By Trustful

Trustful v1 – System Decentralization, Quadradic Funding Reputation Based, Community Incentives and Developer Resources

SCF #30

$92.0K

Build

Awarded

Decentralizing/enhancing Trustful to enable limitless use cases, fostering a solid governance and reputation ecosystem on Stellar.

Products & Services

Next steps

The product is evolving from a MVP to a fully-fledged V1 platform that:

Utilizes Stellar Badges and Smart Contracts: Transitioning from a database to smart contracts on the Stellar network to enhance security, transparency, and decentralization.
Empowers User Profiles: Introduces user profiles that allow members to showcase their contributions and reputation within the Stellar ecosystem.
Enables Reputation-Based Groups/Communities: Allows the creation of reputation groups/communities where members define what is important within their context, leveraging Stellar ecosystem quests.

This V1 phase aims to build on the initial MVP by creating a more sophisticated and impactful reputation system that deeply integrates with the Stellar ecosystem, advancing beyond simple contributions to shape the future of community governance and resource distribution.

Trustful use cases and Stellar ecosystem growth

Creating Reputation-Backed Communities The system enables the creation of communities within the Stellar ecosystem that are backed by reputation data. This approach encourages the formation of small, active nodes of communities—whether they consist of developers, event organizers, or builders—based on shared interests and goals. These communities are formed through a series of reputation badges and corresponding scores. The badge system allows communities to define what is important to them through quests, thereby attracting and aggregating like-minded individuals. This leads to the establishment of specialized working groups that are aligned with the community’s values and objectives. By leveraging reputation data, these reputation-backed communities not only strengthen the social fabric of the Stellar ecosystem but also ensure that collaboration and growth are driven by shared commitments and contributions, rather than just token holdings.
Reputation as Data for Decision-Making Reputation data can be seamlessly integrated into decision-making processes, such as grant applications, to enhance the fairness and impact of resource allocation. Take, for instance, the user flow within the Stellar Community Fund (SCF). Applicants can link their wallets, along with the wallets of their team members involved in the project. These wallets will reflect the cumulative reputation earned within the Stellar ecosystem.

Check the use case flow here.

Some use cases drive:

First Stellar Quadradic Funding Reputation Based: In this incredible use case, reputation acts as a multiplier for voting power, allowing users with fewer tokens to amplify their influence based on their contribution to the ecosystem. By engaging in key activities such as participating in community quests, interacting with Stellar dApps, and maintaining an active presence, users accumulate reputation badges that can increase their voting power to a quadradic funding to small projects or events. What if the major Stellar conferences were funded this way from now on?
Incentivizing more members to register on the SCF dashboard: Encouraging broader participation by getting more community members to sign up and engage with the Stellar Community Fund (SCF).
Encouraging all team members of applicants to register and complete quests: Promoting the accumulation of reputation within the ecosystem, fostering quality interactions between Stellar and grantees.
Motivating active members to remain engaged: Offering the opportunity to earn reputation and be considered for roles such as ambassadors, voters, and other key positions, thus keeping them actively involved in the ecosystem.
Incentivizing interaction with dApps on Stellar: Encouraging engagement from users and builders, and attracting more high-quality protocols to the ecosystem by leveraging an active user base.

In summary:

The system encourages broader participation by motivating more members to participate in Stellar actions, thus increasing engagement with the Stellar Community Fund.

It promotes a culture where all team members of applicants are encouraged to sign up and complete quests, helping them build their reputation within the ecosystem. This approach fosters meaningful interactions between Stellar and its grantees.

Active members are incentivized to stay engaged by offering them the chance to earn reputation, making them eligible for important roles such as ambassadors, voters, grantees and other key positions. By driving interaction with dApps on Stellar, the system not only boosts user and builder engagement but also attracts more high-quality protocols to the ecosystem, benefiting from an active and thriving user base.

Soroban

Yes

Requested Budget

$92.0K

Success Criteria

Success in this context would be measured by both output and impact:

Output:
- Number of Reputation Badges imported, issued, and created
- Number of communities creating their own reputation frameworks
- Number of new users funding their wallets and using Trustful to interact with the Stellar ecosystem
- Increase in transactions related to reputation building and quadratic funding
- Builders creating and using wallets to receive funds, and the number of projects funded
Impact:
- Expanding financial access by enabling a broader range of users to engage with the Stellar ecosystem, especially those who may not have had access to traditional financial services.
- Democratizing funding by allowing smaller contributions to have a meaningful impact through the quadratic funding mechanism.
- Strengthening ecosystem participation by incentivizing more users to engage in governance and funding, thus building a more active and reputable community.
- Empowering builders by providing accessible funding and resources, enabling innovation and further growth within the Stellar ecosystem.

By focusing on both quantitative outputs and qualitative impacts, success would not only be about scaling numbers but also about the meaningful change these activities bring to the ecosystem and broader financial inclusion.

Go-To-Market Plan

Our go-to-market plan focuses on leveraging a quadratic funding event as a key launch strategy and integration with other dApps on Stellar

This event will serve as the first big real-world application of Trustful's reputation system, driving immediate engagement and showcasing the platform's unique value in decentralized governance and funding.

We plan to:

Engage key communities and partners within the Stellar ecosystem to participate in and promote the event, building early traction.
Activate growth strategies by incentivizing both participants and voters through reputation-based rewards, ensuring continuous engagement beyond the event.
Expand marketing efforts across social media, crypto forums, and partnerships with influential players in the Stellar space, highlighting the event as a milestone for the future of decentralized funding.
Showcase case studies and success stories from the event to attract additional communities, users, and developers to adopt and integrate Trustful’s reputation system.
Iterate quickly based on feedback from participants and early adopters, making improvements to drive long-term scalability and adoption.

The Funding Formula:

Matching Pool: A pool of funds is set aside by the Stellar Community Fund (SCF) to match donations from individual contributors. Trustful's reputation system will play a critical role in determining how these funds are allocated, leveraging reputation as a factor to amplify the impact of each contributor's support.
Donations: Individuals contribute to the projects they support, and those with a higher reputation on Trustful—earned through previous participation in the ecosystem—may have enhanced influence in the donation process. Their reputation can help boost the visibility and impact of their contributions in the quadratic matching process.
Quadratic Matching: The key to quadratic funding is the matching formula. The matching amount is calculated in a way that prioritizes breadth of support over the size of individual donations. In Trustful's system, reputation will be an additional layer that affects the matching calculation. The more individual contributors a project has, and the higher the reputation of these contributors on Trustful, the larger the matching amount it can receive. This means that even small contributions from highly reputable community members can have a greater impact than larger contributions from users with lower reputation.

Example:

User A: Contributes $50, has no reputation badges.
User B: Contributes $30, but has several reputation badges on Trustful, earning them a 5% reputation multiplier. Even though User B contributed a smaller amount, their reputation boosts their influence, making their contribution count for more in the quadratic funding calculation. This creates a system where reputation and community engagement play a central role, ensuring that projects are supported by a broad base of trusted and active participants.

Obs: This initiative is aimed at supporting and incentivizing contributors who drive education around Stellar and Trustful. A key growth strategy here is that projects receiving rewards through this QF round will be required to create educational content or projects related to Stellar and Trustful, giving a significant boost to both together.

Additionally, all participants will be using Trustful for this QF, allowing us to launch a real use case of reputation-driven resource allocation, this will generate further growth, as the round will be focused on educational projects about Trustful and Stellar, driving awareness and engagement across the community.

The growth: Users funding their Stellar wallet (this is where a partnership with Albedo or another wallet fits) ⬇ Hundreds of thousands of users interacting with the Stellar ecosystem to build their reputation ⬇ Users donating ⬇ Builders creating wallets ⬇ Builders funding their wallets ⬇ Builders receiving funding to build on Stellar ⬇ Builders creating projects to generate growth around Trustful <> Stellar

We also plan to:

Expand Trustful’s reputation use cases: By integrating real-time SCF data, we'll create new pathways for grantees and funders to engage with reputation-based funding.
Drive community adoption: The Stellar quests integration will encourage more users to participate and build reputation, enhancing engagement through SCF-related tasks.
Showcase new features: During the launch, we will promote the SCF API integration to highlight how Trustful can enhance transparency and efficiency in grant distribution.
Target developers and partners: By offering resources open-source and storybooks, we’ll attract developers and ecosystem partners to build on Stellar and use Trustful, further expanding its capabilities and use cases.

Note that some dApps, such as Tansu and also the Brazilian ambassadors community, are already prepared and taking the first steps to integrate Trustful into their activities. The QF round will take place after we achieve all the milestones, gather user feedback, and implement necessary improvements to ensure the QF round runs smoothly.

Traction Evidence

We launched an MVP as part of our first application – this is a Legacy project. This proposal is aimed at preparing the dApp to generate real traction moving forward. The MVP was recently presented to the community during a call on Discord, which helped us gather valuable feedback and insights on the platform’s usability. The feedback received will inform the next steps and improvements, setting the foundation for broader adoption and user engagement.

Tranche 1 (Deliverable Roadmap) - MVP

MVP is live! Feel free to access the dApp and issue your Reputation Early Adopter badge

The MVP was part of the Activation Award, and we have already presented it to the community, which received it positively and provided ideas for use cases (this is the spirit). We will soon have a dApp (Tansu) integrating Trustful for maintainer levels and to aggregate reputation for the participants involved in the dApp. In addition to the use cases we can implement to improve ambassador processes, resource allocation, and events on Stellar, we already have dApps that managed to find use cases.

Check the gathered feedback here.

Tranche 2 (Deliverable Roadmap) - Testnet

Milestone 1: Smart Contract Development and Decentralization

[Deliverable 1: Smart Contracts on Stellar]

Brief description: Development and deployment of multiple smart contracts on the Stellar network to manage reputation scoring and FeeBumps integration. How to measure completion: Smart contracts are deployed and functional on the Stellar testnet, passing initial tests. Estimated date of completion: December 2024

Rationale: This milestone involves building and testing multiple smart contracts, deploying them on Stellar, and ensuring proper decentralization. It also includes the integration of transaction management through Stellar’s FeeBumps, which requires back-end expertise.

[Deliverable 2: Decentralization of the Badges and Score reputation system]

Brief description: Ensure that reputation badges and scoring are decentralized, with contracts operating independently on Stellar. **How to measure completion:**Decentralization process completed, validated by multiple independent nodes. Estimated date of completion: December 2024

Rationale: Decentralizing the scoring process ensures that reputation data is securely managed and resistant to central control, which is critical for the long-term viability of the system.

Milestone 2: User Profile Features and Reputation Dashboard

[Deliverable 1: User Profiles]

**Brief description:**Development of user profile features integrated with the reputation system. How to measure completion: Profiles are created for users, displaying their reputation badges and community involvement. Estimated date of completion: December 2024

Rationale: Building user profiles and integrating them with reputation data requires both back-end and front-end development. This also includes design work for a user-friendly interface.

[Deliverable 2: Reputation Dashboard]

Brief description: Creation of a dashboard for users to view and manage their reputation across communities. How to measure completion: Fully functional dashboard available on the front-end, displaying user reputation data. Estimated date of completion: December 2024

Rationale: A reputation dashboard is essential for users to easily track and manage their progress, badges, and community standing, providing a transparent interface for engagement.

Milestone 3: Community Reputation Framework and Customization

[Deliverable 1: Community-Specific Reputation Tools]

Brief description: Tools for creating and managing customizable reputation frameworks for individual communities. How to measure completion: Communities can create their own reputation frameworks and manage them independently. Estimated date of completion: January 2025

Rationale: Creating customizable frameworks for different communities will require advanced logic in the smart contracts and a flexible UI for community administrators.

[Deliverable 2: Scoring Mechanisms and UI Development]

Brief description: Develop scoring mechanisms and user-friendly interfaces for community reputation management. **How to measure completion:**Scoring mechanisms and a flexible UI are available for community administrators to manage reputation. Estimated date of completion: February 2025

Rationale: This milestone involves more complex logic and integration with Stellar quests, ensuring a tailored approach to community reputation management.

Tranche 3 (Deliverable Roadmap) - Mainnet

Milestone 4: Code Review and Testing

[Deliverable 1: Deployment on Mainnet]

Brief description: Deploy the smart contracts and the entire system on the mainnet to enable full functionality and usage in a live environment. How to measure completion: Successful deployment on the mainnet with all necessary features functional and accessible to the users. Estimated date of completion: February 2025

Rationale: Deploying on the mainnet is crucial for transitioning from testing to a fully operational system, ensuring real-world application and adoption of the protocol.

[Deliverable 2: Code Review]

Brief description: Comprehensive review of the entire codebase.
How to measure completion: Completion of the code review with a report.
Estimated date of completion: February 2025
Rationale: A code review is essential to ensure the robustness and security of the system, given the sensitivity of reputation data.

[Deliverable 3: Testing of the Entire System]

Brief description: Thorough testing of smart contracts, front-end, and back-end systems to ensure seamless integration.
How to measure completion: System passes all predefined tests, with no critical bugs remaining.
Estimated date of completion: February 2025
Rationale: Extensive testing is necessary to identify and resolve any issues, ensuring the system functions smoothly across all components.

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.