Stellar Community Fund

By Trustful

Trustful

SCF #27

$50.0K

Legacy v5.0 Activation Award

Awarded

A reputation system using Stellar badges and on-chain data that prioritizes fair cross-community collaboration over wealth.

Products & Services

What the product is:

The product consists of a reputation aggregator system that utilizes Stellar badges and on-chain data, prioritizing contribution over plutocracy in DAOs and digital organizations governance, fostering engagement, and encouraging fair collaboration across organizations. The current approach of relying on token ownership for voting and participation has led to decreased community engagement among members. Additionally, individuals are less motivated to join new communities, fearing the time and effort it would take to establish their reputation from the ground up. Trustful is a verifiable and interoperable reputation dApp that addresses these challenges by establishing a framework where contributions as a Stellar community member are acknowledged. This system empowers members to influence the community they are dedicated to, not based only on economic power or tokens they possess but on the level of their commitment and efforts towards the community's future (Valocracy). A pioneering use case in the realm of reputation narrative.

What problems it solves, how it solves them, and what audience it solves them for (explain the benefits):

Problems addressed and Solutions:

1. Verifiable track record of past contributions and Valocracy 1.1 Absence of a history: make your story count and enhance your on-chain reputation with all past collaborations 1.2 Arbitrariness in role selection decisions: assign roles to those with more knowledge and building experience in specific areas, basing decisions on verifiable reputation – contribution-based role assignment 1.3 Certain Stellar Badges from the quests are tradable, enabling the badge-earning effort to be bought or sold, essentially invalidating any reputation tracking. Since quests are individual and showcase efforts, the solution would be the “soulbinding” of these badges, preventing the splitting of these efforts and encouraging the community to view them as active participation in the ecosystem rather than assets for buying and selling.

2. Coordination, Interoperability and Modularity 2.1 Lack of interoperability between ecosystems: portability matters, so take your Stellar reputation forward, participate in other communities, and show them what you've built on Stellar 2.2 Plutocracy and voting turnout: value valocracy, make your participation and contributions valuable and important; currently, governance tokens lead this front and are still based on monetary power and not always on contribution 2.3 Bribery: when we have a non-transferable reputation based on our verifiable contributions, bribery becomes harder. 2.4 Absence of an equitable community currency: a community coin can be created taking reputation into account; economic value may be considered, but reputation can be part of the governance equation 2.5 Voting system based only on token holdings amount: reputational systems, combined with delegate and time-stamp systems, can lead to a better equitative model for voting systems in digital organizations, by weighting the voting power by who are fit by reputation in the ecosystem, not only the amount of holdings.

3. High-quality community engagement and recognition 3.1 Lack of engagement: the ease of tracking progress stimulates increased engagement and optimal decision-making based on a unit with high reputation in a specific area

Most importantly, how it works and how it uses Stellar and/or Soroban:

Trustful is divided into two main branches: the badge issuers and the reputation scorers. The Badge Issuer allows the user to attest the ownership of assets they have and activity they’ve done, giving them a second “non-tradable asset”, which carries the necessary standard information for validating the holder’s reputation. For its initial version, Trustful will operate with a limited set of assets to verify, looking only at assets from: Stellar Quests, Soroban Quests, RPCiege, FCA00C, dApp Quests, and Okashi Cakewalk. The Reputation Scorer allows users to determine a list of “badge:multiplier” pairs, where they can determine what matters for their communities and give it the needed weight. Once a Scorer is created, it becomes openly available for anyone to use for checking one or multiple addresses' Reputation Scores against it. For its first version, the Scorers will be limited to checking assets issued on Trustful, with the same scope used for the Badge Issuer.

Why Stellar?

The main goal of Stellar is to make “blockchain meets the real world”, unlocking human and economic power. Our product aligns with this by connecting economic power to human efforts, by creating a system that allows organizations to fairly reward community members. With this use case, we position Stellar (a ready ecosystem to implement this use case) as a leader in human coordination within the decentralized space, reinforcing its ecosystem's leadership in the emerging narrative of reputation. “The Stellar Community Fund (SCF) is taking a significant step forward with its collaboration with BlockScience to develop Neural Quorum Governance (NQG).” [Source: https://medium.com/stellar-community/scfs-implementation-of-nqg-on-mainnet-open-source-08ca1656cfc8] – Stellar is also at the forefront of development and advancement in governance, with part of this study and development also involving reputation. The Product Manager from Blockful's team participated in a Blockscience community call to discuss GML and the reputation product (Trustful). With the utilization of Soroban and Stellar Badges, we have a ready-to-go use case to showcase to the decentralized community how aggregated reputation with scores can function for community rewards, governance, participation in open-source projects, and even for DeFi usage (imagine if DeFi protocols, in the future, start requiring lower collateral for loans for those with high reputation?). Stellar offers robust governance tools, enhancing its appeal. Additionally, Soroban's documentation is accessible, and the Stellar community facilitated the efficient creation of this use case. Creating a reputation system will bring the ecosystem of DAOs and governance researches to the Stellar environment, enhancing the range of use cases for the GML – Objective: To bootstrap collaboration on governance modules within and beyond the Stellar ecosystem through an accessible and agnostic library, contributing to a sustainable and representative governance of our digital future. [Source: https://medium.com/stellar-community/the-road-ahead-scfs-implementation-of-neural-quorum-governance-4f44d22fa370] The emerging Stellar ecosystem serves as a hub for experimentation and mutual contributions, enabling us to create new and more innovative use cases with the products already deployed and in use within the Stellar ecosystem.

Requested Budget

$50.0K

Team

Daniela Zschaber (Product Manager): Focused on on-chain reputation systems. Also a Web3 teacher in a post-graduate program, sharing knowledge on DAO governance and reputation in decentralized ecosystems.
Leonardo Vieira (Tech Lead): A skilled Rust developer with deep knowledge of the Stellar ecosystem. He has represented Trustful on stage at a Stellar event in Brazil, showcasing the project to the broader community.
Rascar (Junior Back-End Developer): Discovered Web3 through Blockful's initiatives, actively contributed to open-source projects, and transitioned from the community to becoming a full team member.
Douglas Falcão (Front-End Developer): A front-end developer dedicated to creating intuitive and user-friendly interfaces for Trustful’s dApp.