The Future of Tenure is Blockchain-Verified and Community-Governed

EAS provides the base layer for creating, verifying, and revoking any attestation on-chain or off-chain. It's a public good infrastructure, not a product.

• Schema-Based: Anyone defines data structures for credentials (e.g., KYC status, skill badges).
• Permissionless & Portable: Attestations are composable across any app, breaking vendor lock-in.
• On-Chain Verifiability: Immutable proof of who attested what and when, enabling trustless verification.

Aggregates off-chain identity footprints (Google, Twitter, BrightID) into a non-transferable on-chain score to prove unique humanity.

• Stamps as Credentials: Each verification (e.g., Gmail, ENS) is an EAS attestation, building a decentralized identity graph.
• Governance & Access: Used by ~500 projects like Optimism Grants to filter bots and allocate resources to real users.
• Community Curation: Stamp weights are governed by the GitcoinDAO, making sybil resistance a public good.

Turns existing web2 and web3 affiliations into private, provable badges. Users generate ZK proofs of group membership without revealing their underlying accounts.

• Data Sovereignty: Prove you're a "Top 100 NFT Collector" without exposing your wallet address.
• One-to-Many Attestation: A single ZK Badge can attest to membership across multiple source communities.
• On-Chain Actions: Badges function as access keys for gated experiences, airdrops, and governance.

Your contributions on Discord, GitHub, and DAOs are invaluable but non-portable. This fragments reputation capital and stifles on-chain coordination.

• No Composite Identity: A top Snapshot voter can't prove their forum activity to a new DAO.
• High Onboarding Friction: Every new protocol forces you to rebuild social proof from zero.
• Vulnerable to Exploit: Isolated systems are easier to game than a networked reputation graph.

On-chain credentials create a verifiable, composable graph of user history. Smart contracts can query this graph to automate trust.

• Context-Specific Scores: A lending protocol weights your Gitcoin Passport score, while a devDAO values your GitHub commit attestations.
• Automated Access & Rewards: Meet a credential threshold? The contract grants roles, disburses rewards, or unlocks voting power instantly.
• Anti-Collusion Leagues: Detect and mitigate coordinated attacks by analyzing the attestation graph across addresses.

A protocol for creating, funding, and tracking impact. It turns work (e.g., research, development) into a tradeable, fractionalized credential representing a claim on future impact.

• Impact as an Asset: Funders buy hypercerts to support work; holders can later claim rewards if the work succeeds.
• Retroactive Funding Model: Creates a market for impact, aligning incentives for builders of open-source and public goods.
• Composable Reputation: A hypercert is a powerful, verifiable credential of tangible contribution, usable across ecosystems.

Academic and professional tenure lives in closed databases, vulnerable to forgery and inaccessible for verification. This creates friction for hiring, funding, and credential portability.

• Verification Latency: Manual checks take days to weeks.
• Fraud Surface: Fake diplomas and resumes cost the economy ~$600B annually.
• Portability Lock-in: Your reputation is trapped within a single institution's HR system.

Self-sovereign identity protocols like Veramo and ION enable individuals to own and cryptographically attest to their credentials. Universities become issuers on a public ledger.

• Instant Verification: Zero-knowledge proofs enable credential checks in ~500ms without exposing private data.
• Unforgeable Chain of Custody: Each achievement is timestamped and signed, creating an immutable record.
• Interoperable Stack: Builds on standards like W3C Verifiable Credentials and DIF.

Tenure decisions move from closed committees to transparent, community-governed DAOs. Reputation is quantified via token-curated registries and on-chain activity.

• Stake-Weighted Governance: Voting power is tied to verified expertise and skin-in-the-game.
• Dynamic Rewards: Contributors earn protocol-native tokens for peer review, mentorship, and research.
• Sybil-Resistant Design: Leverages Proof of Humanity and BrightID to prevent sock-puppet attacks.

Tenure becomes a yield-generating asset. Verified research outputs and citations can be fractionalized into NFTs and used as collateral in DeFi protocols like Aave or Maker.

• Liquidity for IP: Researchers can borrow against future citation royalties or licensing fees.
• Automated Royalties: Smart contracts ensure real-time micropayments for code, data, and paper usage.
• New Asset Class: Creates a $10B+ market for knowledge futures, similar to Ondo Finance for real-world assets.

The model is already proven in tech. A developer's tenure is their GitHub commit history—public, verifiable, and valued by the market. Blockchain formalizes this for all knowledge work.

• Portfolio as Proof: Contributions to open-source protocols like Uniswap or Ethereum are direct tenure signals.
• Algorithmic Reputation: Platforms like SourceCred and Gitcoin Passport quantify community trust.
• Hiring Efficiency: Reduces candidate screening time by ~70% by automating credential verification.

The final state is a global, decentralized graph of human knowledge and contribution—a Credential Layer for civilization. It's resistant to institutional collapse and continuously verified by the network.

• Network Effects: Each new verified credential increases the value of the entire graph, akin to The Graph for indexing.
• Censorship-Resistant: No single entity can revoke or alter a legitimately earned credential.
• Legacy Integration: Bridges to traditional systems via oracles like Chainlink ensure backward compatibility.