Soulbound tokens to celebrate your community and build on-chain reputation

The MintKudos team has been quietly developing for a while, and we’re excited to share that we’re officially in beta! Anyone can now mint a soulbound (non-transferable) token to capture, recognize, and celebrate community contributions using Kudos!

By minting Kudos tokens, you can build your on-chain identity and provide important context on what you’ve done, who you worked with, and which community you participated in... all with a celebratory twist!

And yes, gas (on-chain transaction fees) are completely on us, so Kudos is 100% free! We’re on Polygon so you’ll be able to see your Kudos on Opensea, Rarible, and more.

Want to try minting a Kudos? Follow the guide below 👇

Our story

The problem our team heard over and over again was the issue of talent management and identity rooted in the pseudonymous state of web3:

• Community managers face hiring and retention challenges because it’s difficult to gain visibility into who their top contributors are, what they’ve done, and what skills they have. It’s also top of mind for them to think of ways to meaningfully recognize community members in order to attract and retain talent.
• Community contributors aren’t able to port their reputation over from one organization to another. With every new community, reputation needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
• Community members often have little insight into the reputation of a core team, which is partly why scams happen so frequently.

We built MintKudos to turn your off-chain contributions, achievements, and endorsements into your on-chain reputation.

MintKudos is built with three key ingredients:

1. Authenticity. Kudos are soulbound (non-transferable), meaning that they can't be bought or sold. The record of your contribution will be owned by you and not anyone else. We’re creating a way for people to build out a genuine history of the great things they’ve done.
2. Community-first. When you create a Kudos, you associate a community with it. Once minted, others in your community can be a part of the celebration and will be able to further endorse your contribution.
3. Simplicity. From covering minting transaction fees to the confetti we add, every detail of the Kudos product experience is rooted with delight at its core in order to make the process of minting and claiming a Kudos as simple as 123.

Ultimately, MintKudos creates a world where the reputation you’ve built, accomplishments you’ve achieved, and contributions you’ve made are fully owned by you regardless of how pseudonymous you want to be and which communities you take part in.

Who should use MintKudos?

Community builders of an organization

Whether you’re in a DAO or a company, if you’re a community-builder that’s focused on building community engagement, give Kudos to document and show appreciation for active contribution as well as participation. Later on, when community members want to step up for more involvement, you can check their beautiful log of accomplishments to help inform your prioritization.

Individual contributors looking to build on-chain reputation

When you claim a Kudos that someone sent you, that Kudos becomes part of your online, decentralized identity. Over time, a collection of Kudos can become strong signals for community engagement and hiring.

We’re frequently asked “can I send myself a Kudos?” The answer is always YES. Whether you contributed to a project that you’re proud of or just got your first job in web3, give yourself a pat on the back and engrave it on the blockchain forever by sending yourself a Kudos!

Common ways to use MintKudos

You can give Kudos to your team, another group of people, or yourself! Here are some ways Kudos is already being used:

🍾 Celebrating project launches

In celebration of GenieXYZ’s new marketplace launch, EmilyNFT gave out Kudos to her entire company to commemorate everyone’s hard work and involvement.

💖 Appreciating community members

Metaintro’s one and only Lacey has been shouting out engaged contributors from her Discord community.

⭐️ Building out an on-chain resume

Kudos can be minted to commemorate professional milestones and new jobs.

✅ Tracking participation and attendance

• Albert from Alchemy rewarded Kudos to all attendees who completed the Alchemy ETHDenver NFT API workshop.
• DAOUnder community leaders Abhi and Isaac gave out Kudos to those who represented their group at a speaker panel during Blockchain week.

🎓 Giving out educational certifications

• Chainshot gave out certificates to their most recent graduation cohort in celebration of course completion.
• Our friends at Lirn.io have been issuing proof of knowledge Kudos to those who’ve successfully passed their knowledge tests.

🏆 Awarding hackathon prizes

Rohan and Peter at Alchemy gave out participation prizes to all of their employees during a recent internal hackathon.

💡Have a different use case in mind?

Have an important occasion coming up? Want special designs for your community? Ping us on Discord or DM us on Twitter, and we can design a custom Kudos for you! You can also book some time with the team here.

Roadmap

The MintKudos experience is just getting started! In the coming weeks, we’ll be working on ways to reduce the friction of giving and claiming Kudos even if you don’t know someone’s ETH address via Twitter and Discord handles! We’re also working on a Discord bot so community members can recognize each other’s efforts without leaving their conversation.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to all our early supporters for ideating and alpha testing with us — huge Kudos to all of you! In the past couple of weeks, we’ve fixed dozens of bugs and papercuts to make the Kudos creation and claim experience as smooth as possible. The Kudos team is now ready to share the product more broadly with the world! If you have any questions and would like to directly connect with the team, we’re just a Zoom or Discord call away.

P.S. We’re hiring across community & engineering! If you love what we’re doing, please reach out via Twitter!