Decentralized Attestations Will Replace Centralized Reputation Scores

Platforms like Coinbase Verified or Binance KYC lock your identity and trust data. This creates walled gardens where your on-chain history is worthless.

• Zero Portability: Your score on Aave doesn't help you on Compound.
• Single Point of Censorship: One entity can revoke your access globally.
• Opaque Logic: You can't audit or dispute the scoring algorithm.

Frameworks like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax turn reputation into a public good. Attestations are on-chain NFTs or signed off-chain messages that anyone can verify.

• Sovereign Ownership: You control and share your attestations via wallets like Coinbase Wallet or Rainbow.
• Native Composability: Builders on Optimism, Arbitrum, or Base can query your graph to customize UX.
• Transparent Provenance: Every attestation links to its issuer and data source.

Without cost, attestations are worthless. Systems use proof-of-humanity (Worldcoin), proof-of-stake (collateralized attestors), or proof-of-work (Gitcoin Passport) to create economic security.

• Costly to Fake: Spamming requires real capital or verified identity.
• Context-Specific: A Uniswap trading attestation differs from a MakerDAO governance attestation.
• Programmable Trust: Weights can be applied (e.g., a Coinbase attestation vs. a friend's).

Every dApp, from Aave to Friend.tech, builds its own isolated credit score. This fragments user identity, prevents cross-protocol composability, and creates massive data silos controlled by single entities.

• Zero Portability: Reputation on Compound doesn't help you on MakerDAO.
• Centralized Control: A platform can arbitrarily change your score or access.
• Wasted Effort: Users repeat KYC and reputation-building for each app.

EAS provides the foundational primitive: a schema-based registry for making on- or off-chain attestations. It's the SQL database for trust, enabling anyone to issue and verify claims about anything.

• Schema Flexibility: Define attestations for KYC, skill badges, or loan repayments.
• Permissionless & Cheap: ~$0.01 cost to create an on-chain attestation.
• Universal Verifiability: Any contract or user can cryptographically verify a claim's issuer and integrity.

Attestations enable a user's entire history—Gitcoin Grants donations, Optimism delegate voting, Guild.xyz memberships—to become a verifiable, user-owned asset. This creates a holistic reputation graph.

• User-Owned Data: You control your attestations; no platform can revoke them.
• Cross-Protocol Leverage: A proven DeFi history could unlock better rates on Morpho or higher limits on EigenLayer.
• Anti-Sybil Foundation: Projects like Worldcoin or BrightID can issue attestations that become reusable across the ecosystem.

The trillion-dollar use case. Today's DeFi lending requires 150%+ over-collateralization. A robust attestation layer allows protocols like Goldfinch or Credix to underwrite based on verifiable, on-chain income, real-world asset ownership, and credit history.

• Capital Efficiency: Unlock $10B+ in currently idle credit demand.
• Automated Underwriting: Smart contracts programmatically assess a portfolio of attestations.
• Default Tracking: Non-repayment generates a negative attestation, harming future credit everywhere.

Full transparency creates privacy risks and opens vectors for discrimination. The next evolution integrates ZK tech like zkSNARKs (via zkEVM chains) or Sismo's ZK Badges to prove properties of an attestation without revealing the underlying data.

• Selective Disclosure: Prove you're accredited without showing your name or salary.
• Sybil-Resistant Privacy: Prove uniqueness (e.g., one-person-one-vote) without doxxing.
• Regulatory Compliance: Enables GDPR-compliant "right to be forgotten" by revoking a ZK proof.

Raw attestations are data; reputation is derived. Protocols like OpenRank or Gitcoin Passport act as aggregation layers, applying algorithms to a user's attestation graph to generate a consumable score or rank for dApps.

• Context-Specific Scores: A lending score differs from a governance score.
• Composable Logic: Developers can fork and tweak aggregation models.
• Incentive Alignment: Aggregators can be token-governed to prevent manipulation, similar to The Graph's curation markets.

Every dApp re-builds its own KYC and credit scoring, creating siloed data and poor UX. This leads to high user acquisition costs and limits DeFi's total addressable market.

• Data Silos: A user's Aave credit history is useless on Compound.
• High Friction: Users repeat KYC for every new protocol.
• Opaque Models: Centralized scores are black boxes, vulnerable to manipulation.

Protocols like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax enable any entity to issue verifiable claims about a user or contract. These become composable data primitives for the entire ecosystem.

• User-Owned: Attestations are stored in a user's wallet or on-chain, not a corporate database.
• Composable: A single 'Gold-KYC' attestation can be reused across Uniswap, Aave, and Friend.tech.
• Verifiable: Cryptographic proofs ensure data integrity and source.

The winning play isn't another scoring algorithm. It's the infrastructure to issue, aggregate, and interpret attestations. This is the oracle problem for identity.

• Issuance Layer: Tools for entities (e.g., Coinbase, universities) to easily issue claims.
• Aggregation Layer: Protocols like HyperOracle or Space and Time that compute reputation scores from raw attestation graphs.
• Consumer Layer: Smart contracts that query these scores for underwriting, airdrops, or governance.

Attestation validity requires decentralized consensus. EigenLayer's Actively Validated Services (AVS) are the natural settlement layer for high-value attestations, creating a new cryptoeconomic security market.

• Security Pool: AVS operators stake ETH to attest to real-world data (credit scores, KYC status).
• Slashing Conditions: Malicious or inaccurate attestations lead to stake loss.
• Native Integration: AVS outputs are natively consumable by restaking DeFi protocols like Eigenpie or Renzo.

Sybil attacks drain protocol treasury value. Attestation graphs enable proof-of-uniqueness and proof-of-history, moving airdrops from wallet-based to person-based distribution.

• Sybil Resistance: Protocols like Worldcoin or BrightID provide uniqueness attestations.
• Merit-Based Rewards: Attestations of contribution (Gitcoin Grants, developer activity) create fairer distribution.
• Capital Efficiency: Value goes to real users, not farming bots, improving ROI on incentive spend.

Forget SaaS. The revenue model shifts to issuing and verifying attestations. This creates a protocol-native B2B2C market where users pay for verifiable credentials.

• Issuer Fees: Entities pay to issue attestations on a trusted public network.
• Verifier Fees: Protocols pay micropayments to query a user's attestation graph.
• Data Unions: Users can monetize their own attestation graph, aligning with projects like Ocean Protocol.