The Future of Reputation Without Surveillance

Your on-chain history is fragmented across wallets and chains, while your off-chain identity is locked in corporate silos like Discord roles and GitHub commits. This creates a massive coordination failure, preventing composable identity and forcing protocols to reinvent the wheel.

• Zero Portability: Reputation earned on Aave doesn't help you on Uniswap Governance.
• Surveillance-Based: Web2 models require total data exposure for simple verification.
• High Friction: Every new dApp starts from zero, creating poor UX and security risks.

Prove you have a credential (e.g., "Top 10% Uniswap LP") without revealing the underlying data or your wallet address. This is the cryptographic foundation for private reputation, enabling systems like Sismo and Worldcoin's Proof of Personhood.

• Selective Disclosure: Prove you're over 18 without showing your passport.
• Sybil-Resistance: Enable fair airdrops and governance without KYC.
• Chain-Agnostic: ZK proofs are verifiable anywhere, solving the fragmentation problem.

Reputation must be a composable, ownable asset. Hypercerts (from Protocol Labs) tokenize impact and contributions. The Graph indexes and makes relational data queryable. Combined, they create a liquid reputation layer.

• Native Composability: Reputation tokens can be used as collateral, staked, or delegated.
• Programmable Logic: Set conditions like "only wallets with >100 POAPs can mint."
• Incentive-Aligned: Contributors are directly rewarded for positive-sum behavior, moving beyond simple transaction history.

The first trillion-dollar use case. Today, DeFi lending requires 150%+ over-collateralization. A robust, private reputation layer could unlock under-collateralized loans based on proven on-chain cash flow and history, akin to a Decentralized FICO Score.

• Capital Efficiency: Unlock $100B+ in currently idle credit demand.
• Risk-Based Pricing: Interest rates dynamically adjust based on ZK-verified repayment history.
• Protocols at the Frontier: Goldfinch (off-chain) and Cred Protocol (on-chain) are early explorers.

Without a centralized identity anchor, any reputation system is vulnerable to cheap, automated account creation. This undermines governance, airdrops, and social graphs.

• Cost of Attack: Sybil creation costs can be as low as ~$0.01 per identity on some L2s.
• Real-World Impact: Degraded signal-to-noise in DAO voting and worthless reputation markets.

Reputation requires importing off-chain behavior (e.g., payment history, employment). This reintroduces centralized data providers like Chainlink or Ethereum Attestation Service, creating single points of failure and censorship.

• Data Integrity Risk: Oracles can be manipulated or go offline.
• Privacy Paradox: To verify, you must expose data, defeating the privacy premise.

Proposals for tradable reputation tokens (e.g., Friend.tech keys, ERC-20 reputation) ignore the core function of trust. If reputation is liquid, it can be instantly sold by bad actors post-exploit, rendering it useless.

• Adversarial Exit: A malicious actor can cash out reputation immediately after a breach.
• Market Failure: Creates perverse incentives to appear trustworthy only to sell the token.

For reputation to be universal, protocols like Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos apps must agree on standards and share data. This is a harder coordination problem than creating the underlying blockchains.

• Standard Wars: Competing frameworks from EIP-7007, Celestia, and others create fragmentation.
• Network Effects: The largest ecosystem (likely Ethereum) becomes the de facto arbiter, recentralizing power.

Your on-chain history is fragmented and uninterpretable. A 10,000 txn history on Uniswap is meaningless without context. This creates friction for undercollateralized lending, governance delegation, and sybil-resistant airdrops.\n- No Portability: Reputation is siloed within individual protocols like Compound or Aave.\n- No Composability: Can't build a unified credit score from across DeFi, DAOs, and Social.

Prove you're in the top 10% of Curve voters without revealing your address. ZK-proofs allow selective disclosure of attestations from sources like Gitcoin Passport, Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS), or Worldcoin.\n- Privacy-Preserving: Show you're credible, not your entire history.\n- Composable: Bundle credentials from DeFi, Git contributions, and POAPs into a single proof.

Reputation is worthless without trusted issuers. Focus on building or integrating with credible data oracles. This is the infrastructure layer for everything else.\n- Issuer Reputation Matters: An attestation from Coinbase vs. a random DAO carries different weight.\n- Standardize Schemas: Adopt EAS or IETF's VC-DATA-MODEL to ensure interoperability across Polygon ID, Disco.xyz, and Sismo.

The value isn't in hoarding user data; it's in the graph of trust relationships. Think The Graph for reputation. Build applications that leverage connected attestations for undercollateralized lending (RociFi, Spectral), sybil-resistant governance, and professional credentialing.\n- Network Effects: Each new issuer and consumer increases the graph's value.\n- Permissionless Innovation: Anyone can build a new reputation model on the open data layer.

This is the trillion-dollar use case. Use on-chain reputation to replace credit scores. A user can prove consistent DAI savings, timely loan repayments on Aave, and a verified Gitcoin Passport to access a loan at 50-80% LTV instead of 0%.\n- Instant Risk Assessment: Replace slow, opaque TradFi checks with a real-time ZK proof.\n- Capital Efficiency: Unlock $1T+ in currently idle social capital.

Don't let reputation become another oracle manipulation game. Anchor credibility in staked economic value. Systems like EigenLayer's restaking or optimistic challenge periods can slash malicious issuers. The cost to attack must exceed the value of the lie.\n- Skin in the Game: Issuers must stake tokens proportional to their attestation's impact.\n- Adversarial Design: Assume bad actors and build slashing conditions from day one.