Contribution Graph

The most direct measure of developer work, encompassing the creation and maintenance of a project's core logic. This includes:

• Smart Contract Deployments: Deploying new contracts to mainnet or testnets.
• Contract Upgrades: Executing proxy upgrades or deploying new implementation contracts.
• Governance Proposal Code: Submitting executable code for on-chain governance votes.

These actions are weighted by their technical complexity and on-chain finality.

Tracks active participation in a protocol's decentralized decision-making processes. Key actions include:

• Voting: Casting votes on governance proposals using native tokens or veTokens.
• Proposal Submission: Creating and sponsoring formal governance proposals.
• Delegation: Receiving or managing voting power delegation.

This category measures a contributor's role in guiding protocol evolution and parameter settings.

Measures actions that directly secure the network or protocol's economic layer. Primary contributions are:

• Staking & Delegating: Locking tokens in staking contracts or delegating to validators.
• Providing Liquidity: Depositing assets into decentralized exchange (DEX) pools or lending markets.
• Running Infrastructure: Operating nodes, validators, or oracles (often tracked via associated reward addresses).

These actions signal skin-in-the-game and commitment to network health.

Captures off-chain contributions that drive adoption and knowledge sharing. This includes:

• Documentation & Education: Publishing high-quality technical tutorials, documentation updates, or blog posts.
• Community Support: Providing consistent, high-value answers in developer forums like Stack Exchange, Discord, or GitHub issues.
• Bug Reporting & Security: Submitting detailed bug reports or vulnerability disclosures through official channels.

These contributions are often verified via GitHub, forum profiles, and issue trackers.

Highlights work that supports the broader ecosystem beyond a single application. Tracked contributions include:

• Library & SDK Development: Creating and maintaining open-source libraries, client SDKs, or development frameworks used by other projects.
• EIP/ERC Standards: Authoring or contributing to Ethereum Improvement Proposals or Ethereum Request for Comments that become widely adopted.
• Infrastructure Tools: Building block explorers, indexers, or other public goods for developers.

This measures a developer's multiplicative impact on the entire blockchain stack.

Not all contributions are equal. Scoring algorithms apply context-aware weighting based on factors like:

• Network: A mainnet deployment carries more weight than a testnet action.
• Complexity: A novel smart contract is weighted higher than a simple token transfer.
• Impact: Contributions to high-TV L protocols or widely used standards receive greater consideration.
• Uniqueness: Sybil-resistant graphs discount repetitive, low-effort actions to highlight meaningful work.

A Contribution Graph aggregates on-chain and off-chain activity to create a verifiable reputation profile. Its primary purpose is to quantify and visualize contributions that are not captured by simple token holdings, enabling merit-based systems for governance, airdrops, and access.

• On-chain data: Transactions, smart contract interactions, liquidity provision, and gas spent.
• Off-chain data: Governance forum posts, code commits (GitHub), documentation, and community moderation.
• Purpose: Serves as a decentralized alternative to traditional credit scores or resumes, proving consistent and valuable participation.

Contribution Graphs synthesize data from multiple layers of ecosystem interaction to build a comprehensive profile.

• Protocol Usage: Frequency and volume of interactions with core smart contracts (e.g., swaps, stakes, borrows).
• Governance Activity: Voting history, delegation, and quality of governance forum proposals/discussions.
• Development Work: Code commits, pull requests, bug reports, and smart contract deployments linked to a verifiable identity.
• Community Building: Content creation, translation work, event organization, and support in social channels.
• Financial Commitment: Total Value Locked (TVL), liquidity provision depth, and longevity of stakes.

Several projects and protocols are building infrastructure to create, standardize, and utilize Contribution Graphs.

• Gitcoin Passport: Aggregates decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials from various web2 and web3 platforms to compute a reputation score.
• SourceCred: An algorithm that weights and scores contributions within a community, originally used by projects like MetaMask and Ethereum.
• Coordinape: Uses peer-to-peer recognition (GIVE circles) to map and reward community contributions.
• Project-Specific Graphs: Protocols like Optimism track contributions for their Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RetroPGF) rounds, directly linking on-chain activity to grant allocation.

While often associated with token distribution, Contribution Graphs enable a wider range of meritocratic systems.

• Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RetroPGF): Objectively reward past contributors to an ecosystem based on proven impact.
• Governance Power: Allocate voting weight based on contribution depth rather than just token wealth (Proof-of-Participation).
• Access Gating: Grant exclusive access to beta features, protocol discounts, or real-world events based on contribution tier.
• Sybil Resistance: A robust contribution history makes it economically costly to fake multiple identities, protecting community initiatives from manipulation.
• Talent Discovery: DAOs and projects can identify and recruit active, skilled contributors directly from the graph data.

Building a universal, composable Contribution Graph faces significant technical hurdles.

• Data Composability: Aggregating data across different blockchains and off-chain platforms requires standardized schemas and oracles.
• Verifiable Credentials: Using W3C Verifiable Credentials and DIDs to prove the ownership and authenticity of off-chain claims (e.g., a GitHub commit).
• Privacy & Selective Disclosure: Allowing users to prove aspects of their contribution (e.g., "I have >50 commits") without revealing their entire activity history.
• Score Manipulation: Designing algorithms that are resistant to gaming, such as meaningless transactions or low-quality spam contributions.
• Interoperability: Efforts like Ceramic Network and Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) aim to create portable, shared data backbones for reputation.

The long-term vision positions the Contribution Graph as the foundational layer for professional identity in a decentralized economy.

• Portable Reputation: A user's graph becomes a soulbound asset (non-transferable NFT) that travels with them across DAOs, protocols, and metaverses.
• Automated Incentive Alignment: Smart contracts could automatically reward specific contribution types (e.g., bug fixes, liquidity in new pools) based on verifiable graph data.
• Decentralized Job Markets: Freelance work and bounties are automatically verified and recorded, building a persistent record of expertise.
• Credit & Underwriting: DeFi protocols could use contribution history as a proxy for trustworthiness, offering better loan terms to proven community stewards.
• The shift is from "Proof-of-Stake" to "Proof-of-Contribution," valuing work and participation alongside capital.

At its core, a Contribution Graph is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where nodes represent contributions (e.g., code commits, governance votes, liquidity provision) and edges represent dependencies or attestations. This structure prevents cycles, ensuring a clear, non-circular lineage of work and influence. Key properties include:

• Immutability: Once recorded on-chain, node and edge data cannot be altered.
• Verifiability: Each contribution can be cryptographically verified back to its origin.
• Composability: Contributions can reference and build upon prior nodes, creating a traceable history.

Edges in the graph are often implemented as cryptographic attestations or proofs. Common standards include:

• EIP-712: Used for signing typed structured data, enabling off-chain contribution signaling with on-chain verification.
• Verifiable Credentials (W3C VC): A standard for cryptographically secure, privacy-preserving attestations of claims.
• Merkle Proofs: Used to efficiently prove membership of a contribution within a larger set or snapshot. These mechanisms allow third parties to trustlessly verify the existence and attributes of a contribution without relying on a central database.

The Contribution Graph concept is heavily inspired by Git's commit history, which is itself a DAG. In this analogy:

• A commit hash is a unique, immutable node.
• Parent commits form the directed edges, creating a lineage.
• Branches and merges demonstrate how contribution histories can diverge and reconverge. Blockchain-based graphs extend this model by making the DAG publicly verifiable and resistant to revision, applying it to actions beyond code, such as financial transactions or governance participation.

Projects like Compound and Uniswap use Contribution Graphs to track governance influence. For example:

• A proposal vote is a node attributed to a delegate's address.
• The voting power behind that vote is an edge weighted by the delegate's vote weight (derived from token holdings).
• The passage or failure of a proposal becomes a child node dependent on the vote nodes. This creates an auditable graph of decision-making power and outcomes, essential for analyzing delegate performance and protocol evolution.

Platforms like Gitcoin Grants and Radicle implement Contribution Graphs to quantify open-source work. Contributions are structured as:

• Nodes: Pull requests, issues, grants funding, or code reviews.
• Edges: Reviews approving a PR, funding allocated to a project, or forks of a repository.
• Attestations: Peer reviews or community endorsements signed with a developer's key. This graph forms the basis for soulbound tokens or non-transferable reputation scores, moving beyond simple commit counts to a web of verifiable, interdependent work.

Emerging standards aim to make Contribution Graphs interoperable across different protocols and chains. This involves:

• Schema Standards: Defining common data models (e.g., using JSON Schema or Protocol Buffers) for contribution events.
• Cross-Chain Attestation: Using bridges or interoperability protocols (like IBC or LayerZero) to verify contributions from one chain on another.
• Aggregate Graphs: Composing sub-graphs from Ethereum, Solana, and off-chain activity into a unified view of a participant's impact. The goal is a portable, multi-chain reputation and contribution history.

The raw data source for a Contribution Graph, consisting of all transactions, smart contract interactions, and token transfers recorded on a blockchain. This immutable ledger provides the foundational events that are analyzed to determine user contributions.

• Examples: Token swaps, liquidity provision, governance votes, NFT mints.
• Key Property: Publicly verifiable and timestamped.

The property of a system that resists Sybil attacks, where a single entity creates many fake identities to gain disproportionate influence. Contribution Graphs are a core tool for Sybil resistance, as they analyze the quality, diversity, and cost of on-chain actions to distinguish between unique contributors and sybil clusters.

• Application: Used in retroactive funding (e.g., Gitcoin Grants) and decentralized governance to weight votes.

A funding mechanism that rewards past contributions to ecosystem development. A Contribution Graph is the scoring engine for this model, quantifying the value of historical work to allocate funds fairly.

• Protocol Example: Optimism's RetroPGF rounds use contribution analysis to distribute millions in funding to developers, educators, and community builders.
• Mechanism: Maps contributions → scores contributors → distributes rewards.

A cryptographic statement issued by one entity about another, often used to build a portable reputation system. Attestations can be integrated into a Contribution Graph as a verifiable signal of trust or proven work outside of pure financial transactions.

• Standard: Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) provides a schema for creating on- and off-chain attestations.
• Use Case: Proving participation in an IRL event, verifying a skill, or delegating reputation.

The quantitative measures derived from analyzing a Contribution Graph to evaluate user behavior and network health.

• Degree Centrality: Number of connections (edges) a node (user) has.
• Transaction Volume & Frequency: Measures economic activity and consistency.
• Cluster Analysis: Identifies tightly-knit groups, which can signal collaborative projects or potential sybil rings.
• Time-Based Analysis: Evaluates longevity and timing of contributions.

A user-controlled, portable identity standard that is not dependent on a central registry. A Contribution Graph can serve as a verifiable data source for a DID, providing evidence of a user's history and reputation across different applications (their on-chain resume).

• Standards: W3C Decentralized Identifiers.
• Benefit: Enables trustless verification of a user's provenance and contributions without revealing personal data.