Why On-Chain Reputation Must Be Portable Across Protocols

Users must perform repetitive, low-value actions across isolated ecosystems to farm reputation for potential airdrops. This fragments capital and creates systemic inefficiency.

• Wasted Capital: Billions in liquidity locked in suboptimal farms just for points.
• Meritless Sybils: The system rewards activity volume, not genuine user quality or loyalty.

Lending protocols like Aave and Compound cannot underwrite uncollateralized loans because they lack a portable history of user behavior.

• Zero-Collateral Loans: Impossible without cross-protocol repayment history.
• Inefficient Capital: Over-collateralization is the only option, locking up ~$50B+ in excess capital.

A user's on-chain history—from Gitcoin Grants donations to Uniswap LP longevity—should be a composable asset. Think Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) or CyberConnect for verifiable, portable credentials.

• Composable Reputation: Proof-of-donation history unlocks governance power in a new DAO.
• Sybil Resistance: Portable graphs make fake identities exponentially more expensive to maintain across the ecosystem.

Protocols like UniswapX and CowSwap solve for optimal execution intent. Portable reputation solves for optimal trust intent, allowing users to signal credibility.

• Reduced Friction: A proven trader on dYdX gets better terms on a new perp DEX instantly.
• Capital Efficiency: Protocols can allocate rewards and leverage based on imported, verified history.

EigenLayer's restaking model is a precursor: it allows ETH stakers to port their economic security to other protocols. Portable reputation is the logical extension—porting your social and behavioral security.

• Trust Layer: Staked ETH secures AVSs; staked reputation secures social and financial interactions.
• Native Yield: Reputation becomes a yield-generating, productive asset beyond mere identity.

Without portability, the ecosystem ossifies. New protocols face a cold-start problem for trust, favoring incumbents. With it, innovation accelerates as users migrate trust seamlessly.

• Winner-Take-Most: Walled gardens entrench giants like MakerDAO.
• Composable Future: Portable trust enables hyper-specialized, interoperable protocols to thrive.

EigenLayer doesn't manage social reputation; it commoditizes cryptoeconomic security. By restaking ETH, operators build a portable, slashing-based security score that can be rented by new AVSs like AltLayer or EigenDA.\n- Portable Capital Efficiency: A single stake secures multiple services.\n- Sybil Resistance: High-cost stake creates a high-fidelity identity for operators.

Protocols waste billions in token incentives on empty wallets that provide no long-term value. Without portable reputation, every new L2 or app must re-run the same costly Sybil-detection gauntlet.\n- Inefficient Capital: >30% of major airdrops are claimed by farmers.\n- Broken Signals: Token distribution fails to align genuine users.

These are anti-Sybil tools moving towards a portable, composable identity layer. Passport aggregates verifiable credentials from Web2 (BrightID) and Web3. World ID uses biometrics for global uniqueness.\n- Composable Proofs: A ZK proof of 'humanity' or 'contributor' status.\n- Protocol-Level Integration: Used by Optimism's RetroPGF and across DeFi for fair launches.

The end-state is a user-owned, privacy-preserving dossier of attestations. Think ERC-7231 or EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) creating a graph of proven actions.\n- User-Owned: Reputation is a wallet asset, not a platform lock-in.\n- Context-Specific: A lending protocol sees your credit history; a DAO sees your governance participation.

These protocols build on-chain social graphs and reputation scores based on interactions. Karma3's OpenRank algorithm scores profiles based on connections, powering discovery.\n- Algorithmic Portability: A score from Farcaster can be used in a DeFi underwriting model.\n- Sybil-Resistant Graphs: Weighted by the reputation of your connections.

Portable reputation flips the model from application-specific networks to user-centric networks. This is the infrastructure for the next billion users, reducing onboarding friction to near-zero.\n- Composability Moat: The first protocol to establish a universal graph owns the layer.\n- Regulatory Clarity: A verifiable credential stack is KYC/AML compliant by design.

Every new protocol forces users to re-stake capital, fragmenting liquidity and capping total leverage. A user's $100K reputation on Aave is worthless when they try to borrow on Compound.

• Capital Inefficiency: Billions in TVL is locked in redundant, protocol-specific staking.
• Barrier to Entry: New protocols struggle to bootstrap trust without demanding fresh, high-value collateral.

EigenLayer pioneered the model of portable cryptoeconomic security. The same logic applies to user-level reputation: a single stake should secure multiple services.

• Capital Multiplier: One stake can underwrite activity on Aave, a prediction market, and a new DeFi primitive.
• Protocol Bootstrap: New apps can inherit security/reputation from established staking pools, reducing cold-start risk.

Without portable reputation, every new social/gaming/DAO app is vulnerable to Sybil attacks. You can't differentiate a loyal user from a bot farm, so you default to token-gating, which excludes real users.

• Trust Vacuum: Forces protocols to use blunt, exclusionary instruments like token holdings.
• Data Silos: Your governance history in MakerDAO doesn't help you in a new Arbitrum DAO.

These are early attempts at aggregating off-chain and on-chain attestations into a portable, non-financial identity. The next step is making this reputation stakable and slashing.

• Sybil Resistance: Aggregate GitHub, ENS, governance votes into a verifiable score.
• Composable Trust: A zk-proof of your Gitcoin Passport score can be your entry ticket to a hundred apps without revealing underlying data.

DAO voting is broken because reputation (voting power) isn't tied to accountable, portable stake. A whale can vote on a critical Compound upgrade, then immediately dump their tokens with no consequence.

• Plutocracy: Voting power = token holdings, not proven commitment.
• No Accountability: Voters face no slashing risk for malicious or negligent decisions.

Imagine a staked reputation score that you use to vote across DAOs. Vote for a malicious proposal? Your reputation stake gets slashed everywhere.

• Aligned Incentives: Forces voters to have accountable, portable skin-in-the-game.
• Cross-Protocol Governance: A high-stake reputation from Uniswap governance could grant you voting power in a new DEX, accelerating trusted community formation.