The Future of Community Trust is On-Chain Reputation

Every new user is a potential Sybil attacker, forcing protocols to over-collateralize or implement friction-heavy KYC. This stifles growth and innovation.

• Costs: Airdrop farming costs protocols $100M+ annually in misallocated capital.
• Friction: Legitimate users face ~30% drop-off from complex verification steps.
• Risk: Lending pools require 150%+ collateral ratios due to identity opacity.

Reputation becomes a verifiable, stake-weighted asset. A user's history across Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum creates a persistent trust score.

• Composability: A Gitcoin Passport score can gate a Safe{Wallet} module or an Aave loan.
• Portability: ~500ms to verify a user's aggregated history via zero-knowledge proofs.
• Monetization: Users can stake reputation for yield via EigenLayer-style restaking pools.

One-token-one-vote leads to mercenary capital and low-quality proposals. Voting power ≠ expertise or long-term alignment.

• Participation: <5% of token holders vote on average proposals.
• Manipulation: Whale voting often dictates outcomes, ignoring community sentiment.
• Quality: Proposal spam is rampant due to low submission costs.

Voting power is derived from a user's proven contributions (e.g., code commits, governance forum posts) via systems like SourceCred or Coordinape.

• Alignment: Delegates with high on-chain reputation scores attract more voting power.
• Quality: Proposal submission requires a minimum reputation stake, reducing spam.
• Sybil Resistance: A user's Gitcoin Passport or BrightID verification boosts their voting weight.

Twitter followers and Discord roles are not verifiable or portable. This enables impersonation and limits composable financial primitives.

• Fragmentation: Trust built in one community (e.g., Farcaster) doesn't transfer to Friend.tech.
• Fraud: $200M+ lost annually to social engineering and fake support scams.
• Inefficiency: Manual verification (e.g., Discord ticket) takes days to weeks.

Trust is minted as non-transferable tokens (SBTs) or verifiable attestations on the Ethereum Attestation Service.

• Portability: A Sismo ZK Badge proving you're a Nouns DAO holder is usable across any app.
• Privacy: Zero-knowledge proofs (via Sismo) allow you to prove membership without revealing your wallet.
• Composability: An attestation of ENS ownership can be a gate for a Uniswap liquidity pool.

The problem: Reputation is fragmented across dApps with no portable, verifiable standard. The solution: A public good infrastructure for making schema-based attestations on-chain or off-chain. It's the primitive for portable credentials.

• Key Benefit: Composable trust graphs across DeFi, DAOs, and identity.
• Key Benefit: Gasless off-chain attestations with on-chain verification.

The problem: How do you prove you're a real human or a valuable contributor without doxxing yourself? The solution: A canonical on-chain registry for off-chain data attestations, built directly into the OP Stack. It's the social layer for the Superchain.

• Key Benefit: Native integration for RetroPGF and governance across the L2 ecosystem.
• Key Benefit: Sybil-resistance through attestation graphs, not just token holdings.

The problem: On-chain social graphs (e.g., Farcaster) need a way to surface quality content and combat spam. The solution: A decentralized reputation protocol that computes context-specific rankings (like PageRank for Web3).

• Key Benefit: Algorithmic sovereignty—communities define their own ranking logic.
• Key Benefit: Sybil-resistant scoring that works across Farcaster, ENS, and Gitcoin Passport.

The problem: Sybil attacks drain resources from public goods funding and airdrops. The solution: A stamp-based identity aggregator that scores unique humanity without centralized KYC.

• Key Benefit: Composability—scores are used by Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base for airdrops.
• Key Benefit: User-owned—stamps are self-custodied Verifiable Credentials.

The problem: Attestations are useless if verifiers can't trust the issuer. The solution: Decentralized Issuer Frameworks like Verax and Iden3 create trust hierarchies and revocation schemes.

• Key Benefit: Selective disclosure via Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) for privacy.
• Key Benefit: Revocable delegations—issuers can update or revoke credentials.

The problem: DeFi only accepts financial capital, locking out the creditworthy but capital-poor. The solution: Protocols like Spectral and Cred Protocol mint non-transferable reputation NFTs as a basis for underwriting.

• Key Benefit: On-chain credit scores built from wallet transaction history.
• Key Benefit: Unlocks undercollateralized lending by quantifying on-chain behavior.

Current DAOs use token-weighted voting, which is either plutocratic or vulnerable to cheap Sybil attacks. Proof-of-Humanity and BrightID are band-aids that don't capture contribution quality.

• Sybil attacks cost less than $1 on many testnets.
• Token-voting concentrates power in <1% of addresses.
• Airdrop farming devalues genuine community effort.

On-chain reputation is a soulbound token (like Ethereum's ERC-7231) that aggregates verifiable actions: Gitcoin Grants donations, Optimism delegate participation, Polygon ID credentials.

• Portable identity across DAOs and chains via EAS or Verax.
• Composable scoring enables reputation-based lending (e.g., Spectral Finance).
• Automated governance via Safe{Core} modules for reputation-weighted execution.

High-throughput, low-cost L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and zkSync are the logical settlement layers for reputation graphs. They enable real-time reputation updates and micro-contributions.

• ~$0.01 transaction costs make frequent reputation signaling viable.
• Native integration with Rollup-as-a-Service platforms (Conduit, Caldera) for DAO-specific chains.
• Reputation oracles (e.g., Pyth, Chainlink) can feed off-chain data (GitHub commits, Discourse posts).

The endgame is financial primitives that use reputation as collateral. Imagine Aave with reputation-based credit lines or Uniswap pools with lower fees for trusted LPs.

• Reduces capital inefficiency by unlocking social capital.
• Mitigates mercenary capital in Curve wars-style governance battles.
• Enables undercollateralized lending for builders with proven track records.

Full transparency creates doxxing risks and stifles honest participation. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) via zkSNARKs (Aztec, Zcash) or zkSTARKs (Starknet) are mandatory for adoption.

• Prove reputation score without revealing underlying actions.
• Selective disclosure for specific DAO requirements.
• ZK-based sybil resistance is the next frontier beyond BrightID.

Reputation trapped in one ecosystem is useless. Interoperability protocols like LayerZero, Axelar, and Wormhole must evolve to pass reputation states, not just assets.

• Composability across Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos appchains.
• Unified identity for users of UniswapX, Aave V3, and GMX.
• Prevents fragmentation that doomed previous Web2 reputation systems.