Grading Humanity: the Role of Scores and a Balanced Approach

For as long as we can remember, humans have been intrigued by the concept of identity rating.

This idea has been pictured, quite distressingly, in Black Mirror’s Nosedive (Season 3, Episode 1). Here, the narrative revolves around a society obsessed with ratings, with such scores influencing vital aspects of life from access to medical treatment to air travel, and housing.

In the real world, scoring systems are prevalent in diverse domains like product reviews, campaign success metrics, and credit ratings.

However, not identities.

A concept such as identity rating is largely untouched, and for some, it invokes dystopian fears. For instance, debates on Reddit frequently dissect the Chinese Rating System, a complex mix of credit scores and app-based ranking, with stories of people denied train tickets due to low social scores.

The world of blockchain technology introduces a new perspective on this discourse. Every transaction, every interaction is recorded on-chain, creating a vast amount of data. By calculating this data into measurable metrics, we can start to compare not just wallets, but also identities. This could revolutionize loyalty programs, offer a more nuanced understanding of a person's activity, and highlight connections within the crypto space.

As we envisage a solarpunk utopia, the score concept is not something to discard. Instead, we need to focus on decentralization, on-chain data, and the access that scores provide. The dystopian fear that individuals with low scores could be deprived of basic human rights has been a major concern for the explorers.

This brings us to a critical postulate of scores: a high score in any system should provide you with advantages and perks, while a low score should never infringe on an individual's basic human rights. As we delve further into existing scoring solutions and our proposed approach, this principle will remain central.

How Are The Scores Used in Web3?

DAO

Participation in DAOs through actions such as development, voting, and contribution is a critical element in the decentralized web3 system managed by autonomous organizations. Tools that evaluate and reward specific contributions, activities, and involvement streamline the management of DAOs.

Karma, for instance, provides a scoring system that ranks users based on the volume and value of their contributions to a DAO. This reputation system not only allows visibility into a DAO's contributor activity but also aids in identifying emerging contributors and rewarding the most engaged ones.

Metopia acts as a framework that constructs a user-centric reputation system and facilitates governance and credential use cases relying on user reputation. It amalgamates contributor data from a plethora of sources, including NFT ownership history, off-chain records from Gitcoin and Discord, DAO governance history, and credential & identity tools like POAP, SBT, OAT, among others.

SourceCred, on the other hand, provides an impartial platform that assigns Cred scores based on contributions, which then forms the basis for distributing Grain tokens. It utilizes an algorithm to estimate the value a contribution or contributor brings to a project in totality. When a contribution is made, SourceCred's objective is to quantify that contribution in terms of "Cred", reflecting its overall value to the project.

Credit Scores

Lending-Borrowing activities and other on-chain data are utilized to regulate loan amounts or offer non-collateralized loans. The credit score, a tool widely accepted in the web2 world, has naturally found its place in web3.

RociFi, an on-chain credit scoring and capital-efficient DeFi lending protocol on Polygon, offers a solution that permits borrowers to secure fixed-term, fixed-rate stablecoin loans with minimal collateral. At the same time, it provides lenders with an opportunity to earn interest by depositing their assets into lending pools.

ARCx Credit, a decentralized credit market on the Polygon network, introduces dynamic maximum-LTV loans on ETH collateral, contingent on a borrower's DeFi Credit Score. This score, an assessment of credit risk for individual wallet addresses, is based on past on-chain borrowing activities. Through ARCx Credit, borrowers can gradually enhance their DeFi Credit Score and successively attain higher capital efficiency on their crypto-collateralized loans. The ultimate goal is to establish an accurate and efficient reputation-based credit market in DeFi.

ReputeX Score evaluates your creditworthiness and on-chain behavior within the Web3 ecosystem. It scrutinizes your wallet's activity across various blockchains to furnish an accurate Web3 credit score, utilizing their proprietary algorithm.

Spectral Finance's Real-time MACRO Score provides a detailed risk evaluation with customized risk levels and reason codes. The Multi-Asset Credit-Risk Oracle (MACRO) Score is a three-digit numeric representation of on-chain creditworthiness, computed by a machine-learning-based credit risk model, capable of almost immediate processing of the entire transaction history of provided wallet(s). It's essentially an on-chain credit risk assessment score, akin to a traditional credit score but derived from on-chain transactions and under the user's control.

Masa's initial release of Credit Score SBTs is a Web3 Credit Score SBT, developed in collaboration with Cred Protocol. Focusing on users' on-chain creditworthiness, Masa utilized the web3 credit score technology created by Cred Protocol and tokenized it within the Masa protocol, making it accessible for web3 users and lenders.

Security Scores

Security Scores play a pivotal role in research, as they evaluate projects based on a myriad of factors related to the safety of smart contracts, blockchains, and decentralized apps (dapps).

Skynet Security Score presents an innovative scoring system that inspects the real-time security status of projects, analyzing key on-chain and off-chain data. CertiK's scoring system spans most Web3 projects that are listed on popular cryptocurrency tracking platforms like CoinMarketCap.

De.Fi Shield is geared towards the automatic assessment of a user's entire DeFi portfolio's security level. It includes automated scans of token contracts and alerts users through a Smart Notifications System if any held tokens display high severity code issues and are classified as high risk. By analyzing all underlying contracts of a crypto portfolio, De.Fi Shield will provide information on the number of smart contract vulnerabilities found at each severity level and the overall security score of the portfolio.

Community Loyalty Programs

Analysing the on-chain activity to run the community loyalty programs such as an airdrop is a promising and challenging domain where projects aim to be able to provide the best insights on the target audience and create a line of communication between the projects and their potential audience or loyal users.

Galxe employs a system known as Galxe Passports, which serves as a dual-purpose mechanism for preventing Sybil attacks and evaluating wallet activity on-chain. This assessment is based on Galxe campaigns and additional wallet data.

Galxe recently announced a collaboration with Nomis to enhance their scoring system with cross-chain data.

The Gitcoin Passport is a widely recognized scoring solution. It's rooted in Gitcoin Badges and enables projects to compile a custom score check that caters to badges specifically crucial to each project.

Project Research

When seeking promising projects – often referred to as "gems" or "alpha" by retrodrop hunters – it's essential to evaluate the project's popularity. This includes investigating potential speculation opportunities through social media research using tools like TweetScout, Twitter Score, Moni.

TweetScout serves as a rating system for crypto-related Twitter accounts. The score rises based on the number and influence of well-known crypto personalities, projects, and fund employees who follow the account.

Twitter Score performs an analysis of crypto accounts, tracking trending web3 projects and coins. It automatically generates scores for Twitter accounts based on their popularity within the crypto sphere.

Moni Discover Score is an alpha-searching platform designed for the so-called Degenerates. It categorizes all projects by an ML-based score, type (NFT, DeFi), and the number of smart followers.

Careers

The scoring system in the professional field excites a lot of builders and many web3 enthusiasts attempt at crafting the system that would help assess the candidates and make better hiring decisions with assistance of on-chain data and verifiable credentials.

Morfyus uses a scoring tool known as Kreds, which acts as the platform's reputation currency. This system allows freelancers to establish their credibility and trustworthiness by completing projects, securing recommendations, and demonstrating their skills and professionalism. As a result, freelancers can accumulate Kreds, which factor into their overall reputation score. A higher Kred count signifies greater reliability and reputation to potential clients and employers.

Kleoverse is another platform that operates under a similar premise, collecting credentials and determining a leaderboard based on skill tokens that can be minted on the platform. Freelancers and job seekers have the opportunity to verify and mint their badges, thereby enhancing their credibility when applying for positions.

PNTHN, on the other hand, resembles LinkedIn in the NFT space. It enables various community members, including moderators, designers, and contributors, to showcase their involvement in NFT projects on their PNTHN profiles. Moreover, PNTHN utilizes NFTs as a means of verifying credibility, thereby adding a unique layer to decentralized credentialing.

Popula, a NEAR infrastructure tool, offers three primary services to community developers. Firstly, Popula's community platform empowers developers to enhance their creations and foster social engagement. Secondly, Popula's Drips System issues non-transferable tokens to acknowledge value-added behavior within the community, thereby reflecting member reputation, contribution, and commitment. Lastly, Popula’s Community Economy Protocol Set harnesses the Drips System to align the community's goals and interests, enabling growth and creations and assisting creators in monetizing and incentivizing member co-creation.

Lastly, SOURC3 serves as an on-chain reputation system for software developers in the blockchain sphere. It functions as a cross-collaboration software development platform, akin to GitHub. Users can migrate their code from GitHub to SOURC3, which offers an open-source, decentralized, and censorship-resistant environment. SOURC3 connects decentralized identities, contribution provenance, and on-chain metadata to drive a new standard they refer to as KYD, or "Know Your Developer."

Reputation

The realm of on-chain activity presents a myriad of potential use cases. For instance, Degenscore offers a unique service where it calculates a score based on a user's activity across different protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) like 1inch, Aave, Lido, Rainbow, and more. This score is then minted as an on-chain asset.

Nomis is a wallet scoring and credentials protocol which helps on-chain developers build better DeFi products. By analyzing the wallet stats such as a wallet age, total transactions, transaction time and interaction with the different protocols on multiple chains, Nomis is able to provide the score that represents the wallet reliability.

Orange Protocol is a reputation and trust minting protocol that aggregates data and Web3 reputation models to generate comprehensive reputation proofs in the form of Verifiable Credentials and NFTs.

It can be used to objectively calculate and assess the "reputation" for a Decentralized Identifier (DID), and associated wallet addresses. It takes multiple data points into account to assess user behaviour and preferences, including on-chain (transactions, protocols interaction, etc) and off-chain (in-app data, reviews, KYC, etc) data.

{r}elinkd score

At {r}elinkd we are focused on building the scoring model that would include the on-chain and off-chain data, but also allow us to verify and mint the credentials that are not yet verifiable.

By creating your {r}elinkd profile on https://relinkd.xyz/, you gain the score that evolves as you grow your credentials pack.

While the web3 credentials are available on-chain and the challenge is to get the data and display it, the web2 credentials do not exist in the web3 world at all.

When minting the credentials through the {r}stamp, anyone can get their web2 credentials verified through the DAO and attested therefore.

Of course, there will be issues with verification but as the scores, reputation and DAO evolve, the credentials will be more and more truly verifiable.

Scores: Where It All Leads and Is It Scary?

While the credit scores are the ones that are more or less known to the world already, the reputation mechanisms built on blockchain, the community loyalty programs and utilizing credentials in the professional space are still on the conceptualization stage.

Web3 enthusiasts have contradictory thoughts about the scores implementation as for the sybil attackers the scores increase the cost of the attack and for the legit users the obligation of proving the wallet score often meets the need of creating a new wallet due to the previous being compromised and therefore losing all the data attached to that specific address.

And this opens a lot of the challenges for the builders to solve – the ability to port the credentials, account abstraction and identity concepts vs the wallet address, creating composable systems and allowing easy and quick access to the identities from different dapps.

Anyways, we are all saved by the decentralization and the probability of not having access to something essential like train tickets because of our web3 score is almost non-existent.

So may the scores bring the Solarpunk future of transparency and data for the informed decisions.