores derived from activity across incompatible execution environments with no shared context.

Reputation portability without context is a vulnerability. A user's trust score from a lending protocol like Aave or Compound is meaningless for a prediction market like Polymarket. Importing this score creates a Sybil-by-proxy attack, where a user's good standing in one domain is weaponized to exploit another.

Cross-domain trust is not transitive. A high EigenLayer restaking score signals validator reliability, not trading integrity. Airdrop farmers on LayerZero or zkSync build reputation for wallet activity, not for creditworthiness. Treating these signals as equivalent erodes the specificity of trust that makes reputation valuable.

The cost is systemic risk. A single compromised or gamed reputation primitive, like a Gitcoin Passport attestation, propagates false trust across every integrated dApp. This creates a single point of failure for decentralized identity, making the entire ecosystem more fragile, not more secure.

Weighting is not context transfer. A protocol like EigenLayer can assign a 0.7 weight to a staker's Ethereum reputation when porting to an AVS, but the underlying semantic meaning of that stake remains anchored to Ethereum's consensus security. The weight is a policy choice, not a derived property of the original context.

This creates systemic fragility. If a reputation's native context collapses (e.g., a DeFi protocol's TVL evaporates), any weighted import of that reputation is a garbage-in, garbage-out scenario. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that correlating uncorrelated risks via models like Gaussian copula leads to catastrophic failure when tail events occur.

Evidence: The Oracle Problem is the canonical example. A node's high reputation for delivering accurate ETH/USD prices on Chainlink has zero bearing on its reliability for delivering esoteric real-world asset data. Weighting the first score to inform the second introduces unquantifiable risk, as seen in oracle manipulation attacks on protocols like Synthetix and Mango Markets.

Reputation is not fungible. A perfect lending score on Aave V3 on Ethereum means nothing for a governance proposal on Uniswap DAO on Arbitrum. Porting raw scores across chains creates false trust signals that sophisticated actors exploit.

Context-aware frameworks are mandatory. Systems must embed the source chain, protocol, and interaction type into the reputation attestation. The Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax provide the primitive for this, but the schema design is the critical battle.

The alternative is systemic risk. A Sybil attacker farming a trivial reputation on a low-security chain could bridge that score to drain a high-value lending pool elsewhere. This is a direct attack vector that LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Tokens (OFT) standard, by design, does not solve.

Evidence: The EigenLayer restaking ecosystem already grapples with this, where an operator's performance in one AVS provides zero context for their reliability in another. The solution is explicit, verifiable context, not portable points.