Why Your DAO's Reputation System is Already Obsolete

One-token-one-vote is a wealth-weighted popularity contest, not a measure of expertise. It's the governance equivalent of letting the highest bidder design the bridge.

• Sybil-resistant systems like Proof-of-Humanity or BrightID separate identity from capital.
• Conviction Voting (pioneered by 1Hive) weights votes by time committed, not tokens held.
• Result: Decisions reflect skin-in-the-game from participants, not passive speculators.

Reputation should be sticky; tokens are liquid. A voter's long-term alignment vanishes the moment they sell, creating permanent principal-agent problems.

• Non-transferable soulbound tokens (SBTs) as proposed by Vitalik Buterin make reputation a persistent record.
• Reputation decay mechanisms ensure recent, active contributors hold more weight.
• This aligns incentives with the protocol's multi-year roadmap, not the next quarterly report.

A single token cannot capture multidimensional contribution. Coding, governance, and community building are not fungible, yet token-weighting treats them as such.

• Specialized reputation graphs (see Gitcoin Passport, SourceCred) score contributions across domains.
• SubDAOs with tailored voting systems (e.g., technical guilds using peer review) delegate based on expertise.
• This moves governance from blunt capital force to nuanced meritocracy.

Focusing solely on preventing fake identities misses the real issue: incentive misalignment. A whale with legitimate tokens can still act against the protocol's long-term health. Systems like Gitcoin Passport solve Sybil but not this core governance failure.

• Real Threat: Rational apathy and plutocratic capture.
• Missed Metric: Measuring contribution quality, not just quantity.

Reputation must be a dynamic, composable asset. Think ERC-20 for contributions. Projects like SourceCred and Coordinape pioneered the idea; the next step is on-chain primitives that allow reputation to be earned, spent, and delegated across DAOs.

• Key Benefit: Enables sub-DAO formation based on proven expertise.
• Key Benefit: Creates a labor market for governance attention.

Voting and proposal execution are the final 1% of the work. The valuable coordination—research, debate, relationship-building—happens off-chain in forums and Discord. Current systems blindly reward formal outcomes, not the labor that creates them.

• Data Gap: No link between discourse quality and voting power.
• Result: High-value contributors burn out without recognition.

Adopt the Optimism RetroPGF model: periodically reward past contributions based on community sentiment. Pair this with non-transferable, soulbound badges (like ERC-721S) for specific achievements. This separates reputation from immediate financialization.

• Key Benefit: Aligns incentives with long-term value creation.
• Key Benefit: Reduces mercenary voting and proposal spam.

Your reputation in Developer-DAO X doesn't translate to Treasury-DAO Y, even if your skills are relevant. This siloing forces re-proving credibility from zero, creating massive inefficiency for multi-DAO contributors—the very people who provide critical cross-pollination.

• Friction: High barrier to entry for competent newcomers.
• Waste: Duplication of reputation-building effort.

The endgame is a reputation graph—a decentralized LinkedIn. Protocols like Orange and Gitcoin Passport are early attempts. DAOs can issue verifiable credentials for specific skills (e.g., "Solidity Auditor") that can be queried by any other protocol, creating a portable trust layer.

• Key Benefit: Liquidity of trust accelerates talent discovery.
• Key Benefit: Enables reputation-based delegation at scale.