Why Decentralized Society (DeSoc) Depends on Unforgeable Identity

Without a cost to identity creation, governance is gamed by whales and bots. This renders DAOs like Compound or Uniswap vulnerable to low-quality votes and protocol capture.\n- Sybil-resistance is the prerequisite for meaningful one-person-one-vote.\n- Fake identities dilute retroactive funding pools and airdrops.

EAS provides a standard schema for making off-chain attestations on-chain verifiable. It's the primitive for portable reputation, enabling systems like Optimism's Citizens' House.\n- Issuers (e.g., Coinbase, Gitcoin) sign claims about users.\n- Verifiers (e.g., protocols) trust the issuer, not the data storage.\n- Decouples trust from storage, enabling privacy-preserving credentials.

Worldcoin's World ID uses orb biometrics to generate a zero-knowledge proof of unique humanness. It's the nuclear option for global Sybil resistance, used by Gitcoin Grants and Praise for distribution.\n- Privacy: The proof reveals nothing but uniqueness.\n- Scalability: Aims for ~1B+ verified humans as a network good.

Pioneered by Vitalik Buterin, SBTs are non-transferable tokens that represent commitments, credentials, and affiliations. They turn a wallet into a "Soul" with a persistent history.\n- Enables under-collateralized lending based on credit history.\n- Creates decentralized professional networks (e.g., Karma).\n- ERC-5114 and ERC-4973 are emerging standards.

Ethereum Name Service provides the readable username layer that maps to cryptographic addresses. It's the primary social graph node and reputation anchor for DeSoc.\n- Vital Infrastructure: 2M+ names registered, integrated across Coinbase, Uniswap, Opensea.\n- Revenue-Generating: Generates ~$50M+ annual protocol revenue from renewals.

The end-state is a user carrying selectively disclosable proofs of their attributes (age, credit score, DAO contributions) without revealing underlying data. This relies on zkSNARKs and standards from W3C.\n- Enables private KYC for DeFi.\n- Sismo and zkEmail are building the tooling.\n- Shifts power from data hoarders to individuals.

Without proof of unique personhood, token-weighted voting is a farce. Airdrop farmers and whale cartels create infinite sockpuppet addresses to capture protocols like Compound and Uniswap.\n- Result: 51% attacks on DAO treasuries become trivial.\n- Consequence: Real user preferences are drowned out by economic noise.

DeFi's reliance on excessive collateral (e.g., 150%+ on MakerDAO) is a direct result of not knowing who you're transacting with. It's a massive capital efficiency tax.\n- Inefficiency: $10B+ in locked, unproductive assets.\n- Alternative: Under-collateralized lending (like Maple Finance) requires KYC, recentralizing the system.

ZK-proofs of humanity (e.g., Worldcoin, zkPass) promise privacy-preserving verification but face a trilemma: Scalability, Accessibility, Decentralization.\n- Bottleneck: ~500k verifications/day for a global system is a joke.\n- Centralization Risk: Orbs/Iris scans create single points of failure and exclusion.

Your Gitcoin Passport score or ENS name is just a data point. True DeSoc requires a composable, sovereign reputation graph that isn't owned by a platform.\n- Fragmentation: Reputation is siloed in Lens, Farcaster, DeBank.\n- Consequence: No network effects for good actors, no cost for bad ones.

For DeSoc to govern real-world assets or resolve disputes, it needs a legal bridge. Kleros and Aragon courts are experiments, but enforcement requires a legal identity.\n- Gap: Smart contracts cannot subpoena or seize off-chain assets.\n- Reality: Anonymous entities cannot enter legally binding contracts, ceding ground to traditional LLC wrappers.

The economic reward for breaking identity (e.g., stealing an airdrop, manipulating a vote) often far exceeds the cost of creating it. Proof-of-Stake networks face the same issue with cheap stake.\n- Imbalance: $100M exploit vs. $0.01 Sybil cost.\n- Result: Security becomes a function of capital, not cryptography, favoring adversarial whales.

Without unforgeable identity, every governance vote, airdrop, and reputation system is a capital-intensive game of whack-a-mole. Proof-of-stake and proof-of-work are insufficient for social consensus.

• Result: $100M+ wasted on Sybil-fighting in major airdrops.
• Opportunity: Native identity enables 1-person-1-vote DAOs and targeted incentive distribution.

Pioneered by Vitalik Buterin and E. Glen Weyl, SBTs are non-transferable tokens representing credentials, affiliations, and reputation. They are the building blocks for a persistent, composable social graph.

• Enables: Under-collateralized lending via reputation-based credit scores.
• Example: Gitcoin Passport aggregates SBTs for Sybil-resistant quadratic funding.

Unforgeable identity flips the script on DeFi and DAOs. Your on-chain history—from Compound repayments to ENS tenure—becomes a verifiable asset.

• Mechanism: Zero-knowledge proofs allow selective disclosure (prove credit score without revealing tx history).
• Market: Enables trust-minimized B2B deals and reputation-based insurance pools like Nexus Mutual.

The winning play isn't another social media clone. It's infrastructure: attestation protocols (EAS), zk-identity verifiers, and SBT primitive layers.

• Key Players: Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS), Worldcoin (controversial biometrics), Polygon ID.
• Metric: Success is measured by developer adoption and attestations issued, not monthly active users.