The Future of Work: Portable Reputation Through Abstracted Identities

Your professional capital is trapped. A GitHub commit history, DAO contribution record, or DeFi credit score is useless outside its native platform, forcing you to rebuild trust from zero.

• Zero Portability: Achievements on Aave don't translate to a MakerDAO governance application.
• High Friction: Onboarding to new protocols requires redundant KYC and proof-of-work.
• Platform Risk: Your professional identity is subject to a single entity's policies and uptime.

Projects like Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) and Verax enable the creation of portable, on-chain attestations that act as reusable reputation tokens.

• Sovereign Data: You own and control the attestations, not the issuing platform.
• Composable Proofs: A zk-proof of your Gitcoin Grants history can be used to access a lending pool without revealing the details.
• Cross-Protocol Utility: A single 'Senior Solidity Dev' attestation from Code4rena can be verified by any protocol seeking auditors.

Abstracted identities enable a new market structure where users express intents ("lend to me at this rate") and solvers compete based on your verifiable reputation, not just collateral. This mirrors the shift seen in UniswapX and CowSwap.

• Efficiency Gain: Solvers bundle users with strong reputations for better execution and rates.
• Capital Efficiency: Unlock undercollateralized lending via credential-based risk scoring.
• Automated Trust: Protocols like Source and Otterspace automate role-gating and rewards based on attestation graphs.

The modular blockchain stack (e.g., EigenLayer, Celestia) and ZK tech make portable reputation scalable and private. Reputation can be computed off-chain and proven on-chain.

• Data Availability: Attestation graphs stored on Celestia or EigenDA are cheap and universally accessible.
• Privacy-Preserving: zk-proofs allow you to prove you're in the top 10% of contributors without revealing your identity or exact score.
• Cross-Chain Portability: Protocols like Hyperlane and LayerZero enable attestations to be natively verified on any chain.

Every interaction starts from zero. You can't distinguish a 10x engineer from a bot. This trust vacuum kills complex coordination and forces reliance on centralized platforms like LinkedIn.

• No composable history: Reputation is siloed within each DAO, guild, or protocol.
• Sybil vulnerability: Nothing stops bad actors from spinning up infinite wallets.
• High friction: Every new project requires re-establishing credibility from scratch.

EAS isn't an app; it's the base layer for making verifiable statements. It allows anyone to issue, verify, and trust attestations on-chain or off-chain, creating a universal graph of reputation.

• Permissionless schemas: Projects like Optimism, Gitcoin Passport, and Coinbase Verifications define their own credential types.
• Cost-effective: Off-chain attestations cost ~$0, enabling mass adoption.
• Composable data: Attestations from different issuers can be aggregated to form a rich identity graph.

The endgame is a user-owned, privacy-preserving graph of verifiable claims. You prove your credentials without revealing your entire history, enabling trustless hiring, governance, and underwriting.

• Selective disclosure: Use ZK-proofs (e.g., Sismo, zkPass) to prove you're a top-100 DAO voter without exposing your address.
• Cross-protocol leverage: Your Gitcoin Passport score could grant you instant credibility in a new DeFi lending pool.
• Machine-readable trust: Smart contracts can query reputation graphs for automated, conditional access (e.g., Uncollateralized lending based on proven income).

OAK Network automates recurring payments and membership by using on-chain reputation for underwriting. It demonstrates the tangible financial utility of the reputation layer.

• Streaming salaries: DAOs can pay contributors based on verifiable task completion attested by platforms like Dework or SourceCred.
• Risk-based access: Protocols can offer better terms (e.g., lower fees, higher limits) to wallets with strong reputation scores.
• Automated governance: Reputation can trigger automatic voting power delegation or role assignments.

Reputation is trapped within individual dApps like Aave or Compound, forcing users to rebuild trust from zero. This creates massive friction for new market entrants and stifles the growth of a unified on-chain economy.\n- Liquidity Fragmentation: Proven users can't leverage their history to access better terms elsewhere.\n- High Onboarding Cost: Every new protocol requires redundant KYC/credit checks, costing ~$50-100/user.

Abstract identity into a portable, ZK-verified attestation layer (e.g., Ethereum Attestation Service, Verax). This turns social and financial history into a composable asset.\n- Underwrite Without KYC: A DAO can grant a credit line based on a user's Gitcoin Passport score or Aave repayment history.\n- Dynamic Risk Pricing: Lending protocols like Compound could offer 10-50 bps better rates for users with verified, positive reputation.

Portable reputation enables trustless, global talent markets. Builders can prove their contributions across Gitcoin, Coordinape, and DAOs like Optimism Collective.\n- Sybil-Resistant Governance: Allocate voting power or grants based on proven contribution graphs, not token wealth alone.\n- Composable Bounties: Platforms like Layer3 or dework can auto-match tasks with qualified users based on verifiable skill badges.

Winning protocols will be infrastructure-first. The value accrues to the credential graph, not the front-end application. Look at EigenLayer for cryptoeconomic security and Worldcoin for global identity as parallels.\n- Monetize the Graph: Charge micro-fees for attestation issuance and verification, not end-user subscriptions.\n- Avoid Regulatory Traps: Build with ZK-proofs and user custody to sidestep data privacy laws (GDPR, CCPA).

Reputation is subjective. The critical failure mode is corrupt or lazy attestation issuers. The system is only as strong as its most trusted oracle (e.g., Chainlink, Pyth for price, but for social data?).\n- Sybil Attacks on Issuers: A malicious DAO could mint false positive reputations for its members.\n- Data Freshness: Stale credentials (e.g., a 2-year-old GitHub commit) must decay or expire to maintain system integrity.

Portable reputation is a core primitive for any ecosystem seeking adoption. The most likely acquirers are Ethereum L2s (Optimism, Arbitrum) integrating it for native social apps, or wallets like Rainbow or MetaMask making it a user feature.\n- Strategic Moat: The reputation graph becomes a defensible moat for the acquiring chain's app ecosystem.\n- Integration Multiplier: A single sign-on with verifiable credentials could drive the next 100M users on-chain.