Why Reputation Should Be Portable, Not Permanent (On-Chain)

Protocols like Aave and Compound maintain isolated credit scores, forcing users to rebuild trust from zero. This fragmentation leads to inefficient capital allocation and exposes the system to isolated failures.

• $10B+ TVL is secured by non-portable reputation models.
• Users face 100% loss of social capital when migrating chains or protocols.
• Creates attack vectors where bad debt in one silo cannot be mitigated by good standing elsewhere.

Frameworks like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax enable reputation to be issued as portable, verifiable statements. These attestations are context-specific and cryptographically signed, allowing protocols to query a user's relevant history without inheriting irrelevant baggage.

• Enables cross-protocol underwriting (e.g., using Uniswap LP history for a MakerDAO loan).
• Revocable & time-bound attestations prevent permanent blacklisting.
• Composability allows for reputation aggregators to build holistic profiles.

Projects like Sismo and zkPass use ZK proofs to make reputation portable and private. Users can prove they have a credential (e.g., "Gitcoin Passport score > 20") without revealing the underlying data or linking their identities across contexts.

• Selective disclosure prevents reputation from becoming a permanent, public surveillance tool.
• Enables sybil-resistant airdrops and governance without doxxing.
• ~500ms verification time with on-chain verifiers.

Portable attestations are the missing primitive for truly global credit. A user's repayment history on Avalanche can secure a loan on Arbitrum via a LayerZero-verified attestation, creating a unified underwriting layer.

• Unlocks $1T+ latent demand in undercollateralized lending.
• Chainlink's CCIP and Wormhole become critical attestation relay layers.
• Reduces reliance on volatile crypto collateral, bridging to TradFi risk models.

DAO tooling like Snapshot and Optimism's Citizen House conflate identity with reputation. Portable attestations allow for context-specific governance power—your contribution to a DeFi protocol shouldn't dictate your vote in an NFT project's treasury.

• Prevents governance capture by whales with off-topic capital.
• Enables meritocratic voting based on proven, relevant contributions.
• Sybil-resistant without requiring KYC or central arbiters.

Portable attestations will be traded, bundled, and securitized. EigenLayer restakers could bundle their slashing-risk attestation with a credit score to get better rates. This creates a reputation derivatives market where trust is priced and hedged.

• Attestation issuers become a new class of curators with skin-in-the-game.
• Reputation oracles like UMA will resolve disputes on attestation validity.
• Drives a flywheel where valuable attestations increase in utility and liquidity.

Your on-chain history is a valuable asset, but it's held hostage by individual protocols like Aave (credit) or Uniswap (LP reputation). This creates massive switching costs and stifles innovation.

• Fragmented Capital: Reputation cannot be used as collateral or proof-of-work across ecosystems.
• Vendor Risk: Users are perpetually exposed to a single protocol's governance or failure.
• Zero Composability: A stellar history on Arbitrum is meaningless when bridging to Base.

Decouple reputation from state by issuing standard, portable attestations. Projects like EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) and Verax enable proofs of activity, KYC status, or governance participation that are chain-agnostic.

• Sovereign Control: Users own and selectively disclose their credential graph.
• Universal Proof: A single "Elite DAO Voter" attestation works across Compound, Optimism, and ApeCoin governance.
• Gasless Verification: Off-chain signing with on-chain verification slashes cost for high-frequency reputation checks.

Portable reputation enables a new primitive: users can express intents backed by their verifiable history. Solvers (like those in UniswapX or CowSwap) compete to fulfill these intents, using reputation as a trust score to secure better rates and access.

• Capital Efficiency: High-reputation users can access undercollateralized loans or premium pools without re-staking.
• Dynamic Pricing: Protocols like MarginFi can offer personalized rates based on portable credit scores.
• Sybil Resistance: A portable, aggregated reputation score is exponentially harder to farm than isolated protocol points.

Eureka Labs is building Persona, a protocol that makes on-chain reputation portable, programmable, and private. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to allow users to prove traits (e.g., "Top 10% Uniswap V3 LP") without revealing full history.

• ZK-Powered Privacy: Prove your reputation meets a threshold without doxxing your entire wallet.
• Protocol SDK: Lets any dApp (e.g., a Friend.tech clone or a LayerZero app) request and verify portable credentials.
• Composable Trust: Turns fragmented history into a unified, monetizable asset class for the modular stack.

Permanent, soulbound reputation creates a closed system where early adopters have an unassailable moat. This stifles new entrants and creates a reputation aristocracy, defeating the purpose of a permissionless network.\n- Problem: New users face impossible barriers to entry.\n- Solution: Portable reputation allows for context-specific scoring and resets, enabling fair competition.

Immutable bad debt history on-chain makes underwriting impossible and locks out rehabilitated users. This cripples the potential for sophisticated on-chain credit markets beyond over-collateralization.\n- Problem: A single liquidation creates a permanent black mark.\n- Solution: Portable, expirable reputation enables risk-based lending, similar to TradFi's 7-year credit history cycle, unlocking $100B+ in capital efficiency.

Permanent voting power based on static token holdings or historical activity leads to governance stagnation. Protocols like Compound and Uniswap suffer from low participation and whale dominance.\n- Problem: Decision-making power doesn't reflect current competence or engagement.\n- Solution: Portable reputation scores that decay or are re-earned in new contexts create fluid, meritocratic governance, increasing participation and innovation.

Restaking $15B+ TVL creates monolithic, systemically important reputational layers. A slash on one AVS creates irreversible reputational damage across the ecosystem, risking a cascading failure.\n- Problem: Reputational risk is non-compartmentalized and permanent.\n- Solution: Portable reputation allows operators to segment their history per service, isolating risk and enabling safer, more modular restaking markets.

The infrastructure gap isn't in storing reputation, but in verifying and transporting it across chains and contexts. This is the next oracle problem. Builders should focus on ZK-proofs of history and consensus-light attestation rather than monolithic registries.\n- Opportunity: The stack for portable reputation is as fundamental as Chainlink for price feeds.\n- Key Tech: ZK attestations, optimistic verification, and context-specific scoring engines.

The value accrual shifts from permanent reputation ledgers (like SBT registries) to the applications that interpret and utilize portable signals. The money is in the scoring algorithms and dispute resolution mechanisms, not the storage layer.\n- Investment Thesis: Back protocols that define reputation primitives (e.g., EAS for attestations) and vertical-specific scoring engines for DeFi, Social, and Gaming.\n- Avoid: Monolithic, immutable reputation blockchains.