Reputable

Inspiration

How can we retain the principles of a trustless system whilst also building trust where it is needed?

Many activities in Web3 are held back by the prevailing distrust of pseudo-anonymous identities. Interactions and communication are limited by the inability to verify relevant information about another’s identity. Web2 overshares, but Web3 currently undershares. Certain degrees of trust are needed in governance, in community-participation, in trading, in communication and more.

Web3 technology presents an opportunity to decouple information pertaining to a single identity into multiple. This allows individuals to tailor the information they provide about their identity to the specific context they’re acting in. Giving individuals control over what data they share with a decentralized application, restores their privacy where it matters.

Governance is particularly impacted by an inability to build trust between delegates, delegators, DAO members and the community. As DAOs continue to grow, trust in governance will become ever-more challenging whilst equally ever-more critical to their long-term success.

Existing solutions focus on proving ‘human identity’ through encrypted off-chain and web2 verifiers, e.g. government ID and social channels. Others use token-based systems which are either restrictively non-transferrable or the opposite and open up concerns around trade and monetisation of reputation.

We need a reputation system that uses metrics which are relevant to the context it’s being used in. A reputation system that empowers inclusivity rather than exclusivity; where contextual reputation helps to inform web3 users’ decisions, not make the decision for them. The impact and weight of the context on an individuals’ decision or interaction should be up to them to decide. Reputation and trust are subjective and cannot be universally set.

The NEAR ecosystem has multiple projects which can be used to inform the reputation of an identity. NEAR builders uniquely focus on bringing humanity and accessibility into their projects which creates a diverse dataset of participatory activity to pull from. Aurora governance activity, AstroDAO participation, Mintbase store approval, Niche community memberships, vSelf identities, they are all examples of reputation building in the community which can be used to build context around an identity.

What it does

Reputable uses the NEAR ecosystem to bring together reputation metrics for governance.

An individual can use Reputable to build a ‘reputation-in-context’ for their NEAR identity, using information and activity associated with their NEAR addresses. For example, the number of successful proposals they have positively voted in or relevant communities they are a part of. Each individual can attach the metrics they choose to represent them to their identity on the governance platform.

Activity from multiple wallet addresses can also be combined to build a singular ‘reputation-in-context’. This gives users more flexibility with their identity fragmentation, and equally enables people to act as guarantors for others by letting them bootstrap to their reputation. Newcomers can then earn trust quickly with the community and take on an active role. Time in the ecosystem does not always equate to credibility and should not act as a barrier to entry. Similar to maintainers for open source projects, when one decides to stop they need someone excited by the project to replace them.

When a delegator is choosing a delegate they can view the delegatees Reputable reputation and it can help to inform their decision and build trust with their chosen delegate. When the DAO council are reviewing the number of votes given to delegatees, they can view the Reputable reputation of the delegators to identify any bad actors and provide more context to the decided-vote.

The Reputable reputation does not restrict anyone from participating in governance activities, it simply acts as a contextual informer. Platforms or DAOs may choose to set a Reputable threshold where individuals below the threshold cannot participate, however this decision lies with the governing body and not Reputable.

How we built it

For the MVP, we used Aurora’s governance as an example. The Aurora project is governed by the AuroraDAO. Aurora’s new decentralized governance platform will allow holders of $VOTE to vote on the constituency of the Council. The Council vote on and manage high-level protocol matters. Aurora+ users earn $VOTE through staking, and the amount of tokens a user can earn is directly proportional to the duration and the amount of tokens being staked. $VOTE owners can either directly vote to elect a new DAO member (= a new member of the council), or send their $VOTE to a third party delegate to vote for them. With Reputable, $VOTE owners will be able to see the contextual reputation of those they are considering to elect as new DAO members or third party delegates.

We used Covalent’s unified API to pull data on governance engagement and Aurora ecosystem engagement. This information tells us about an address’ previous interactions in governance and staking.

Challenges we ran into

One of the key challenges we faced was being able to find information on governance contracts and interactions with projects on Aurora. To workaround this we had to manually identify project’s on-chain governance projects. To get the relevant data points, we had to filter through many transactions to find the right logs and contract calls which was helped by Covalent’s ‘Primer’.

For the MVP we were only able to gather information for a single address. However, using zero-knowledge proofs, addresses could be linked to combine reputation-activities whilst maintaining address owners privacy around the address relationship or relationships.

We also wanted to integrate relevant data points from AstroDAO and Mintbase but we ran out of time. In other cases integrations would require development to be completed on the side of the platform, such as vSelf who are still working on launching sub-profiles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We met with the people making the NEAR ecosystem what it is today, including community managers, product people and the team, such as Nate from Mintbase, Oli from the NEAR foundation, Austin from Pagoda, Zaven from Niche and Eric Abensur amongst others. We used direct feedback from them and insights from talks such as Sheila Warren’s, to understand what the best and most useful MVP might look like.

We started from scratch with NEAR development, and although more limited in functionality than we had planned, we still managed to deploy a working prototype.

What we learned

We learned:

• How to use Covalent’s API for Aurora, and how to use Primer effectively.
• About the infrastructure underlying Mintbase and Mintbase stores.
• About Aurora’s roadmap for decentralized governance.
• About vSelf’s roadmap for decentralized identities and identity fragmentation.

What's next for Reputable

This is a v1 reputation system focussed on governance. We plan to support many other positive and negative influences which give relevant context to an identities reputation for interactions where trust is needed; such as governance, work employment relationships & recruitment, lending, gaming, DAOs.

Built With

• covalent
• react
• vercel