Ranking and Reputation

The rapid growth of onchain users and transactions has come with an increasing amount of fraud, rug pulls and spam. To continue attracting and retaining onchain users and high quality developers, there's an urgent need for trust and reputation solutions. It's a pain for users to discover, use, fund, read or buy something on-chain without worrying about getting spammed or scammed. In web2, this ranking and reputation service layer was managed by centralized companies such as App Store, Airbnb, eBay and Twitter. But these companies ended up capturing all the value, while gatekeeping developers and users, and stifling innovation. We need an open and decentralized reputation protocol to solve this.

Verifiable Algorithms on Reputation Graphs

OpenRank leverages reputation graphs for trust and coordination in the decentralized context. These can be constructed using on-chain or any peer-to-peer social graph data. OpenRank enables graph algorithms like EigenTrust, Hubs and Authorities, Collaborative Filtering to compute reputation and ranking using these reputation graphs.

Using OpenRank, consumer applications and marketplaces can integrate context-specific, native rankings and recommendations seamlessly.

Any user or developer using OpenRank is assured of verifiability of the rankings and reputation computation. This enables a critical trust layer for users who are interacting with various applications to search and discover things onchain, or even for protocols to reward contributors based on verifiable ranking and reputation data.

Open and Composable Reputation

OpenRank lets developers and protocols compose reputation from one use case context to another, which is nearly impossible in most web2 applications. This helps solve the inherent cold start or bootstrapping problem for new applications, networks and communities.

With web3's open and composable data layer, developers can leverage any data sets that suit their application context without having to worry about the cost or verifiability of computing on the data. Rankings and reputation computed using OpenRank are available for any smart contract, protocol or developer without having to run, manage or redo the compute.

In the longer run, anyone could publish their algorithms to OpenRank and get rewarded if their algorithms are utilized by application developers. A shared reputation infrastructure for accessing compute and existing rankings creates a flywheel for developer network effects.