Proof-of-Attendance

PoA tokens act as soulbound tokens (SBTs) or NFTs that serve as immutable proof of participation. This is used for:

• Conference & Festival Access: Replacing traditional tickets with non-transferable digital passes.
• Educational & Workshop Completion: Issuing certificates for attending a course or seminar.
• Community Governance: Granting voting rights in a DAO based on proven participation in key meetings.

Projects use PoA to create gamified loyalty systems where engagement is directly rewarded.

• Exclusive Airdrops: Event attendees receive token allocations or NFT mints unavailable to the public.
• Multi-tiered Benefits: Accumulating PoA tokens from multiple events unlocks higher membership levels, merchandise, or future discounts.
• On-chain Reputation: A wallet's collection of PoA tokens builds a verifiable history of community involvement, which can be used for whitelists or trust scoring.

PoA is a foundational primitive for decentralized identity (DID). A wallet's collection of attendance proofs creates a persistent, user-controlled record of real-world and digital activity.

• Sybil Resistance: Protocols can use a history of PoA tokens to distinguish unique humans from bots, as faking consistent physical attendance is difficult.
• Credential Verification: Employers or institutions can cryptographically verify an individual's claimed conference attendance or workshop completion.

PoA provides sponsors with verifiable, on-chain analytics for their event investments.

• Proof of Engagement: Sponsors receive immutable data on the exact number of verified attendees, moving beyond self-reported metrics.
• Targeted Campaigns: Sponsors can airdrop rewards or surveys directly to the wallets of proven attendees.
• ROI Measurement: The secondary activity of PoA tokens (like being displayed in profiles) provides clear metrics for brand exposure and engagement.

A standard PoA issuance involves a specific smart contract workflow:

1. Event Creation: Organizer deploys or uses a factory contract to define the event and minting rules.
2. Claim Mechanism: Attendees claim via a QR code scan, secret phrase, or cryptographic signature during a defined claim window.
3. Minting: The contract mints a unique token (usually an NFT/SBT) to the claimant's wallet address.
4. Verification: Anyone can independently verify the token's authenticity, issuer, and metadata on-chain.

Projects use PoA tokens as verifiable records of user participation to build on-chain reputation and reward engagement. Key implementations include:

• Governance weight: Holding PoA tokens from community calls or meetups can grant increased voting power in DAOs.
• Loyalty tiers: Accumulating attendance proofs unlocks higher membership levels with exclusive benefits.
• Airdrop eligibility: Serving as a Sybil-resistant filter to reward genuine community members, not bots.

This turns passive attendance into a reputational primitive within a protocol's social graph.

A specialized form of PoA that cryptographically proves a user was at a specific geographic coordinate. This enables:

• Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN): Verifying that a hardware node or hotspot is deployed at its claimed location.
• Geo-gated experiences or rewards: Unlocking content, NFTs, or token rewards only when a user's device provides a verified location signature.
• Supply chain provenance: Creating an immutable record of a physical asset's presence at key checkpoints.

This often relies on secure hardware elements or trusted execution environments (TEEs) for location signing.

PoA tokens act as verifiable credentials for completing educational milestones. They provide a decentralized alternative to traditional certificates by:

• Immutable proof of course completion, workshop attendance, or skill acquisition.
• Composability, allowing credentials from different institutions to be aggregated into a single, user-owned identity portfolio.
• Automated verification, enabling employers or other institutions to cryptographically confirm credentials without contacting an issuer.

This creates a user-centric, portable record of learning and professional development.

PoA mechanisms are used to verify that a specific data point was recorded by a trusted entity at a precise moment. This supports:

• Oracle networks: Where node operators provide a PoA signature alongside data submissions to prove direct observation or measurement.
• Audit trails: Creating tamper-proof logs for regulatory compliance, where each log entry is signed as proof of its creation time and source.
• Proof-of-existence: Notarizing a document or dataset by generating a PoA token at the time of its verification by a notary service.

Here, PoA shifts from proving human presence to proving agent or sensor presence at a data-generation event.

A Sybil attack is the primary threat, where a single user creates many fake identities to claim multiple attendance proofs. Protocols defend against this by linking proofs to a cryptographically verified device (e.g., via Bluetooth beacon handshake) or a biometric check-in. The security model depends on the cost and difficulty of spoofing this physical verification layer.

Attackers may attempt to geospoof their GPS location or relay signals from a legitimate device (a Wormhole attack) to fake attendance. Mitigations include:

• Using ultra-wideband (UWB) or NFC for precise, short-range verification.
• Employing secure elements on devices to prevent signal relay.
• Combining multiple sensors (GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth) with consensus among nearby devices.

PoA systems collect sensitive location and co-presence data (who was near whom). Key considerations:

• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) allow users to prove attendance without revealing full identity or precise timestamp.
• On-chain data should be minimized; proofs should be privacy-preserving attestations.
• Clear data retention and deletion policies are critical for compliance with regulations like GDPR.

The system's trustworthiness hinges on the verifier nodes or oracles that validate physical presence. This creates a trusted hardware or trusted operator assumption. Risks include:

• A malicious or compromised verifier issuing false proofs.
• Centralized verifiers becoming a single point of failure.
• Solutions involve decentralized validator networks with staking and slashing, or using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) like Intel SGX.

If PoA tokens grant governance rights or access, securing the minting and distribution mechanism is vital. Threats include:

• Flash loan attacks to manipulate governance if tokens are tradable.
• Collusion among attendees or validators to mint tokens for absent parties.
• Time-bound claim windows and non-transferable soulbound tokens (SBTs) are common mitigations to reduce financial attack surfaces.

The protocol's security extends to the physical venue. Attack vectors include:

• Theft or cloning of verification hardware (badges, beacons).
• Social engineering of event staff to bypass checks.
• Network jamming to disrupt Bluetooth or WiFi signals.
• Defense requires physical security protocols layered with cryptographic proofs, treating the venue as part of the trusted computing base.