Why On-Chain Reputation Should Replace Traditional Sign-Ups

The Problem: Reputation data is locked in individual dApps. The Solution: A public good schema registry for creating, tracking, and verifying on-chain attestations.

• Portable Credentials: Build a persistent, chain-agnostic reputation graph.
• Composable Trust: Protocols like Optimism and Gitcoin use EAS for governance and grants.

The Problem: Sybil attackers exploit permissionless systems for profit. The Solution: On-chain reputation scores based on historical behavior and capital-at-risk.

• Sybil Resistance: Projects like LayerZero and EigenLayer use activity graphs to filter noise.
• Merit-Based Distribution: Rewards real users, not just wallets, increasing capital efficiency.

The Problem: Overcollateralization kills capital efficiency in DeFi. The Solution: Creditworthiness proven via on-chain transaction history and repayment attestations.

• Trust Graphs: Protocols like ARCx and Spectral generate credit scores from wallet activity.
• Default as a Reputation Sink: A single default burns your score across all integrated protocols.

The Problem: Web2 social graphs are proprietary and non-financial. The Solution: A decentralized protocol mapping social connections and contributions on-chain.

• Monetizable Influence: Reputation from Gitcoin grants or Optimism voting translates into governance weight.
• Anti-Spam: High-karma users get priority access in crowded mempools and governance forums.

The Problem: DAO voter apathy and low-quality proposals. The Solution: Reputation-weighted voting based on proven expertise and skin-in-the-game.

• Delegation by Merit: Auto-delegate your vote to wallets with high reputation in specific domains (e.g., DeFi, security).
• Proposal Quality: Systems like Compound's governance can filter proposals by submitter reputation score.

The Problem: Public reputation graphs create surveillance risks. The Solution: Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to verify traits without revealing underlying data.

• Selective Disclosure: Prove you're a "top 10% Uniswap LP" without exposing your full trade history.
• Compliance-Friendly: ZK attestations can satisfy regulatory KYC/AML checks privately, used by projects like Sismo.

Reputation is worthless if it's cheap to forge. Without robust Sybil resistance, on-chain scores are just a game of capital allocation, not identity.

• Cost of Attack: Creating 1,000+ fake identities can cost less than a few hundred dollars on many chains.
• Real Consequence: Protocols like Aave and Compound cannot rely on on-chain history alone for undercollateralized lending.

A high-reputation DeFi whale is not necessarily a trustworthy forum moderator. Reputation is not fungible across contexts.

• Data Silos: Your Uniswap LP history means nothing for a Farcaster social graph.
• Protocol Risk: A user's good standing in MakerDAO does not predict their behavior in a new NFT lending protocol.

To be useful, reputation needs rich data. To be adopted, it needs privacy. Current systems fail at both.

• ZK-Proof Gap: Projects like Sismo and Semaphore enable privacy but sacrifice granular, verifiable detail.
• Oracle Reliance: Off-chain attestations (e.g., Gitcoin Passport) reintroduce centralized trust vectors and data latency.

Established Web2 platforms have network effects and embedded financial rails that pure on-chain systems can't easily disrupt.

• Friction Cost: Migrating $10B+ of institutional KYC/AML workflows on-chain is a regulatory and operational nightmare.
• Cross-Chain Fragmentation: Reputation on Ethereum is isolated from Solana or Bitcoin, preventing a unified identity layer.

Most sophisticated reputation systems rely on oracles or committees to score off-chain behavior, creating a new attack surface.

• Governance Capture: A MakerDAO-style committee for reputation scoring becomes a political target.
• Data Integrity: Oracles like Chainlink are secure for price feeds, but subjective social data is a fundamentally harder problem.

Reputation systems need data to be useful, but users won't engage until the system is useful. This stifles adoption of new protocols.

• Bootstrapping Hell: A new lending protocol cannot use on-chain reputation because no users have a score yet.
• Vicious Cycle: Falls back to over-collateralization or centralized whitelists, defeating the purpose.

Manual Sybil filtering is a black box that alienates real users. On-chain reputation enables programmatic, transparent distribution based on verifiable history.

• Key Benefit: Replace subjective analysis with objective, on-chain proof-of-work.
• Key Benefit: Drastically reduce ~80% of airdrop farming by weighting activity over wallet count.

DeFi over-collateralization locks up $50B+ in capital. Reputation-based credit scores unlock capital efficiency.

• Key Benefit: Enable 0-to-low collateral loans for wallets with proven repayment history (e.g., EigenLayer restakers).
• Key Benefit: Create a native, composable credit market detached from traditional finance.

EAS provides the primitive for issuing, storing, and verifying on-chain attestations—the raw data layer for reputation.

• Key Benefit: Schema-based flexibility for any data (KYC, credit scores, guild membership).
• Key Benefit: Permissionless and composable, enabling a competitive ecosystem of reputation aggregators like Orange, Clique, Spectral.

Users hate signing transactions for every micro-action. Reputation enables zero-click interactions by establishing trust.

• Key Benefit: Grant temporary, scoped permissions (session keys) to bots or services based on reputation score.
• Key Benefit: Enable sponsored transactions for high-reputation users, abstracting gas entirely.

Token-weighted governance is plutocratic and leads to voter apathy. Reputation-weighted voting aligns influence with proven contribution.

• Key Benefit: 1P1V for humans based on verifiable on-chain activity, not capital.
• Key Benefit: Mitigate whale dominance and incentivize long-term ecosystem participation over speculation.

Reputation is siloed per chain. A portable, universal reputation graph is the ultimate moat for L2s and appchains.

• Key Benefit: Seamless onboarding across any EVM chain—your credit score and airdrop eligibility follow you.
• Key Benefit: Hyper-sticky users, as rebuilding reputation from zero becomes a significant switching cost.