Almost daily, we rely on people we trust to help us navigate our life choices. When faced with important decisions, the opinion of a trustworthy person or friend is often more credible and valuable than any other source of information.
Reputation is the very social construct that facilitates human interactions in any society. We conduct business collaborations through reputation. We choose service providers through reputation. We make governance decisions through reputation. In fact, effective and ethical reputation systems help differentiate between high signal and noise, providing a trust layer for meaningful and frictionless human coordination.
Even for people to participate online across internet communities, search engines and marketplaces — a layer of trust, safety and reputation became essential in enabling more people to transact and coordinate digitally.
Imagine looking up information online without Google Search (powered by PageRank), or buying something on eBay or Amazon without knowing if a seller had good reviews or ratings. These internet marketplaces scaled to billions of users by creating and controlling a trust and safety layer. Through this layer, marketplaces were able to power important services like search, ranking and recommendations.
However the reputation layer of our world is becoming opaque and controlled by a single or few entities. As our digital footprints explode online, we’ve grown more efficient at coordinating with each other. This has come at a huge cost of privacy violations and risks of losing access to platforms we heavily rely on. The source and reasoning behind reputation are locked behind closed doors, while personal data become corporate proprietary assets.
Our need for finding reliable information or trustworthy people extends to web3.
Web3 applications are creating new peer-to-peer (p2p) marketplaces and communities, but lack mechanisms to instill a trust and reputation layer so that users can take informed actions. Enabling trust in decentralized systems or permissionless p2p communities is hard. The identity layer in web3 will look very different from web2 — sybil resistant, user-owned and privacy preserving.
The main difference will be that no central party shall be trusted to own and organize data about users and their actions. User data is essentially owned by the users (via PKI), open to benefit from composability, and must withstand sybil attacks.
Today, application developers have no choice but to pass on the cost of trust and reputation to end users. This has become a big hurdle for users to participate in web3 applications safely and securely. It’s scary when you don’t have an idea whether or not you can trust the counter-party (wallet) you are transacting with online.
It’s not uncommon in crypto to get scammed by users or wallets without any sources of trust or reputation. Both new and experienced users are losing their savings to rug pulls when decisions are made based on online information, Twitter hype and even their own biases.
The reality today is that majority of social connections and networks in web3 still remain largely off-chain, leaving word-of-mouth information limited to one-on-one interactions or small social circles. Without an easy and verifiable way to create a trust and reputation layer, users will not transact and coordinate in web3 at scale.
Web3 is missing a core public infrastructure that developers can leverage to create context specific rankings and recommendations and enable a trust layer in their applications.
The conundrum of trust in decentralized systems presents a challenge: On one hand, a central authority cannot be trusted to manage information ranking and suggestions. On the other hand, establishing trust through reputation in a decentralized system is a difficult task.
We believe that online communities will coordinate and transact on crypto rails without depending on centralized gatekeepers of trust and reputation. Users will be able to search for trustworthy communities, NFTs, contributors, counter-parties through an open, shared and configurable trust and reputation system.
In an effort of building a better version of the internet, web3 communities have to address the critical need to build a better reputation layer for it too.
We envision it to be based on social or peer-to-peer attestations, making it accessible, verifiable and sybil-resistant within a decentralized network.
We envision it to be open, modular and composable, built to work for different contexts and projects across chains and ecosystems.
We envision it to curate honest algorithms using open data, run by communities and based on reputation signals which are configurable and resilient to centralized forces or collusion.
We see it not only as our mandate, but also as a broader goal of enabling public infrastructure to solve the many problems arising from day-to-day coordination issues in web3 communities. With an open reputation system available as a public utility and infrastructure, web3 will be able to truly scale and onboard more users.