The Launch

In our previous post, we announced the launch of 0xFrens Kudos. Kudos is part story, part gift - a way for someone to express and show appreciation for an act of kindness. In the story portion, the Kudos sender describes why they're sending Kudos - what kind act of kindness did the recipient do that deserves it? In the gift portion, the sender specifies a small number of MATIC tokens to gift the recipient.

Kudos leverages on-chain transparency and social recognition to create reputation for web3 users. Instead of asking individuals to market their thoughts (i.e Twitter) or market their job history (i.e LinkedIn), Kudos asks the community to showcase the best from an individual on a regular basis.

Why Tokens?

Unlike other “kudos-esque” concepts in web3, 0xFrens Kudos heavily encourages users to attach a MATIC gift to each Kudos. This is important to ensure Kudos isn’t just a cheap writing contest. Think “upvote” vs “Reddit Gold.”

There are a number of projects in the ecosystem that have gotten significant traction gamifying check-ins, participation, and onboarding. While these projects are obviously valuable, they do little to create identity and reputation. Just because someone showed up to a Decentraland event, doesn’t make them any more reliable than the next person over.

Social endorsements, on the other hand, are unique and high signal. Someone who has earned Kudos managed to achieve something socially valuable: a far cry from someone who simply followed a set of cookie cutter instructions to earn a badge. If the Kudos comes from someone you know or someone in the same community, the signals are even more significant.

Algorithmic Web of Trust

We can look at Kudos as edges in a social graph. Every Kudos is a signal of trust: I trust this person enough to send them recognition and MATIC tokens. The graph that results is a web of trust. Let’s rewind to the internet of the late 1990s: by analyzing inlinks and outlinks, Google deployed the PageRank algorithm to determine which pages are more dependable than others. Kudos can be used in the same way: by analyzing the tokens in each Kudos and using them as weights, we can measure and calculate authority for each and every address. The openness of on chain data means Kudos can be analyzed by everyone and composed with other signals to make even better reputation systems.

Community Reputation

Kudos and the resulting reputation doesn’t stop at the individual level. It can bring reputation to a community as well. Soon, we’ll be launching community pages listing recent kudos sent / received in the community. All else being equal, would you rather join a community with lots of people helping each other (as detailed by Kudos), or would you rather join a community full of hype and hot air? Kudos brings transparency to community engagement and spur communities into positive competition: instead of pushing members to hype up token prices, communities will be incentivized to enable real connections among their members. Communities that fail to do so will lose members to more helpful communities.

Unlocking a new Internet

On-chain reputation that can be instantly accessed and digitally read will change the way we interact online. The way people trust and collaborate will change forever. Imagine only receiving message requests and comments from people that are trustworthy. Imagine jumping into DAO discussions knowing your counterparts are dependable. Imagine if we can skip all the 6 hours behavioral interviews and instantly match members to bounties / jobs based on their reputation. This is just applying reputation to problems we have today: there’s a lot more that we haven’t envisioned yet.

Discord? Telegram? More?

As a soft launch, 0xFrens Kudos will only be enabled for existing users of the 0xFrens web app. We’re aware that most web3 community occur in Discord & Telegram, and we’re more than interested in bringing the Kudos product to these platforms. Imagine if you can easily send kudos to someone via Discord when they do spent great efforts to answer question in the #help channel. Community engagement is about to change forever!

Let’s Get Your Community Onboard

If this sounds exciting to you or your community, message us on Twitter https://twitter.com/0xfrensxyz. We’re ready to build the future of web3 🙂