Spoiler alert, you can now build your on-chain reputation by using Decentralised Social Media! Today we explore a tool that makes it possible — LensScore, our hackathon project which has won awards sponsored by Aave and Celo! Potential areas of use include:
- Lending: Calculating on-chain credit score;
- Communities: The creation of exclusive communities with access permissioned by minimum wallet LensScore, reputation-based whitelisting for app alpha access; defining addresses eligible for an airdrop based on the score; specific Discord privileges based on the score;
- Security: Fighting against bots in your decentralized forum by granting access only to people with a certain score;
- Credentials: Searching for potential business partners based on their on-chain reputation and contributions.
Based on data retrieved from the leading protocol in decentralized social media — Lens Protocol by Aave team. The fastest way to learn about it? Check out the short Kyiv Tech Summit submission of LensScore 👇:
A new future both for content creators and consumers
Decentralized Social Media offers a variety of new possibilities for users to extract value. Let’s think about some examples:
- What if you could refine YouTube for a different application with the exact same content but a completely different recommendation algorithm? The new one would recommend only hyper-valuable deep-dive videos on topics of your interest (instead of empty clickbaits sucking up your time).
- What if you could quickly turn quality content creation into a viable business model?
No more straining to get millions of empty subscribers. Now it makes perfect financial sense to create artisanal content for a group of superfans.
Today we are adding one more fundamental question to this list:
What if you could build your reputation based on your Decentralized Social Media activity?
The faults of current online reputation
Let’s face it, the Web2 online reputation is broken. First of all, you need to disclose your full identity to keep on gaining trust. Secondly, since the reputation gained on one platform is not transferable to another one — your level 7,211 Paladin on Forum A, does not matter in Forum B, as you cannot prove you’re the same user across two platforms.
Even if you wanted to stay within just one platform, there are still more problems to overcome. In order to make the reputation usable, you have to pass a very high threshold of recognizability. This is traditionally measured by the follower count. In other words, only when you reach a “critical mass of followers” can you leverage your reputation and start seeing tangible returns coming from it. For example, monetization of content (such as commercial partnerships, paid posts, etc.) on most platforms only starts when you reach tens of thousands of followers/subscribers.
For a moment let’s go beyond the concept of reputation based solely on followers within a single social media app. Let’s include more verticals (all coming from on-chain activity), and serve it in a machine-readable form that unlocks permissionless benefits in the decentralized financial system. Let’s make it transparent to let participants estimate the effort needed to get to returns they find satisfying.
This concept opens up many interesting opportunities. Now you can create exclusive communities with permissionless access that can only be joined by members above X level of on-chain reputation. You can search for potential business partners by simply scanning an open and transparent database. You can get significantly better conditions for your collateralized loan based on your open and transparent reputation (or maybe even become eligible for an uncollateralized one?).
The above use cases can only be made possible because of some key assumptions. Such a measure of reputation has to be unified across different apps. Also, dApps and Smart Contracts have to be able to use it in a permissionless manner. That is exactly what we have built.
Introducing Lens Score
LensScore is a Web3 scoring Oracle based on data from Lens Protocol. It’s also our hackathon project for KyivTechSummit that won prizes in 2 different categories!
Here is how it works:
- We fetch data about Lens profiles like Stani.lens by retrieving statistics from GraphQL API,
- We calculate the score based on the below 6 variables,
- The Score is then available for Smart Contracts and Protocols.
The formula for score calculation can be described as follows:
Where:
tc — total number of comments
tpo — total number of posts
tpub — total number of publications
tf — total number of followers
tc — total number of collects
tm — total number of mirrors
A full description of our submission can be found here. Please keep in mind that this algorithm was created solely for POC purposes during the hackathon. Our goal was to generally explore this idea without getting into too much detail i.e. in terms of exploit prevention. We believe that the potential it might have with a more sophisticated calculation layer underneath, i.e. by using Machine Learning models, is very promising.
Where do RedStone Oracles come into play? We pull on-chain data from Polygon-based Lens Protocol, calculate the score and make it available for anyone to integrate into a dApp or Smart Contract on 30+ chains (here you can see how it works under the hood). We have already gathered over 50 Lens profiles and calculated their scores. You can check them out here (spoiler alert: surprisingly, stani.lens is not the one with the highest score👀).
Want us to calculate your Lens Score? Get it→ HERE
Possible use cases
Our goal here was to convert reputation to a variable closely representing the possibilities which your reputation provides you with. We also wanted to create a way of rewarding active members of the web3 space, across different projects, areas of interest, or specific industries. Moreover, the goal was to do it in a very tangible way, allowing users to see their incremental progress at all levels of engagement.
Lens Protocol, being a cross-topic, cross-community, and cross-application data layer, appeared to be just the right environment for this concept. It doesn’t matter how you enjoy consuming your content, which applications built on top of Lens you prefer or what particular topics interest you most. If you take an active part in the ecosystem, you are building your reputation with every single contribution.
How can we use that mechanism in a blockchain context? A couple of ideas come to mind in an instant:
- On-chain credit scoring — either used as a basic variable or as one of the variables in calculating the final credit score for overcollateralized or undercollateralized lending. Building on the premise of reputation being one of the most valuable assets in this space. This is definitely a great topic for a whole other article.
- Anti-bot/Sybil protection, ‘lazy’ KYC for airdrops/allowlists — now you can prove you are not a bot while remaining anon. This gives us great tools for eliminating bots and enabling users to leverage their engagement.
- Building exclusive communities/applications on top of Lens — want to join our dApp focused on sharing the most insightful Tokenomic materials? Prove your contribution to the Lens Ecosystem beforehand. The team behind such an application could come up with their own way of calculating LensScore to find the highest quality new joiners (thanks to us, the infrastructure is automatic — the Smart Contract won’t let you join unless you fulfill the conditions).
Next steps
To sum up, we see LensScore as an interesting tool for Builders to play with. We are currently in co-operation with the Lens & Aave team about the further development of the project. Besides this, we will soon submit LensScore to the Aave Grants DAO as one of the revolutionary pieces in the Web3 trust puzzle. Our main goal is to serve this data on chain therefore we are open to cooperation with Builders willing to build, for example, a more sophisticated data calculation/data processing layer (or, perhaps, one tailored to some specific needs). If you have in mind any particular use case you would like to build, be sure to let us know at our Discord!
At RedStone we are on a mission to build the next generation of Oracles. Our solution has an unrivaled ability to exert significant control over any new data listings. Result? The flexibility to follow any emerging market trends, alongside substantial cost savings, allows us to stay at the frontier of a new wave of Decentralized Finance.
Join us on the journey!
