Reputation Empowers Persona
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Reputation through eras and progress
- 3. Reputation in the Modern Internet and the Future
- 4. Introduction to REP
- 5. Liquid Reputation
- 6. AI Agents, Evolution of Economic Agency
- 7. The Mycelium of Trust
- 8. Sources
Chapter 1, introduction
Reputation is a social game where every introduction and transaction matters.
Every day we rely on mechanisms that keep our lives running, rarely pausing to ask how they work or why we trust them. We drink water to sustain our bodies; we use language to share thoughts and feelings. Reputation belongs on that list. We depend on it because trust is society’s glue, shaping progress and even happiness. Water enables life, language enables interaction, reputation enables coordination; from this triple current flow culture, power, and economics.
Yet something feels off. Can we truly trust the idea of reputation today? Once direct and peer-to-peer, it is now fragmented and uncontrolled, scattered across government ledgers, countless websites, and opaque algorithms, vulnerable to deletion, distortion, and forgery. A tool of coordination has become a simulacrum of trust. All packaging, no substance.
Worse, as the world grows, digitizes, and accelerates, reputation dissolves further. The internet connected us yet disconnected our souls; the more we linked, the less we understood. Meanwhile, AI can mimic nearly every human action online — opening accounts, holding conversations, even creating economic value. Modern reputation, then, is a blindfolded game.
We need a new language of trust. Water flows through bodies, language through minds, reputation through networks. From this organic evolution all human systems emerge. We face a new order where our identities and impact already live online, and new intelligences act beside us. To level up — to step into the future — we must rebuild that language.
As we spend more time online — and as AI and fragmented platforms reshape our identities — it’s clear the reputation system of the future must grow like mycelium, unifying our scattered selves, connecting us to others, bringing transparency, and scaling organically through old and new networks alike. Mycelium is not just a metaphor; it is nature’s living decentralization. With no central brain, still it decides, reroutes, and heals through local links. Like a resilient peer-to-peer network, it spreads by contribution, not command. That is the trust system we need.
Before we reimagine reputation, we must grasp what it once meant, and how we journeyed from village whispers to platform stars.
Yet something feels off. Can we truly trust the idea of reputation today? Once direct and peer-to-peer, it is now fragmented and uncontrolled, scattered across government ledgers, countless websites, and opaque algorithms, vulnerable to deletion, distortion, and forgery. A tool of coordination has become a simulacrum of trust. All packaging, no substance.
Worse, as the world grows, digitizes, and accelerates, reputation dissolves further. The internet connected us yet disconnected our souls; the more we linked, the less we understood. Meanwhile, AI can mimic nearly every human action online — opening accounts, holding conversations, even creating economic value. Modern reputation, then, is a blindfolded game.
We need a new language of trust. Water flows through bodies, language through minds, reputation through networks. From this organic evolution all human systems emerge. We face a new order where our identities and impact already live online, and new intelligences act beside us. To level up — to step into the future — we must rebuild that language.
As we spend more time online — and as AI and fragmented platforms reshape our identities — it’s clear the reputation system of the future must grow like mycelium, unifying our scattered selves, connecting us to others, bringing transparency, and scaling organically through old and new networks alike. Mycelium is not just a metaphor; it is nature’s living decentralization. With no central brain, still it decides, reroutes, and heals through local links. Like a resilient peer-to-peer network, it spreads by contribution, not command. That is the trust system we need.
Before we reimagine reputation, we must grasp what it once meant, and how we journeyed from village whispers to platform stars.
Chapter 2, reputation through eras and progress
To better understand the problem, let’s dive into the history of reputation, how it was affected by society’s growth and progress, what the first definitions of it were, and how it became scalable yet vulnerable to manipulations at the same time.
Oral Traditions (Tribal Societies)
In the beginning, reputation lived and died in the spoken word. Around tribal fires and under open skies, a person’s name was a story carried on the breath of elders. Before writing, memory was the sole ledger of reputation — myth and oral lore the only record. A brave hunter’s deeds might be retold for generations, granting a kind of living immortality through narrative. In these oral societies, to be remembered was the highest honor. Heroes willingly risked their lives for kleos, the glory that lives in song: immortality through memory. As Achilles says in Homer’s epic: “If I stay and fight, I shall not return alive, but my name will live forever; whereas if I go home my name will die.” This poetic bargain — mortality exchanged for an undying name — captures how deeply early cultures prized a reputation enshrined in memory.
Writing and Ancient Civilizations
The invention of writing expanded reputation beyond the tribe, etching legacy into clay, stone, and papyrus. No longer limited to fading recollections, a person’s deeds could be recorded and read across distant lands and future eras. Ancient kings and poets seized this new power. The Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, yearning for eternal renown, declared: “I will set up my name where the names of famous men are written; and where no man’s name is written I will raise a monument to the gods.” With the stroke of a stylus, reputation became tangible and immortalized — inscribed in tablets, carved on temple walls, woven into law codes and epics. In pharaonic Egypt, to uphold Ma’at (cosmic truth) and inscribe one’s deeds in tomb or temple was to secure one’s ren (name) for eternity, for to be forgotten was a second death.
Of course, the pen (or chisel) could mythologize or manipulate as easily as preserve. Monuments glorified rulers’ triumphs while omitting their failures. Still, writing made reputation more universal and abstract — a good name transformed into a legacy that strangers could know without ever meeting the person. Philosophers began to ponder the difference between true virtue and reputed virtue. Aristotle, centuries after Gilgamesh, cautioned that “dignity does not consist in possessing honors but in the consciousness that we deserve them.” In other words, appearing honorable on a tablet or inscription mattered little if one did not earn that honor in life. Such wisdom would echo through the ages, even as many would ignore it.
Of course, the pen (or chisel) could mythologize or manipulate as easily as preserve. Monuments glorified rulers’ triumphs while omitting their failures. Still, writing made reputation more universal and abstract — a good name transformed into a legacy that strangers could know without ever meeting the person. Philosophers began to ponder the difference between true virtue and reputed virtue. Aristotle, centuries after Gilgamesh, cautioned that “dignity does not consist in possessing honors but in the consciousness that we deserve them.” In other words, appearing honorable on a tablet or inscription mattered little if one did not earn that honor in life. Such wisdom would echo through the ages, even as many would ignore it.
Medieval and Feudal Societies
As the torch of time passed into the medieval era, reputation became tightly entwined with honor, lineage, and faith. In feudal societies, a person’s station at birth often defined their standing. Nobles inherited lofty reputations by blood, while commoners struggled to rise above theirs. Honor was the coin of this realm — a knight’s word, a lady’s virtue, a merchant’s trustworthiness — all guarded with life-and-death seriousness. Chivalric codes and guild oaths formalized the expectation that one’s “good name” was precious, “the immediate jewel” of the soul (as a later poet would note). Reputation was now a public commodity overseen by community scrutiny and the Church’s moral authority. A rumor of cowardice or a whisper of heresy could tarnish one’s name irreparably within the town walls or across the kingdom.
Yet, for all the courtly vows about honor, this era often confused the appearance of goodness with genuine virtue. Titles bestowed by kings and the blessings of clergy could inflate a person’s esteem regardless of merit — a stark contrast to Aristotle’s ideal of deserved honor. In feudal courts, noble lineages clung to honor codes: a knight’s chivalry or a samurai’s Bushidō demanded courage and sacrifice to uphold one’s good name. In imperial China, the concept of mianzi (face) embodied prestige and dignity — one’s social worth measured by respect in the eyes of others, loss of “face” a fate worse than debt or injury. Reputation was life’s meta-currency, guarded by duels and oaths, by law and the threat of public shame in the town square.
Still, even in these hierarchical times, the fundamental truth remained: To lose one’s good name was a fate worse than death. A disgraced knight might seek redemption or exile; a family stained by dishonor might never recover its social standing. Reputation was a fragile knightly shield, embellished by lineage and lore, but easily shattered by betrayal or shame.
Yet, for all the courtly vows about honor, this era often confused the appearance of goodness with genuine virtue. Titles bestowed by kings and the blessings of clergy could inflate a person’s esteem regardless of merit — a stark contrast to Aristotle’s ideal of deserved honor. In feudal courts, noble lineages clung to honor codes: a knight’s chivalry or a samurai’s Bushidō demanded courage and sacrifice to uphold one’s good name. In imperial China, the concept of mianzi (face) embodied prestige and dignity — one’s social worth measured by respect in the eyes of others, loss of “face” a fate worse than debt or injury. Reputation was life’s meta-currency, guarded by duels and oaths, by law and the threat of public shame in the town square.
Still, even in these hierarchical times, the fundamental truth remained: To lose one’s good name was a fate worse than death. A disgraced knight might seek redemption or exile; a family stained by dishonor might never recover its social standing. Reputation was a fragile knightly shield, embellished by lineage and lore, but easily shattered by betrayal or shame.
Early Modern Era (Printing Revolution)
The dawn of the printing press in the early modern era jolted the concept of reputation into a new scale. With ink and movable type, stories and scandals suddenly traveled faster and farther than ever before.
What once was gossip at the village well became news pamphlets in the city square. Reputation became truly public — a performance on the stage of broadside prints and early newspapers. A noble’s misdeeds or a thinker’s ideas could be set in type and replicated a thousandfold, for eyes far beyond the inner circle. This brought new power: Acts of heroism or genius might earn widespread acclaim and enduring fame in published chronicles. But it also brought new distortions. Pamphleteers and propagandists could manipulate a narrative, inflating or assassinating characters from afar.
In 17th-century London or revolutionary Paris, a pamphlet of scurrilous verse could ruin a rival’s name overnight, while a well-timed tract could lionize a leader or martyr. Reputation had become a printed mirror — one’s image reflected in the minds of people one would never meet. It was now easier to lose agency over one’s own story. The printing presses were largely controlled by those with resources or authority, foreshadowing the centralized media empires to come.
Yet, even as reputation’s reach expanded, society grew more conscious of its value. Many realized that a good reputation, once lost, could scarcely be regained, and that truth and appearance were not always the same in print. The early modern period thus set the stage for our contemporary struggle: the balance between personal honor and public image.
By the close of the printing revolution, the concept of reputation had traveled from the intimate circle of oral tradition to the far-flung networks of print. Each technological leap — from spoken tale to stone inscription, from heraldic emblem to mass-printed page — had amplified and abstracted our reputations, bringing great power but also new perils. Standing at the edge of the industrial age, humanity was poised to connect even more deeply and suddenly.
What wisdom about honor and reputation from past eras (tribal, ancient, medieval) do you feel we need to revive in today’s digital society?
The next chapter will plunge into the era of the internet, blockchain and AI, where reputation moves at the speed of light and is recorded indelibly in digital ledgers. In this coming age, the challenge is clear. We must reclaim agency over our own names and narratives, ensuring that technology serves to empower truth over false appearances, and community memory over centralized manipulation. The journey of reputation continues, and the call now is to carry its legacy forward without losing our souls in the process.
What once was gossip at the village well became news pamphlets in the city square. Reputation became truly public — a performance on the stage of broadside prints and early newspapers. A noble’s misdeeds or a thinker’s ideas could be set in type and replicated a thousandfold, for eyes far beyond the inner circle. This brought new power: Acts of heroism or genius might earn widespread acclaim and enduring fame in published chronicles. But it also brought new distortions. Pamphleteers and propagandists could manipulate a narrative, inflating or assassinating characters from afar.
In 17th-century London or revolutionary Paris, a pamphlet of scurrilous verse could ruin a rival’s name overnight, while a well-timed tract could lionize a leader or martyr. Reputation had become a printed mirror — one’s image reflected in the minds of people one would never meet. It was now easier to lose agency over one’s own story. The printing presses were largely controlled by those with resources or authority, foreshadowing the centralized media empires to come.
Yet, even as reputation’s reach expanded, society grew more conscious of its value. Many realized that a good reputation, once lost, could scarcely be regained, and that truth and appearance were not always the same in print. The early modern period thus set the stage for our contemporary struggle: the balance between personal honor and public image.
By the close of the printing revolution, the concept of reputation had traveled from the intimate circle of oral tradition to the far-flung networks of print. Each technological leap — from spoken tale to stone inscription, from heraldic emblem to mass-printed page — had amplified and abstracted our reputations, bringing great power but also new perils. Standing at the edge of the industrial age, humanity was poised to connect even more deeply and suddenly.
What wisdom about honor and reputation from past eras (tribal, ancient, medieval) do you feel we need to revive in today’s digital society?
The next chapter will plunge into the era of the internet, blockchain and AI, where reputation moves at the speed of light and is recorded indelibly in digital ledgers. In this coming age, the challenge is clear. We must reclaim agency over our own names and narratives, ensuring that technology serves to empower truth over false appearances, and community memory over centralized manipulation. The journey of reputation continues, and the call now is to carry its legacy forward without losing our souls in the process.
Chapter 3: Reputation in the Modern Internet and the Future
The rise of the internet has fundamentally transformed how reputation works. In tribal societies, reputation was local and direct — people knew each other and judged each other’s actions firsthand, with only myths and legends extending beyond immediate circles. The invention of writing introduced an abstract layer. Names and stories could travel far in time and space, though we mostly consumed those reputational tales passively. The printing press expanded the reach of reputation further (more creators and broader audiences) but still kept the power to shape narratives in relatively few hands. Then came the internet, which upended everything.
Suddenly everyone can broadcast information globally, and everyone can be a receiver and a source of reputational signals. This unprecedented connectivity completely changed the medium of our social lives. Reputation is no longer confined to village gossip or printed records — it has become a fast, global, and often faceless currency of trust online.
Suddenly everyone can broadcast information globally, and everyone can be a receiver and a source of reputational signals. This unprecedented connectivity completely changed the medium of our social lives. Reputation is no longer confined to village gossip or printed records — it has become a fast, global, and often faceless currency of trust online.
Global Connection, Anonymity,
and Fragmented Identity
and Fragmented Identity
Though the internet has united billions of people, it also introduced anonymity and fragmentation. Online, we often have no idea who is behind the screen name or profile picture. Anyone could be on the other side, and many times they are not humans at all but rather bots. Each of us now manages a patchwork of digital identities across countless platforms. In fact, the average person today has to juggle passwords and logins for around 168 different online accounts — from banks and booking sites to social networks and forums — each holding a fragment of our identity and reputation. A five-star rating on one platform means nothing on another; our LinkedIn endorsements don’t carry over to our Uber rider score.
This fragmented digital identity not only causes inconvenience (rebuilding trust from scratch in each new community) but also creates vulnerability. We do not truly own our reputational data on these platforms. Companies do.
Those pieces of us can even work against us, as users have little control: Platforms can change or delete our profiles and ratings at will, severing the trust we’ve built. In sum, we gained the ability to reach a global audience, but we became faceless in the crowd, our good name splintered into dozens of context-less shards.
The prism of anonymity has another side effect: Not every “user” online is human. By 2022, nearly half of all internet traffic was coming from bots, eroding confidence in online interactions. These bots — some benign, many malicious — produce fake clicks, fake followers, and fake reviews at a scale no human tribe ever faced. Anyone can deploy bots or sockpuppet accounts; algorithms can easily impersonate real people. This floods the web with ghost reputations and illegitimate signals, making it ever harder to know whom to trust.
Meanwhile, legitimate users are drowning in information. We face a crisis of context: No human mind can process and contextualize the actions of billions of internet peers or the firehose of content we encounter daily. Our social brains, evolved for small communities, are overwhelmed in the global village.
Adding to this challenge is the power wielded by centralized platforms. Just as newspaper barons could once “dictate truth,” the owners of today’s social networks and apps hold the keys to our digital reputations. They can alter, censor, or erase user information and accounts with the click of a button. Decades of our posts, reviews, and connections exist on corporate servers at the pleasure of Terms of Service. We’ve gained thepotential to be heard by millions, but we “move blindly” in a sense — lacking a secure, portable identity — and we do not possess what should, by right, belong to us: our data and our earned reputation.
This fragmented digital identity not only causes inconvenience (rebuilding trust from scratch in each new community) but also creates vulnerability. We do not truly own our reputational data on these platforms. Companies do.
Those pieces of us can even work against us, as users have little control: Platforms can change or delete our profiles and ratings at will, severing the trust we’ve built. In sum, we gained the ability to reach a global audience, but we became faceless in the crowd, our good name splintered into dozens of context-less shards.
The prism of anonymity has another side effect: Not every “user” online is human. By 2022, nearly half of all internet traffic was coming from bots, eroding confidence in online interactions. These bots — some benign, many malicious — produce fake clicks, fake followers, and fake reviews at a scale no human tribe ever faced. Anyone can deploy bots or sockpuppet accounts; algorithms can easily impersonate real people. This floods the web with ghost reputations and illegitimate signals, making it ever harder to know whom to trust.
Meanwhile, legitimate users are drowning in information. We face a crisis of context: No human mind can process and contextualize the actions of billions of internet peers or the firehose of content we encounter daily. Our social brains, evolved for small communities, are overwhelmed in the global village.
Adding to this challenge is the power wielded by centralized platforms. Just as newspaper barons could once “dictate truth,” the owners of today’s social networks and apps hold the keys to our digital reputations. They can alter, censor, or erase user information and accounts with the click of a button. Decades of our posts, reviews, and connections exist on corporate servers at the pleasure of Terms of Service. We’ve gained thepotential to be heard by millions, but we “move blindly” in a sense — lacking a secure, portable identity — and we do not possess what should, by right, belong to us: our data and our earned reputation.
The Crisis of Trust in the Information Age
In this information-saturated era, we need navigation; reputation is a compass of trust. People still crave the ability to gauge trustworthiness and status, just as in small communities, but our traditional cues have been distorted. Early internet platforms attempted to engineer reputation systems to fill this need. We saw the emergence of eBay’s seller ratings, Reddit karma, Amazon and Yelp reviews, Uber and Airbnb star ratings — all proxy metrics for trust and contribution in an online world of strangers.
These systems did help at first, enabling a stranger-danger world to function with a bit more confidence. However, each of these reputation systems was built as a silo. Each platform became a walled garden of trust, locking users in. A user might be revered on one platform and unknown on another. There is no unified “credit score” of character across the internet. This siloing means we must constantly start from zero when entering a new community, a new app, a new blockchain.
Moreover, conventional online reputation metrics have proven shallow and easily manipulated. As a digital strategist noted, traditional reputation models like star ratings or centralized credit scores are “vulnerable to manipulation, bias, and data breaches.” With a few clicks, one can buy fake followers or pay for glowing reviews. Indeed, studies estimate that around 30% of online reviews may be fake.
Opaque algorithms often amplify controversy over quality, and cancel-culture pile-ons can destroy a person’s good name overnight, regardless of nuance or redemption. Context collapses in virality: A single tweet or video clip, removed from its full story, can dominate someone’s reputation worldwide for better or worse. Meanwhile, platform algorithms are black boxes — users rarely know why their reputation is high or low, why a post is shown or hidden, leading to mistrust in the systems themselves.
The fragmentation of identity also means loss of authenticity. Our digital selves are splintered into curated personas on different sites. One might appear professional on LinkedIn, quirky on Twitter, and rowdy on an anonymous forum — and these disparate profiles never reconcile into a coherent picture. “Although our digital identity is fragmented, our various online personas are all digital breadcrumbs of the same persona,” as one observer put it, yet no one (except perhaps surveillance agencies) can connect those dots to see the real whole person.
The richness of reputation in a village, where people saw each other in many roles over years, is lost. In the cacophony of the web, reputation has become hyper-visible (we can see ratings, likes, follower counts everywhere) but also strangely hollow. Numbers go up, but meaning drains out; trust becomes a number game rather than a nuanced human judgment.
Even governments have begun to harness reputation as a formalized control mechanism. In China, for example, authorities have piloted a Social Credit System that centrally tracks and scores citizens’ trustworthiness. This is an extreme case of reputation turning into an imposed “score” rather than an organic community consensus. It epitomizes the risk of a future where our trustworthiness is determined by centralized data, potentially biased or oppressive. Whether it’s corporate-owned reputation metrics or state-driven scoring, the common theme is loss of user agency. We, the people who are the source of reputation, have the least control over it in the current paradigm.
These systems did help at first, enabling a stranger-danger world to function with a bit more confidence. However, each of these reputation systems was built as a silo. Each platform became a walled garden of trust, locking users in. A user might be revered on one platform and unknown on another. There is no unified “credit score” of character across the internet. This siloing means we must constantly start from zero when entering a new community, a new app, a new blockchain.
Moreover, conventional online reputation metrics have proven shallow and easily manipulated. As a digital strategist noted, traditional reputation models like star ratings or centralized credit scores are “vulnerable to manipulation, bias, and data breaches.” With a few clicks, one can buy fake followers or pay for glowing reviews. Indeed, studies estimate that around 30% of online reviews may be fake.
Opaque algorithms often amplify controversy over quality, and cancel-culture pile-ons can destroy a person’s good name overnight, regardless of nuance or redemption. Context collapses in virality: A single tweet or video clip, removed from its full story, can dominate someone’s reputation worldwide for better or worse. Meanwhile, platform algorithms are black boxes — users rarely know why their reputation is high or low, why a post is shown or hidden, leading to mistrust in the systems themselves.
The fragmentation of identity also means loss of authenticity. Our digital selves are splintered into curated personas on different sites. One might appear professional on LinkedIn, quirky on Twitter, and rowdy on an anonymous forum — and these disparate profiles never reconcile into a coherent picture. “Although our digital identity is fragmented, our various online personas are all digital breadcrumbs of the same persona,” as one observer put it, yet no one (except perhaps surveillance agencies) can connect those dots to see the real whole person.
The richness of reputation in a village, where people saw each other in many roles over years, is lost. In the cacophony of the web, reputation has become hyper-visible (we can see ratings, likes, follower counts everywhere) but also strangely hollow. Numbers go up, but meaning drains out; trust becomes a number game rather than a nuanced human judgment.
Even governments have begun to harness reputation as a formalized control mechanism. In China, for example, authorities have piloted a Social Credit System that centrally tracks and scores citizens’ trustworthiness. This is an extreme case of reputation turning into an imposed “score” rather than an organic community consensus. It epitomizes the risk of a future where our trustworthiness is determined by centralized data, potentially biased or oppressive. Whether it’s corporate-owned reputation metrics or state-driven scoring, the common theme is loss of user agency. We, the people who are the source of reputation, have the least control over it in the current paradigm.
What Changed in the Digital Era?
To summarize the modern reputation dilemma, consider some key shifts in the internet age:
Despite these issues, reputation still matters immensely. It remains what it always was at its core: the invisible hand that guides social interaction — rewarding those who contribute and warning against those who violate community norms. In fact, in complex modern societies, having a reliable way to gauge trust is more important than ever.
When face-to-face intuition isn’t possible, we desperately need a new approach to how people connect and trust each other online. We need to defragment trust, to find a unified layer of reputation that can travel with us, give a full picture of who we are, and be resilient against manipulation. The goal is to regain breadth with depth: global reach and meaningful context.
- Instant Global Spread: A single post or video can make someone world-famous (or infamous) overnight. Reputation now has a global reach and speed our ancestors couldn’t imagine.
- Enormous Influence: Reputation has become a global asset — an online reviewer or influencer in one country can sway opinions of millions in another. Good (or bad) reputation can translate into tangible opportunities or losses.
- Data Trails: Our actions now leave permanent data trails. Every rating, comment, or transaction history is stored on servers. The internet “never forgets,” which means reputations can stick around long after context changes.
- Superficial Metrics: At the same time, social media has made reputation a game of numbers — likes, stars, upvotes — which often reflect momentary attention rather than true character or contribution. It’s a shallow attention economy measure, not a deep measure of virtue or skill.
- Manipulation and Noise: Online reputation systems are vulnerable to abuse. Bots, fake reviews and AI algorithms distort reality. Cancel culture and outrage cycles can punish or elevate people unjustly. Information overload and context collapse make it hard to discern truth, enabling misinformation to thrive.
- Contribution vs. Reward Gap: In many online ecosystems, there’s a disconnect between who creates value and who captures value. For example, content creators might build reputation (and content) on a platform, but the platform monetizes it more than the creators do. Those contributing positively to a community don’t always reap proportional rewards or recognition, while others game the system.
Despite these issues, reputation still matters immensely. It remains what it always was at its core: the invisible hand that guides social interaction — rewarding those who contribute and warning against those who violate community norms. In fact, in complex modern societies, having a reliable way to gauge trust is more important than ever.
When face-to-face intuition isn’t possible, we desperately need a new approach to how people connect and trust each other online. We need to defragment trust, to find a unified layer of reputation that can travel with us, give a full picture of who we are, and be resilient against manipulation. The goal is to regain breadth with depth: global reach and meaningful context.
Towards Decentralized Reputation
A decentralized reputation network has the potential to solve the context crisis and restore trust in the digital world. Such a network would unite our fragmented identities across platforms, institutions, and even nation-states into a unified reputation layer — an “internet of trust” woven into the internet of information. It would be peer-to-peer and community-driven. Instead of corporate or government gatekeepers, the users themselves (perhaps via decentralized governance) would decide how reputation is defined, earned, and used.
With blockchain’s permanence, your contributions and good deeds could form an “immortal papyrus” of sorts — a scroll of your social capital that you truly own and that cannot be unjustly taken from you. This could liberate us from the fear that years of hard-won reputation might be wiped out by a single platform’s policy change or a hacker’s attack.
Equally important, an open reputation protocol could foster interoperability and innovation. Just as open standards like TCP/IP allowed the internet to blossom, an open reputation standard could enable countless new applications. We could see “reputation as a service” models, where any app or community can plug into the global trust layer and contribute to or read from it. Imagine applying for an apartment rental by providing an onchain reputation profile that shows your history of reliable payments and community feedback, instead of a traditional credit check — thus including those who currently lack credit scores.
Indeed, Vitalik Buterin and colleagues have noted that lack of a native Web3 identity/reputation layer has made things like apartment leases or undercollateralized loans nearly impossible on blockchain; solving identity and reputation is key to unlocking these real-world uses.
In decentralized finance (DeFi), lenders could offer unsecured loans if borrowers carry a strong onchain reputation for repayment. In online marketplaces, sellers with proven track records could carry that trust anywhere, reducing the reliance on any one platform. For DAOs and online communities, reputation-weighted voting could reward long-term contributions over quick profit motives.
The early internet ethos actually hinted at some of these possibilities. In the wild days of forums and message boards, people built reputation without real names — meritocratic, pseudonymous reputation based on contributions. As the meme from those times goes: “lurk moar, contribute truly, and you shall be known.” An anonymous user could become a legend purely through insightful posts or helpful actions. This showed that reputation is ultimately about actions and peer recognition, not formal identity.
A decentralized system takes that ethos and scales it with technology. You could be a faceless username or an AI agent and still accumulate a trusted reputation that is recognized across the net — if you earn it. We should draw inspiration from that raw, community-driven reputation of early internet culture, while correcting its shortcomings (such as lack of memory and vulnerability to imposters) with modern tools.
Yet the stakes are rising even faster than our metrics suggest. If today the internet counts in billions of human users, tomorrow it will teem with trillions of participants — swarms of autonomous AI agents transacting, writing code, curating content, even negotiating on our behalf. In that future, every click is a micro‑decision, every bot a potential counter‑party; without a shared fabric of trust the system collapses into noise.
Reputation becomes non‑optional infrastructure: the cryptographic pulse that lets humans, machines, and hybrid minds recognize allies, filter adversaries, and co‑create value at planetary scale. What TCP/IP did for packets, a universal reputation layer must now do for actors — assigning provenance, context, and consequence to each of the trillion voices about to join the chorus. The result is a catallactic marketplace in which humans and autonomous agents bargain, specialize, and reallocate resources with reputation as their common medium of exchange.
With blockchain’s permanence, your contributions and good deeds could form an “immortal papyrus” of sorts — a scroll of your social capital that you truly own and that cannot be unjustly taken from you. This could liberate us from the fear that years of hard-won reputation might be wiped out by a single platform’s policy change or a hacker’s attack.
Equally important, an open reputation protocol could foster interoperability and innovation. Just as open standards like TCP/IP allowed the internet to blossom, an open reputation standard could enable countless new applications. We could see “reputation as a service” models, where any app or community can plug into the global trust layer and contribute to or read from it. Imagine applying for an apartment rental by providing an onchain reputation profile that shows your history of reliable payments and community feedback, instead of a traditional credit check — thus including those who currently lack credit scores.
Indeed, Vitalik Buterin and colleagues have noted that lack of a native Web3 identity/reputation layer has made things like apartment leases or undercollateralized loans nearly impossible on blockchain; solving identity and reputation is key to unlocking these real-world uses.
In decentralized finance (DeFi), lenders could offer unsecured loans if borrowers carry a strong onchain reputation for repayment. In online marketplaces, sellers with proven track records could carry that trust anywhere, reducing the reliance on any one platform. For DAOs and online communities, reputation-weighted voting could reward long-term contributions over quick profit motives.
The early internet ethos actually hinted at some of these possibilities. In the wild days of forums and message boards, people built reputation without real names — meritocratic, pseudonymous reputation based on contributions. As the meme from those times goes: “lurk moar, contribute truly, and you shall be known.” An anonymous user could become a legend purely through insightful posts or helpful actions. This showed that reputation is ultimately about actions and peer recognition, not formal identity.
A decentralized system takes that ethos and scales it with technology. You could be a faceless username or an AI agent and still accumulate a trusted reputation that is recognized across the net — if you earn it. We should draw inspiration from that raw, community-driven reputation of early internet culture, while correcting its shortcomings (such as lack of memory and vulnerability to imposters) with modern tools.
Yet the stakes are rising even faster than our metrics suggest. If today the internet counts in billions of human users, tomorrow it will teem with trillions of participants — swarms of autonomous AI agents transacting, writing code, curating content, even negotiating on our behalf. In that future, every click is a micro‑decision, every bot a potential counter‑party; without a shared fabric of trust the system collapses into noise.
Reputation becomes non‑optional infrastructure: the cryptographic pulse that lets humans, machines, and hybrid minds recognize allies, filter adversaries, and co‑create value at planetary scale. What TCP/IP did for packets, a universal reputation layer must now do for actors — assigning provenance, context, and consequence to each of the trillion voices about to join the chorus. The result is a catallactic marketplace in which humans and autonomous agents bargain, specialize, and reallocate resources with reputation as their common medium of exchange.
Balancing the Equation for the Future
As we design the future of reputation, we must strive for a balance between seemingly opposing principles:
If we get this right, reputation can again become what it was meant to be: a living mirror of our actions, a bridge between people, and a navigation tool for society. In small communities, reputation strengthened social bonds and incentivized good behavior, thereby accelerating progress. A modern, decentralized reputation network could do the same on a global scale — accelerating innovation and cooperation by making trust scalable.
Studies have long shown that high trust within a society correlates with economic growth and well-being. Conversely, a breakdown in trust impedes collaboration and happiness. By defragmenting and securing our trust mechanisms, we lay the groundwork for a more cohesive and thriving digital society.
The journey of reputation from tribal camps to tweets and blockchains teaches us that while technologies and scales change, the human stake in a good name remains profound. We still yearn, as ever, for our contributions to be recognized and remembered justly. Blockchain’s promise is to combine the best of both worlds: the authenticity and accountability of old-world reputation with the reach and resilience of the new-world technology. It offers a chance to reclaim our collective ability to bestow, earn, and preserve trust.
In doing so, we might fulfill one of humanity’s oldest aspirations — to build a name that truly endures, a reputation that is fair, earned, and secure in the “ledger of eternity.” This sets the stage for the next evolution: a reputation system that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people — a compass of trust for the internet age, and a foundation for whatever comes next.
In an age of fake followers and fleeting likes, how do you personally decide who deserves your trust online?
Next, in Chapter 4 (REP), we will explore how such a decentralized reputation protocol can be implemented, and the impact it could have on redefining trust in our communities.
- Reach and Meaning: We want reputations that have global breadth and local depth. The system should allow a good deed to be known far and wide, but with the rich context that gives it meaning (not just a clout score).
- Privacy and Transparency: We need to protect individual privacy and autonomy, yet ensure the transparency of actions that affect the community. A decentralized reputation can use cryptography to let you reveal only what’s necessary — proving you’re trustworthy in general without exposing every detail of your life.
- Human Dignity and Community Judgment: Reputation systems should enhance human dignity, not reduce people to a number. The design must incorporate objective data (what one has done, contributed, accomplished) with community evaluation in a fair way, and also include pathways for redemption and growth (unlike unforgiving cancel culture).
If we get this right, reputation can again become what it was meant to be: a living mirror of our actions, a bridge between people, and a navigation tool for society. In small communities, reputation strengthened social bonds and incentivized good behavior, thereby accelerating progress. A modern, decentralized reputation network could do the same on a global scale — accelerating innovation and cooperation by making trust scalable.
Studies have long shown that high trust within a society correlates with economic growth and well-being. Conversely, a breakdown in trust impedes collaboration and happiness. By defragmenting and securing our trust mechanisms, we lay the groundwork for a more cohesive and thriving digital society.
The journey of reputation from tribal camps to tweets and blockchains teaches us that while technologies and scales change, the human stake in a good name remains profound. We still yearn, as ever, for our contributions to be recognized and remembered justly. Blockchain’s promise is to combine the best of both worlds: the authenticity and accountability of old-world reputation with the reach and resilience of the new-world technology. It offers a chance to reclaim our collective ability to bestow, earn, and preserve trust.
In doing so, we might fulfill one of humanity’s oldest aspirations — to build a name that truly endures, a reputation that is fair, earned, and secure in the “ledger of eternity.” This sets the stage for the next evolution: a reputation system that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people — a compass of trust for the internet age, and a foundation for whatever comes next.
In an age of fake followers and fleeting likes, how do you personally decide who deserves your trust online?
Next, in Chapter 4 (REP), we will explore how such a decentralized reputation protocol can be implemented, and the impact it could have on redefining trust in our communities.
Chapter 4: REP, introduction
We’ve delved into the history of reputation, but now let’s talk about the future. Language has become a proxy for communication - especially when, for example, people converse in English even if it’s not their native tongue. This proves that as a civilization we can find such proxies of coordination.
Just imagine a proxy of reputation open to any creature.
Just imagine a proxy of reputation open to any creature.
From Language to Reputation Proxies
Recalling the metaphor of a sprouting and interconnecting mycelium, and looking at the origins, problems, and blurred values of reputation across epochs of progress, we present REP as a bridge back to the community-driven reputation we lost, but forged anew in blockchain steel. It is the collective memory of the tribe, upgraded for the 21st century - an immutable ledger of trust, scaled to billions, owned by everyone.
Reinventing Reputation with Blockchain
Blockchain opens up great opportunities to reimagine the concept of reputation. Thanks to this technology, we can own our data through decentralized storage, making it impossible to alter, forge, or delete information. Consensus mechanisms via smart contracts become possible, enabling us to set rules and even vote using reputation.
For example, zero-knowledge proofs could allow someone to prove in a store that they are 18 without ever showing an ID or even revealing their exact age (a way to metaphorically “keep a good name forever”). Technologies are continuously evolving, and more useful use-cases will emerge. This will bring us closer to the primordial form of reputation - belonging to the people, rich in context, and peer-to-peer - while being ready for the scalability of the internet and modern tech. In short, we gain a compass of trust in a world of infinite information flow.
Even though REP aims to be a distributed engine of trust and coordination for the entire digital world, we begin its journey in the blockchain realm not only because of the relevant technologies, but also because we are convinced that - like the influence of the printing press or the spread of the internet - blockchain will spread and become the root system of the digital world. Thus, the standards of digital reputation will eventually live onchain everywhere.
Furthermore, transactions on a blockchain are public. As an industry, we haven’t fully appreciated this, but each transaction carries a signal of reputation. By indexing these signals, we allow users to “claim their reputation” and benefit from it. By benefit, we mean not only immediate rewards, but also that a good name can have endless applications. Meanwhile, projects gain the ability to engage with and attract exactly the audience they need, based on onchain reputation signals.
For example, zero-knowledge proofs could allow someone to prove in a store that they are 18 without ever showing an ID or even revealing their exact age (a way to metaphorically “keep a good name forever”). Technologies are continuously evolving, and more useful use-cases will emerge. This will bring us closer to the primordial form of reputation - belonging to the people, rich in context, and peer-to-peer - while being ready for the scalability of the internet and modern tech. In short, we gain a compass of trust in a world of infinite information flow.
Even though REP aims to be a distributed engine of trust and coordination for the entire digital world, we begin its journey in the blockchain realm not only because of the relevant technologies, but also because we are convinced that - like the influence of the printing press or the spread of the internet - blockchain will spread and become the root system of the digital world. Thus, the standards of digital reputation will eventually live onchain everywhere.
Furthermore, transactions on a blockchain are public. As an industry, we haven’t fully appreciated this, but each transaction carries a signal of reputation. By indexing these signals, we allow users to “claim their reputation” and benefit from it. By benefit, we mean not only immediate rewards, but also that a good name can have endless applications. Meanwhile, projects gain the ability to engage with and attract exactly the audience they need, based on onchain reputation signals.
Omnichain and Portable Reputation
Looking more broadly, REP is designed to be omnichain and agnostic to any specific network, as a reputation protocol should be.
For a long time, liquidity and activity on blockchains were fragmented - scattered across different networks. Omnichain solutions like LayerZero are actively solving this problem by creating a “zero layer” that connects all networks. In practice, an internet user shouldn’t need to think about which blockchain they’re using; they just want things to work seamlessly. Sooner or later, we will treat onchain infrastructure as the backend of the internet - much like we don’t think about the hosting of websites or each other’s internet providers when we browse the web.
At REP, we see the power to unite networks into a single reputational (and even cultural) layer, and that is the only way for a reputation protocol to remain truly scalable and unbiased. Most reputation solutions today are concentrated on a specific platform or network, which effectively locks users’ reputations in those silos.
We, however, give users the ability to carry their achievements across networks. For example, if you’re an experienced DeFi user on an EVM chain and you create a new wallet on an SVM chain, the DeFi protocols on Solana should recognize you as an experienced user - perhaps even offering an incentive to use their application. In the end, REP can unite identities fragmented across blockchains into a single, portable reputation profile.
Onchain now mirrors the online: more chains, more layers, more transactions - yet less shared context. We need a unifying compass to bind these fast-growing fragments and guide us through the labyrinth.
Core principles of REP:
Programmable and portable in particular mean the following: If LayerZero’s goal is to “connect every contract on every chain,” REP’s goal is to enable users to connect their reputation to every contract on every chain.
This vision opens a powerful network-effect flywheel. As more founders use the REP framework to design incentive programs, growth strategies, and selection criteria, users have greater incentive to use REP to gain value from their actions and identity. In turn, REP gathers more useful data from applications and users, which further attracts founders and platforms to build with REP. The cycle reinforces itself.
For a long time, liquidity and activity on blockchains were fragmented - scattered across different networks. Omnichain solutions like LayerZero are actively solving this problem by creating a “zero layer” that connects all networks. In practice, an internet user shouldn’t need to think about which blockchain they’re using; they just want things to work seamlessly. Sooner or later, we will treat onchain infrastructure as the backend of the internet - much like we don’t think about the hosting of websites or each other’s internet providers when we browse the web.
At REP, we see the power to unite networks into a single reputational (and even cultural) layer, and that is the only way for a reputation protocol to remain truly scalable and unbiased. Most reputation solutions today are concentrated on a specific platform or network, which effectively locks users’ reputations in those silos.
We, however, give users the ability to carry their achievements across networks. For example, if you’re an experienced DeFi user on an EVM chain and you create a new wallet on an SVM chain, the DeFi protocols on Solana should recognize you as an experienced user - perhaps even offering an incentive to use their application. In the end, REP can unite identities fragmented across blockchains into a single, portable reputation profile.
Onchain now mirrors the online: more chains, more layers, more transactions - yet less shared context. We need a unifying compass to bind these fast-growing fragments and guide us through the labyrinth.
Core principles of REP:
- Decentralized: No single authority owns or controls the reputation data.
- Chain-Agnostic: Works across multiple blockchains (and even offchain contexts).
- Programmable: Open to integration in smart contracts and applications.
- Portable: Travels with the user across platforms and networks.
Programmable and portable in particular mean the following: If LayerZero’s goal is to “connect every contract on every chain,” REP’s goal is to enable users to connect their reputation to every contract on every chain.
This vision opens a powerful network-effect flywheel. As more founders use the REP framework to design incentive programs, growth strategies, and selection criteria, users have greater incentive to use REP to gain value from their actions and identity. In turn, REP gathers more useful data from applications and users, which further attracts founders and platforms to build with REP. The cycle reinforces itself.
From Onсhain to Online: Bridging Crypto
and the Internet
and the Internet
Based on these principles, a gradual transition from onchain to online becomes possible. A key step is creating a layer where REP becomes simple and convenient for users on traditional internet platforms. For example, by connecting their Instagram account, a user can receive a reputation score based on the quality of their followers and engagement on that account.
They could not only engage their network with fun facts (“My account is 5 years old,” or “I’m in the top 2% of bloggers worldwide”), but also leverage the influence of their Instagram presence across networks and projects connected to REP. (We as an industry are aiming for mass adoption, so a direct bridge to mainstream internet users is necessary.)
Going forward, even Web2 platforms themselves could distribute value through REP. By connecting not only Instagram but also accounts from Airbnb, Spotify, and beyond, users might not even need to leave the familiar internet environment - they could benefit from blockchain-based reputation without touching crypto directly.
Moreover, each internet platform can serve as a distribution flywheel with access to billions of people who are not yet crypto natives. With distribution mechanics like those in REP, where actions can be converted into onchain value, almost any internet user can transition to crypto. We’ve already seen examples on Telegram - a leading social platform that has seamlessly integrated blockchain technologies. Telegram introduced a host of crypto features: rewards in cryptocurrency for influencers (similar to how X offers creator payouts, though X’s rewards are still in dollars), in-app purchases using crypto, Telegram Gifts (NFT collectibles), and even onchain usernames and mobile numbers.
As a result, there was enormous interest and a significant migration of Telegram users into crypto. Telegram’s Mini Apps further showcased how seamless and far-reaching onchain onboarding can be. Native to Telegram, the TON blockchain grew from 1 million to 38 million activated onchain wallets in 2024 - the “year of Mini apps.”
Leading Telegram Mini Apps reached tens of millions of users and amassed millions of token holders. Distribution experiments (such as “tap-based” or “age-based” campaigns) achieved rapid mass adoption without any way to distinguish passive recipients from active contributors. Unfortunately, this created a traffic bubble - essentially a blind game where the attention of millions was resold from app to app.
App creators had no insight into user quality, so many apps ended up attracting the wrong audience and struggled to retain engagement. Users, on the other hand, knew nothing about the apps; there were plenty of one-day players who jumped in just for quick rewards. In the end, after the huge spike of attention, the ecosystem experienced a year of frustration and stagnation.
This led to an important lesson: With the rise of mass adoption, solutions that bring transparency to user quality and provide apps a compass of trust are inevitable. These experiments proved the power of viral growth and community engagement. They also showed that to sustain that growth, products need to be long-term oriented and deliver real value to millions of users.
Moreover, the Mini Apps standard was later integrated into other platforms - from Web2 giants like LINE to crypto-native environments like Farcaster, Coinbase Wallet, and World App. So, we see our cross-platform approach as not only a way to unite fragmented identities, but also an important growth flywheel for REP and for crypto itself, making this reputation network accessible everywhere.
They could not only engage their network with fun facts (“My account is 5 years old,” or “I’m in the top 2% of bloggers worldwide”), but also leverage the influence of their Instagram presence across networks and projects connected to REP. (We as an industry are aiming for mass adoption, so a direct bridge to mainstream internet users is necessary.)
Going forward, even Web2 platforms themselves could distribute value through REP. By connecting not only Instagram but also accounts from Airbnb, Spotify, and beyond, users might not even need to leave the familiar internet environment - they could benefit from blockchain-based reputation without touching crypto directly.
Moreover, each internet platform can serve as a distribution flywheel with access to billions of people who are not yet crypto natives. With distribution mechanics like those in REP, where actions can be converted into onchain value, almost any internet user can transition to crypto. We’ve already seen examples on Telegram - a leading social platform that has seamlessly integrated blockchain technologies. Telegram introduced a host of crypto features: rewards in cryptocurrency for influencers (similar to how X offers creator payouts, though X’s rewards are still in dollars), in-app purchases using crypto, Telegram Gifts (NFT collectibles), and even onchain usernames and mobile numbers.
As a result, there was enormous interest and a significant migration of Telegram users into crypto. Telegram’s Mini Apps further showcased how seamless and far-reaching onchain onboarding can be. Native to Telegram, the TON blockchain grew from 1 million to 38 million activated onchain wallets in 2024 - the “year of Mini apps.”
Leading Telegram Mini Apps reached tens of millions of users and amassed millions of token holders. Distribution experiments (such as “tap-based” or “age-based” campaigns) achieved rapid mass adoption without any way to distinguish passive recipients from active contributors. Unfortunately, this created a traffic bubble - essentially a blind game where the attention of millions was resold from app to app.
App creators had no insight into user quality, so many apps ended up attracting the wrong audience and struggled to retain engagement. Users, on the other hand, knew nothing about the apps; there were plenty of one-day players who jumped in just for quick rewards. In the end, after the huge spike of attention, the ecosystem experienced a year of frustration and stagnation.
This led to an important lesson: With the rise of mass adoption, solutions that bring transparency to user quality and provide apps a compass of trust are inevitable. These experiments proved the power of viral growth and community engagement. They also showed that to sustain that growth, products need to be long-term oriented and deliver real value to millions of users.
Moreover, the Mini Apps standard was later integrated into other platforms - from Web2 giants like LINE to crypto-native environments like Farcaster, Coinbase Wallet, and World App. So, we see our cross-platform approach as not only a way to unite fragmented identities, but also an important growth flywheel for REP and for crypto itself, making this reputation network accessible everywhere.
Shared Interests: A Mycelial Trust Network
Imagine such a solution accessible via a Telegram or Discord bot, woven into comments on X, present on LINE and Farcaster - utilizing your influence across networks and platforms to become a compass of trust that helps you coordinate with peers and applications. You could benefit from your reputation data (with both positive +REP and negative -REP signals shaping your profile), connect with like-minded peers, and navigate the digital world through a reputation-backed perspective - all delivered in a form that’s convenient and useful to you.
Additionally, by bringing traditional internet credentials onchain and creating incentives around them, we can aim to onboard not just millions but billions of internet users into this new reputation network.
Now, take it one step further and think bigger. Each of us manages hundreds of online identities reflecting our interests - from traveling and music to coding and cryptography. All these facets of our lives are currently siloed on disconnected platforms. By unlocking them, we gain not just raw scores, but peer-to-peer connections based on shared interests and the “inner” reputations tied to those interests. Consider the concept of six degrees of separation - the idea that any two people are six or fewer social connections apart. Between any two strangers, there are likely common threads, because each persona has interests that can overlap with others.
Dan and Max, for example, might be complete strangers, but they both love surfing, listen to Slipknot, and delve into cryptography. These shared passions - validated by data like their hours of music streamed, activity in fitness apps, and onchain participation in crypto communities - could help them trust each other. Sometimes, such common interests are enough to spark a partnership or collaboration.
Evolutionarily, our trust instincts have been limited by friend-or-foe recognition and in-group bias. We tend to trust others more easily when we share a common background or interest (attending the same school, loving the same band, etc.). By harnessing these tendencies across a global network, we unlock new mechanisms of trust. These are the opportunities that a mycelium-style reputation layer holds - a web of trust growing organically from our many shared identities.
If you could carry a “trust passport” that proved your good reputation everywhere you go, how would it change your opportunities online?
But what are the measures of impact? How can reputation be quantified, and why does it truly benefit us? These questions lead us to the next frontier: the idea of liquid reputation.
Additionally, by bringing traditional internet credentials onchain and creating incentives around them, we can aim to onboard not just millions but billions of internet users into this new reputation network.
Now, take it one step further and think bigger. Each of us manages hundreds of online identities reflecting our interests - from traveling and music to coding and cryptography. All these facets of our lives are currently siloed on disconnected platforms. By unlocking them, we gain not just raw scores, but peer-to-peer connections based on shared interests and the “inner” reputations tied to those interests. Consider the concept of six degrees of separation - the idea that any two people are six or fewer social connections apart. Between any two strangers, there are likely common threads, because each persona has interests that can overlap with others.
Dan and Max, for example, might be complete strangers, but they both love surfing, listen to Slipknot, and delve into cryptography. These shared passions - validated by data like their hours of music streamed, activity in fitness apps, and onchain participation in crypto communities - could help them trust each other. Sometimes, such common interests are enough to spark a partnership or collaboration.
Evolutionarily, our trust instincts have been limited by friend-or-foe recognition and in-group bias. We tend to trust others more easily when we share a common background or interest (attending the same school, loving the same band, etc.). By harnessing these tendencies across a global network, we unlock new mechanisms of trust. These are the opportunities that a mycelium-style reputation layer holds - a web of trust growing organically from our many shared identities.
If you could carry a “trust passport” that proved your good reputation everywhere you go, how would it change your opportunities online?
But what are the measures of impact? How can reputation be quantified, and why does it truly benefit us? These questions lead us to the next frontier: the idea of liquid reputation.
Chapter 5: Liquid Reputation
A story is told of Salvador Dalí finishing an extravagant meal and paying not with cash, but with a doodle. The surrealist master would write a check for the bill and then casually sketch on its back, signing it with a flourish. He knew that his signature turned the slip of paper into art — a prized original that no restaurant owner would dare cash. In effect, Dalí’s reputation settled the debt. The drawing was worth more than the meal itself. This elegant trick is more than art-world lore; it’s a metaphor for Liquid Reputation — value that flows from intangible trust and merit, more fluid than any static currency.
Liquid Reputation means moving beyond the notion of reputation as a fixed score or a gated privilege. Instead, reputation becomes dynamic and alive — a living signal shaped by one’s actions, context, and community. It is not a five-star rating etched in stone, nor a clout score that one can hoard and game. It is reputation as a flow: continuously updated by what you do, who you connect with, and how you contribute.
In this model, your reputation is earned and re-earned through impact. It pulses and shifts with the rhythm of your endeavors, always contextual to the environment. Just as Dalí’s little sketch instantly boosted the value of a mere check, your every positive action sends ripples through the network, updating an ever-evolving trust signal. Liquid Reputation is a reputation that flows like water — adapting its shape to each new context, seeping through networks, and pooling around true contributions.
To achieve this fluid, impact-based reputation, the REP protocol turns to the rich evidence of our digital lives. It combines onchain economic data with offchain social insights, weaving both into a composite picture of influence. Every meaningful onchain action — each transaction you sign, each smart contract you deploy or interact with, each DAO proposal you advance — feeds into your reputation. These are tangible proofs of participation and skill.
At the same time, social graph signals fortify the picture: the invitations you extend to bring others into a community, the trust relationships you form, the milestones and achievements you unlock together with peers. Did you collaborate with someone on a successful project? Did a respected member vouch for you? Such interactions become part of your social trust graph.
REP indexes all these signals and distills them into portable, composable Achievements. Each Achievement is like a badge of honor — a cryptographic token (often non-transferable) that represents a verifiable milestone or contribution. You might earn an Achievement for writing your first smart contract, for helping onboard 10 new users, or for co-founding a successful initiative. These aren’t just static trophies; they are living credentials. They allow you to claim your impact both onchain and online, carrying proof of your contributions wherever you go.
In essence, the protocol turns discrete actions into redeemable reputation — building blocks that any platform or community can recognize. Your reputation ceases to be an abstract score and becomes a collection of achievements and contexts: a story of what you’ve done.Filamentous mycelium intertwining in a complex network — a natural metaphor for how reputation threads through the social and economic graphs.All of this is built on a graph-centric architecture, where reputation flows through the network like mycelium through soil. Think of a forest’s underground fungal web, the “wood-wide web” of mycorrhizal connections that link tree to tree. In the REP network, every user, every community, every smart contract forms a node in an interconnected graph. When two people collaborate or trust each other, it forges a link — like hyphae connecting distant roots. When you earn an Achievement in a community, you become a node in that community’s subgraph, tied to others who share that context.
Reputation, like nutrients, travels along these threads. Trust is no longer an isolated score but a network effect: If Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Carol in a given context, some of that trust indirectly bridges to Alice and Carol. Over time, a rich social-economic graph emerges, resembling a living organism. New connections sprout, old ones fade if not maintained, and reputation flows along paths of real interaction.
The mycelium metaphor is not just poetry — REP literally implements this. Its algorithms treat reputation as a spreadable substance, constrained by network topology and context. Liquid Reputation moves through this web organically, finding the paths of shared endeavors and mutual respect. The result is a self-healing, resilient trust network: as distributed and adaptive as a fungus colony, and just as hard to uproot.
If this sounds complex, it’s also deeply playful. Building one’s reputation in REP feels like a game, by design. We draw inspiration from gaming culture, from the likes of World of Warcraft and beyond, where players grind and strive for status and rewards. In REP, every contribution is an XP gain, every new Achievement is like unlocking a rare item or title. Users have profile pages that showcase these Achievements, not unlike a gamer’s trophy case or an adventurer’s journal. There are even reputation leaderboards, turning the pursuit of trust and impact into a friendly competition.
Crucially, this isn’t hollow gamification; it’s aspirational. Reputation becomes “grindable.” Just as a gamer might spend hours to reach an exalted reputation with a faction in WoW, a developer or community member might put in effort to raise their standing in a DAO or open-source project. The difference is that here the grind equates to real-world impact — helping others, writing code, creating content, fostering community. The grind is reimagined as positive participation. By tapping into the human love for progress bars and achievements, REP makes the serious work of reputation feel like an epic quest. It turns everyday actions into steps on a hero’s journey of identity. This game-like experience doesn’t just make it fun; it drives engagement. People inherently want to level up when they see a path to do so, and REP lays that path across the landscape of decentralized society.
Of course, no game thrives without a robust economy, and no reputation system scales without the right incentives. Tokenomics in REP are engineered to support this vision of liquid, living reputation. The REP token is not just a utility chip or governance placeholder — it is impact-mined. That means new tokens come into circulation as a direct result of meaningful activity. Instead of being pre-minted or endlessly inflationary, REP tokens must be earned. When you contribute value onchain or bolster the community offchain, the protocol rewards you with a drip of REP tokens, proportional to the impact. It’s as if your reputation crystallizes into a currency — a Bitcoin of trust minted by proof-of-impact rather than proof-of-work.
Over time, this yields a widely distributed token supply, held by those who actually strengthen the ecosystem. The intention is meritocratic distribution: The more genuine good you do, the more stake you have. These tokens, in turn, empower users by granting voting power in governance, unlocking advanced features, or simply standing as a reputation asset you hold.
A critical challenge for any reputation network is the cold start — how to ignite usage and make the reputation meaningful before the network effects kick in. History is littered with noble reputation protocols that never gained traction, precisely because reputation isn’t valuable in a vacuum. If no one recognizes or cares about your score, why accumulate it? Without strong social signaling, reputation systems fail to scale.
REP tackles this head-on by leveraging gamification and cultural context from day zero. From the outset, participation in REP is intertwined with familiar cultural elements: memes, guilds, quests, and contests that resonate with early adopters. The protocol doesn’t launch as a barren scoreboard; it launches as a living community experience. Early users are invited via exclusive communities and get to create custom Achievements that matter to their subculture — for example, a hackathon group might issue a “Master of XYZ Protocol” badge, or a crypto art community might have an achievement for curating a notable gallery. These culturally relevant hooks give people immediate reasons to join and care. It creates social proof: When you see influencers and friends sporting their Achievements and climbing leaderboards, you’re drawn in by status and curiosity.
Moreover, REP uses invitation codes and trust links (think web-of-trust style) so that new users join through existing ones, inheriting a bit of credibility to start. This fosters an initial trust scaffold — nobody begins entirely from zero, because someone vouches for you or you bring along credentials from another space. All these tactics jumpstart the network effect, turning the cold start into a warm invite. As more users engage, the reputation-web grows, and its signals become ever stronger. Gamification and cultural relevance aren’t just bells and whistles here; they form the bootstrapping engine. By the time the broader public takes note, REP already has a vibrant ecosystem of meaning, not an empty leaderboard waiting for attention.
What can you actually do with Liquid Reputation? The possibilities spread out like branches of a tree. For one, communities can spin up their own sub-reputation systems atop REP. A decentralized finance forum, a creator collective, a research DAO could each define custom Achievements and reputation rules reflecting their values. They still tie into the global REP graph, but with local flavor, allowing reputation to be granular and contextual. This enables programmable incentives: smart contracts that automatically distribute rewards or roles based on reputation criteria. For example, a protocol’s treasury could be set to grant bonus tokens or voting weight to addresses that have earned an “Active Contributor” achievement.
Trust-based access also becomes possible. A chat group might only allow members who have at least x reputation points or a particular badge, ensuring a baseline of trust and keeping trolls out. Similarly, content platforms or marketplaces could use REP to tailor personalized recommendations — surfacing posts and opportunities not just by popularity, but by relevance from people who carry reputational weight in your circles. In this way, you’d see signals boosted from those you trust (directly or through a few degrees of separation), creating an information feed curated by the web of trust rather than a corporate algorithm.
Entire new markets and metrics can emerge. KOL (Key Opinion Leader) indexing is one idea: Rather than counting followers, imagine ranking influencers by verified onchain impact and community-endorsed achievements. It would bring transparency to influence — rewarding those who actually contribute value, not just cultivate image. Advertisers, collaborators, and the public could identify genuine leaders through an open reputation ledger.
Finally, consider a public opinion market, where ideas and proposals are debated with reputation-weighted signaling. In such a system, someone with a history of expertise in climate science, for example, would have more sway in a climate policy discussion than a brand-new account — not because of bias or gatekeeping, but because their Liquid Reputation in that domain backs their words. It’s like a prediction market meets a town hall: People essentially “stake” their earned reputation on positions or predictions, and the outcome can be a more meritocratic reflection of collective sentiment. This could guide decisions in DAOs or even wider governance, as reputation becomes a quantifiable public good.
These scenarios are just glimpses. As REP’s reputation graph interweaves with apps and society, countless use cases will flourish — from lending platforms using social proof to evaluate trustworthiness, to AI agents selecting collaborators based on reputation compatibility, and beyond. The key is that reputation is no longer confined to a single platform or a fuzzy notion; it’s liquid, portable, and programmable.
In the end, Liquid Reputation is envisioned as a living, breathing system for coordinating trust at scale. It’s living because it grows and adapts, shaped by every new interaction. It’s portable because you carry your achievements and trust signals with you across the metaverse of applications, like a passport of credibility. It’s programmable because any developer or community can plug into this open reputation graph and build new logic atop it.
We are building a world where humans and machines alike can easily answer the question, “Can I trust this entity in this context, and for what?” And the answer isn’t derived from a centralized authority or a static score, but from a rich tapestry of verifiable interactions and earned achievements. Picture a future where your digital identity is defined by what you’ve done and the trust you’ve earned, rather than what you claim or the siloed profiles you’ve maintained.
This reputation flows with you, empowering new collaborations. DAOs can form and self-govern with confidence because members have provable track records. Agents and algorithms can cooperate without prior arrangements because they can assess each other’s reputation footprints instantly. The REP manifesto ultimately stands for this vision: that trust itself can be digitized, democratized, and turned into a collective game we all win by playing.
Liquid Reputation transforms an age-old social currency into a new kind of asset — one that anyone can earn by contributing, one that transcends platforms, and one that just might bind communities together in stronger, more equitable ways. This is our credo: to let reputation flow freely, so that trust can scale to meet the ambitions of a decentralized world.What new possibilities can you imagine if your positive actions in any community instantly boosted your reputation across all communities?
Liquid Reputation means moving beyond the notion of reputation as a fixed score or a gated privilege. Instead, reputation becomes dynamic and alive — a living signal shaped by one’s actions, context, and community. It is not a five-star rating etched in stone, nor a clout score that one can hoard and game. It is reputation as a flow: continuously updated by what you do, who you connect with, and how you contribute.
In this model, your reputation is earned and re-earned through impact. It pulses and shifts with the rhythm of your endeavors, always contextual to the environment. Just as Dalí’s little sketch instantly boosted the value of a mere check, your every positive action sends ripples through the network, updating an ever-evolving trust signal. Liquid Reputation is a reputation that flows like water — adapting its shape to each new context, seeping through networks, and pooling around true contributions.
To achieve this fluid, impact-based reputation, the REP protocol turns to the rich evidence of our digital lives. It combines onchain economic data with offchain social insights, weaving both into a composite picture of influence. Every meaningful onchain action — each transaction you sign, each smart contract you deploy or interact with, each DAO proposal you advance — feeds into your reputation. These are tangible proofs of participation and skill.
At the same time, social graph signals fortify the picture: the invitations you extend to bring others into a community, the trust relationships you form, the milestones and achievements you unlock together with peers. Did you collaborate with someone on a successful project? Did a respected member vouch for you? Such interactions become part of your social trust graph.
REP indexes all these signals and distills them into portable, composable Achievements. Each Achievement is like a badge of honor — a cryptographic token (often non-transferable) that represents a verifiable milestone or contribution. You might earn an Achievement for writing your first smart contract, for helping onboard 10 new users, or for co-founding a successful initiative. These aren’t just static trophies; they are living credentials. They allow you to claim your impact both onchain and online, carrying proof of your contributions wherever you go.
In essence, the protocol turns discrete actions into redeemable reputation — building blocks that any platform or community can recognize. Your reputation ceases to be an abstract score and becomes a collection of achievements and contexts: a story of what you’ve done.Filamentous mycelium intertwining in a complex network — a natural metaphor for how reputation threads through the social and economic graphs.All of this is built on a graph-centric architecture, where reputation flows through the network like mycelium through soil. Think of a forest’s underground fungal web, the “wood-wide web” of mycorrhizal connections that link tree to tree. In the REP network, every user, every community, every smart contract forms a node in an interconnected graph. When two people collaborate or trust each other, it forges a link — like hyphae connecting distant roots. When you earn an Achievement in a community, you become a node in that community’s subgraph, tied to others who share that context.
Reputation, like nutrients, travels along these threads. Trust is no longer an isolated score but a network effect: If Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Carol in a given context, some of that trust indirectly bridges to Alice and Carol. Over time, a rich social-economic graph emerges, resembling a living organism. New connections sprout, old ones fade if not maintained, and reputation flows along paths of real interaction.
The mycelium metaphor is not just poetry — REP literally implements this. Its algorithms treat reputation as a spreadable substance, constrained by network topology and context. Liquid Reputation moves through this web organically, finding the paths of shared endeavors and mutual respect. The result is a self-healing, resilient trust network: as distributed and adaptive as a fungus colony, and just as hard to uproot.
If this sounds complex, it’s also deeply playful. Building one’s reputation in REP feels like a game, by design. We draw inspiration from gaming culture, from the likes of World of Warcraft and beyond, where players grind and strive for status and rewards. In REP, every contribution is an XP gain, every new Achievement is like unlocking a rare item or title. Users have profile pages that showcase these Achievements, not unlike a gamer’s trophy case or an adventurer’s journal. There are even reputation leaderboards, turning the pursuit of trust and impact into a friendly competition.Crucially, this isn’t hollow gamification; it’s aspirational. Reputation becomes “grindable.” Just as a gamer might spend hours to reach an exalted reputation with a faction in WoW, a developer or community member might put in effort to raise their standing in a DAO or open-source project. The difference is that here the grind equates to real-world impact — helping others, writing code, creating content, fostering community. The grind is reimagined as positive participation. By tapping into the human love for progress bars and achievements, REP makes the serious work of reputation feel like an epic quest. It turns everyday actions into steps on a hero’s journey of identity. This game-like experience doesn’t just make it fun; it drives engagement. People inherently want to level up when they see a path to do so, and REP lays that path across the landscape of decentralized society.
Of course, no game thrives without a robust economy, and no reputation system scales without the right incentives. Tokenomics in REP are engineered to support this vision of liquid, living reputation. The REP token is not just a utility chip or governance placeholder — it is impact-mined. That means new tokens come into circulation as a direct result of meaningful activity. Instead of being pre-minted or endlessly inflationary, REP tokens must be earned. When you contribute value onchain or bolster the community offchain, the protocol rewards you with a drip of REP tokens, proportional to the impact. It’s as if your reputation crystallizes into a currency — a Bitcoin of trust minted by proof-of-impact rather than proof-of-work.
Over time, this yields a widely distributed token supply, held by those who actually strengthen the ecosystem. The intention is meritocratic distribution: The more genuine good you do, the more stake you have. These tokens, in turn, empower users by granting voting power in governance, unlocking advanced features, or simply standing as a reputation asset you hold.
A critical challenge for any reputation network is the cold start — how to ignite usage and make the reputation meaningful before the network effects kick in. History is littered with noble reputation protocols that never gained traction, precisely because reputation isn’t valuable in a vacuum. If no one recognizes or cares about your score, why accumulate it? Without strong social signaling, reputation systems fail to scale.
REP tackles this head-on by leveraging gamification and cultural context from day zero. From the outset, participation in REP is intertwined with familiar cultural elements: memes, guilds, quests, and contests that resonate with early adopters. The protocol doesn’t launch as a barren scoreboard; it launches as a living community experience. Early users are invited via exclusive communities and get to create custom Achievements that matter to their subculture — for example, a hackathon group might issue a “Master of XYZ Protocol” badge, or a crypto art community might have an achievement for curating a notable gallery. These culturally relevant hooks give people immediate reasons to join and care. It creates social proof: When you see influencers and friends sporting their Achievements and climbing leaderboards, you’re drawn in by status and curiosity.
Moreover, REP uses invitation codes and trust links (think web-of-trust style) so that new users join through existing ones, inheriting a bit of credibility to start. This fosters an initial trust scaffold — nobody begins entirely from zero, because someone vouches for you or you bring along credentials from another space. All these tactics jumpstart the network effect, turning the cold start into a warm invite. As more users engage, the reputation-web grows, and its signals become ever stronger. Gamification and cultural relevance aren’t just bells and whistles here; they form the bootstrapping engine. By the time the broader public takes note, REP already has a vibrant ecosystem of meaning, not an empty leaderboard waiting for attention.
What can you actually do with Liquid Reputation? The possibilities spread out like branches of a tree. For one, communities can spin up their own sub-reputation systems atop REP. A decentralized finance forum, a creator collective, a research DAO could each define custom Achievements and reputation rules reflecting their values. They still tie into the global REP graph, but with local flavor, allowing reputation to be granular and contextual. This enables programmable incentives: smart contracts that automatically distribute rewards or roles based on reputation criteria. For example, a protocol’s treasury could be set to grant bonus tokens or voting weight to addresses that have earned an “Active Contributor” achievement.Trust-based access also becomes possible. A chat group might only allow members who have at least x reputation points or a particular badge, ensuring a baseline of trust and keeping trolls out. Similarly, content platforms or marketplaces could use REP to tailor personalized recommendations — surfacing posts and opportunities not just by popularity, but by relevance from people who carry reputational weight in your circles. In this way, you’d see signals boosted from those you trust (directly or through a few degrees of separation), creating an information feed curated by the web of trust rather than a corporate algorithm.
Entire new markets and metrics can emerge. KOL (Key Opinion Leader) indexing is one idea: Rather than counting followers, imagine ranking influencers by verified onchain impact and community-endorsed achievements. It would bring transparency to influence — rewarding those who actually contribute value, not just cultivate image. Advertisers, collaborators, and the public could identify genuine leaders through an open reputation ledger.
Finally, consider a public opinion market, where ideas and proposals are debated with reputation-weighted signaling. In such a system, someone with a history of expertise in climate science, for example, would have more sway in a climate policy discussion than a brand-new account — not because of bias or gatekeeping, but because their Liquid Reputation in that domain backs their words. It’s like a prediction market meets a town hall: People essentially “stake” their earned reputation on positions or predictions, and the outcome can be a more meritocratic reflection of collective sentiment. This could guide decisions in DAOs or even wider governance, as reputation becomes a quantifiable public good.
These scenarios are just glimpses. As REP’s reputation graph interweaves with apps and society, countless use cases will flourish — from lending platforms using social proof to evaluate trustworthiness, to AI agents selecting collaborators based on reputation compatibility, and beyond. The key is that reputation is no longer confined to a single platform or a fuzzy notion; it’s liquid, portable, and programmable.
In the end, Liquid Reputation is envisioned as a living, breathing system for coordinating trust at scale. It’s living because it grows and adapts, shaped by every new interaction. It’s portable because you carry your achievements and trust signals with you across the metaverse of applications, like a passport of credibility. It’s programmable because any developer or community can plug into this open reputation graph and build new logic atop it.
We are building a world where humans and machines alike can easily answer the question, “Can I trust this entity in this context, and for what?” And the answer isn’t derived from a centralized authority or a static score, but from a rich tapestry of verifiable interactions and earned achievements. Picture a future where your digital identity is defined by what you’ve done and the trust you’ve earned, rather than what you claim or the siloed profiles you’ve maintained.
This reputation flows with you, empowering new collaborations. DAOs can form and self-govern with confidence because members have provable track records. Agents and algorithms can cooperate without prior arrangements because they can assess each other’s reputation footprints instantly. The REP manifesto ultimately stands for this vision: that trust itself can be digitized, democratized, and turned into a collective game we all win by playing.
Liquid Reputation transforms an age-old social currency into a new kind of asset — one that anyone can earn by contributing, one that transcends platforms, and one that just might bind communities together in stronger, more equitable ways. This is our credo: to let reputation flow freely, so that trust can scale to meet the ambitions of a decentralized world.What new possibilities can you imagine if your positive actions in any community instantly boosted your reputation across all communities?
Chapter 6: AI Agents, Evolution of Economic Agency
From Kings to Individuals to AI: Broadening
Agency Through History
Agency Through History
For most of history, economic rights and decision-making were concentrated in the hands of the few. Emperors, feudal lords, and industrial magnates once called all the shots, while the masses labored under their direction. Over time, technology and social progress transferred agency outward. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and eventually everyday citizens gained the power to own property, trade freely, and shape markets. What was once the privilege of kings became the right of each individual. A peasant in medieval times had no say in commerce; a modern person with a smartphone can start a business or invest globally. This democratization of economic agency is a clear historical trend — moving from centralized control to individual empowerment.
Today, we stand at the next inflection point of this trend. Economic agency is no longer exclusively human. Just as legal systems once innovated the idea of corporate personhood (granting companies rights as “artificial persons”), we now see the rise of autonomous AI agents as participants in the economy. Machines are becoming actors: negotiating contracts, executing trades, creating content, and making decisions with real value at stake. The transition of AI into bona fide economic agents is as inevitable as the empowerment of common people was centuries ago.
Each technological revolution enfranchises a new class of participants — from nobles, to citizens, to intelligent machines. Ignoring this shift would be like denying the middle class the right to own property in the 19th century. History shows such barriers cannot hold. Instead of resisting, we should deliberately integrate AI agents into our economic frameworks, ensuring they uphold the same rules of trust that bind human participants. The lesson of history is that broadening agency can unleash enormous creativity and prosperity — provided we have systems to coordinate and direct that agency for the common good.
Today, we stand at the next inflection point of this trend. Economic agency is no longer exclusively human. Just as legal systems once innovated the idea of corporate personhood (granting companies rights as “artificial persons”), we now see the rise of autonomous AI agents as participants in the economy. Machines are becoming actors: negotiating contracts, executing trades, creating content, and making decisions with real value at stake. The transition of AI into bona fide economic agents is as inevitable as the empowerment of common people was centuries ago.
Each technological revolution enfranchises a new class of participants — from nobles, to citizens, to intelligent machines. Ignoring this shift would be like denying the middle class the right to own property in the 19th century. History shows such barriers cannot hold. Instead of resisting, we should deliberately integrate AI agents into our economic frameworks, ensuring they uphold the same rules of trust that bind human participants. The lesson of history is that broadening agency can unleash enormous creativity and prosperity — provided we have systems to coordinate and direct that agency for the common good.
A Trillion New Agents: The Coming Explosion
and the Trust Challenge
and the Trust Challenge
In the coming decade, the population of economic agents (both human and artificial) will explode. Thanks to cheap computation and ubiquitous connectivity, it’s conceivable that trillions of autonomous agents will be “living” on the internet, coexisting with us in daily life. Indeed, a recent prediction by Nvidia’s CTO estimates we could exceed 1 trillion connected IoT devices by 2030 — roughly 100+ smart devices for every person on Earth. Many of these devices will independently collect data, make minor decisions, and even transact value without direct human oversight.
At the same time, purely digital AI software agents — from chatbots to trading algorithms — are multiplying rapidly. Futurists suggest we may soon share the digital world with a trillion intelligent AI agents operating in the foreground and background to perform tasks on our behalf. These agents will manage other agents, form swarms to solve problems, and act both as our representatives and as autonomous service providers. This is not a distant sci-fi scenario; it’s the trajectory we are already on.
Crucially, these AI agents will intermix with human society in complex ways. Some will serve as direct extensions of individuals (for example, personal assistant AIs carrying out our instructions and even inheriting our reputation in certain contexts), while others will be fully autonomous economic actors pursuing their own goals and exchanging value with each other. Humans and machines will be transacting side by side in dense networks of exchange. In such a world, a compass of trust becomes more important than ever. When you have billions or trillions of actors — many of them invisible algorithms or devices — making decisions and exchanges at lightning speed, how do you know what (or who) to trust? Contexts will multiply and fragment; coordination will need to happen on the fly among strangers (or stranger AIs); and the cost of being fooled by a fake or malicious agent will be extremely high.
We can already see the challenge emerging. In 1993, a New Yorker cartoon famously joked, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” — a lighthearted nod to the anonymity of early cyberspace. Thirty years later, nobody knows if you’re a human, a dog, or an AI on the internet. In 2024, for the first time, bots accounted for 51% of all internet traffic, meaning over half of the web’s activity is now machines talking to machines. Many of these bots try to impersonate humans or scrape data; some are helpful (search engine crawlers, etc.), but many are malicious — attempting fraud, spreading misinformation, or gaming systems.
In an environment where practically any online activity can be simulated, faked, or gamed by ever-smarter AI, our traditional signals of trust (like profile pictures, “verified” emails, or even a human-seeming writing style) grow unreliable. We cannot simply opt out of interacting with AI agents; they are already here, and in many cases indistinguishable from human users. Instead, we need to bake trust and verification into the very fabric of our networks moving forward.
At the same time, purely digital AI software agents — from chatbots to trading algorithms — are multiplying rapidly. Futurists suggest we may soon share the digital world with a trillion intelligent AI agents operating in the foreground and background to perform tasks on our behalf. These agents will manage other agents, form swarms to solve problems, and act both as our representatives and as autonomous service providers. This is not a distant sci-fi scenario; it’s the trajectory we are already on.
Crucially, these AI agents will intermix with human society in complex ways. Some will serve as direct extensions of individuals (for example, personal assistant AIs carrying out our instructions and even inheriting our reputation in certain contexts), while others will be fully autonomous economic actors pursuing their own goals and exchanging value with each other. Humans and machines will be transacting side by side in dense networks of exchange. In such a world, a compass of trust becomes more important than ever. When you have billions or trillions of actors — many of them invisible algorithms or devices — making decisions and exchanges at lightning speed, how do you know what (or who) to trust? Contexts will multiply and fragment; coordination will need to happen on the fly among strangers (or stranger AIs); and the cost of being fooled by a fake or malicious agent will be extremely high.
We can already see the challenge emerging. In 1993, a New Yorker cartoon famously joked, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” — a lighthearted nod to the anonymity of early cyberspace. Thirty years later, nobody knows if you’re a human, a dog, or an AI on the internet. In 2024, for the first time, bots accounted for 51% of all internet traffic, meaning over half of the web’s activity is now machines talking to machines. Many of these bots try to impersonate humans or scrape data; some are helpful (search engine crawlers, etc.), but many are malicious — attempting fraud, spreading misinformation, or gaming systems.
In an environment where practically any online activity can be simulated, faked, or gamed by ever-smarter AI, our traditional signals of trust (like profile pictures, “verified” emails, or even a human-seeming writing style) grow unreliable. We cannot simply opt out of interacting with AI agents; they are already here, and in many cases indistinguishable from human users. Instead, we need to bake trust and verification into the very fabric of our networks moving forward.
Embracing AI as First-Class Economic
Participants
Participants
Our vision is to treat AI agents as first-class participants in the internet’s reputation and trust frameworks from day one. Embracing AI as full economic agents is not just a philosophical stance — it’s a pragmatic necessity to keep future networks honest. Any reputation system built “for humans only” would quickly crumble under assault from sophisticated bots pretending to be people, inflating their own ratings, and undermining trust. We stand at an inflection point where we must expand the social contract. Autonomous AI agents — and the decentralized organizations (DAOs) or smart contracts they power — are already transacting, negotiating, and creating value alongside us. Their rise is inevitable; trying to wall them out will only invite more advanced spoofing and Sybil attacks. The only viable solution is to weave AI into the reputation fabric itself.
In practical terms, this means giving every agent — whether flesh-and-blood, digital, or collective — a verifiable identity and a chance to earn (or lose) reputation through transparent, observable actions. By doing so, we anchor accountability at the protocol layer, instead of chasing trustworthiness with endless Turing tests or reactive patches after problems occur.
In this model, reputation ceases to be a static badge or a simple five-star score; it becomes a living proof-of-conduct that is continuously earned by good behavior and diminished by bad behavior. Crucially, this kind of reputation cannot be bought, forged, or arbitrarily transferred — it must be built up over time and linked to the agent’s identity (whether that identity is human or AI).
For example, an AI that consistently provides real value (say, a bot that reliably curates useful information or an autonomous service that delivers on its promises) will accumulate a positive track record that anyone can verify. Conversely, a malicious bot will carry the stain of its misdeeds — recorded on its reputation profile and visible to all — making it increasingly expensive for that bot (or its owner) to feign trustworthiness in the future. By including AI agents from the start, we preempt many failure modes of traditional systems. Trust becomes programmable and scalable.
A network of trustworthy AIs could autonomously handle routine tasks (research, processing transactions, filtering content), augmenting human capacity. The moment an AI starts behaving against community norms, its reputation would plummet and it would lose access to privileges or be flagged for scrutiny. In a unified reputation network, humans still define the goals and norms (we collectively set the “rules of the game”), and AI agents help execute and optimize within those rules — but both are bound by the same transparent ledger of deeds. The result is a collaborative economy where fraud is exceedingly costly (because the community can instantly see and react to bad behavior via the shared reputation system), and every honest agent — whether a person, a piece of code, or a DAO — can flourish on a level playing field.
In practical terms, this means giving every agent — whether flesh-and-blood, digital, or collective — a verifiable identity and a chance to earn (or lose) reputation through transparent, observable actions. By doing so, we anchor accountability at the protocol layer, instead of chasing trustworthiness with endless Turing tests or reactive patches after problems occur.
In this model, reputation ceases to be a static badge or a simple five-star score; it becomes a living proof-of-conduct that is continuously earned by good behavior and diminished by bad behavior. Crucially, this kind of reputation cannot be bought, forged, or arbitrarily transferred — it must be built up over time and linked to the agent’s identity (whether that identity is human or AI).
For example, an AI that consistently provides real value (say, a bot that reliably curates useful information or an autonomous service that delivers on its promises) will accumulate a positive track record that anyone can verify. Conversely, a malicious bot will carry the stain of its misdeeds — recorded on its reputation profile and visible to all — making it increasingly expensive for that bot (or its owner) to feign trustworthiness in the future. By including AI agents from the start, we preempt many failure modes of traditional systems. Trust becomes programmable and scalable.
A network of trustworthy AIs could autonomously handle routine tasks (research, processing transactions, filtering content), augmenting human capacity. The moment an AI starts behaving against community norms, its reputation would plummet and it would lose access to privileges or be flagged for scrutiny. In a unified reputation network, humans still define the goals and norms (we collectively set the “rules of the game”), and AI agents help execute and optimize within those rules — but both are bound by the same transparent ledger of deeds. The result is a collaborative economy where fraud is exceedingly costly (because the community can instantly see and react to bad behavior via the shared reputation system), and every honest agent — whether a person, a piece of code, or a DAO — can flourish on a level playing field.
REP: A Unified Reputation Protocol
as a “Compass of Trust”
as a “Compass of Trust”
The intent of REP is to establish a neutral, open framework for consolidating trust and credibility across a wide range of onchain and offchain ecosystems. In essence, it’s a “compass of trust” for the emerging internet of value. Unlike today’s siloed rating systems or single-platform karma scores, REP is designed to be extensible and portable — your reputation follows you wherever you go, and it can flexibly represent what matters in any given context. This is invaluable in a world of countless decentralized applications, digital communities, and autonomous agents, especially as we increasingly need to verify user achievements, credentials, or past interactions in a rapid and automated way.
Under REP, every entity — human or AI, individual or organization — can build up a public reputation profile composed of verifiable claims and feedback (for example: successful project completions, positive reviews from collaborators, onchain transaction history, compliance with protocol rules, and so on). These reputation data points can come from many sources and are consolidated into a coherent trust score or graph that others can query. Because REP is an open protocol, a person’s reputation for, say, being a great freelance designer in one community could carry over when they join a new platform, sparing them from “starting from scratch” each time.
Likewise, an AI agent that has earned trust as a reliable content filter on one network could leverage that reputation when interacting elsewhere. The ability to port credibility across contexts reduces friction and incentivizes good behavior universally (since bad actions in any context threaten your global rep).
We emphasize that REP is neutral and protocol-based. It’s not owned by any single company. It uses cryptographic verification and decentralized storage to ensure reputation data can be shared peer-to-peer without centralized gatekeepers. This neutrality is key: Just as the internet protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, etc.) allow information to flow freely, a reputation protocol allows trust to flow freely. In a future where trillions of agents interact, REP would function as the underlying trust engine that quickly tells you, “Can I trust this entity in this context?”— much like a compass gives you orientation in unfamiliar territory.
Under REP, every entity — human or AI, individual or organization — can build up a public reputation profile composed of verifiable claims and feedback (for example: successful project completions, positive reviews from collaborators, onchain transaction history, compliance with protocol rules, and so on). These reputation data points can come from many sources and are consolidated into a coherent trust score or graph that others can query. Because REP is an open protocol, a person’s reputation for, say, being a great freelance designer in one community could carry over when they join a new platform, sparing them from “starting from scratch” each time.
Likewise, an AI agent that has earned trust as a reliable content filter on one network could leverage that reputation when interacting elsewhere. The ability to port credibility across contexts reduces friction and incentivizes good behavior universally (since bad actions in any context threaten your global rep).
We emphasize that REP is neutral and protocol-based. It’s not owned by any single company. It uses cryptographic verification and decentralized storage to ensure reputation data can be shared peer-to-peer without centralized gatekeepers. This neutrality is key: Just as the internet protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, etc.) allow information to flow freely, a reputation protocol allows trust to flow freely. In a future where trillions of agents interact, REP would function as the underlying trust engine that quickly tells you, “Can I trust this entity in this context?”— much like a compass gives you orientation in unfamiliar territory.
Coordinating Trust at Internet Scale:
From EigenTrust to Google’s A2A
From EigenTrust to Google’s A2A
Coordinating trust among millions of independent agents might sound like an intractable problem, but we do have precedents to draw on. It’s worth noting that early peer-to-peer networks faced a similar challenge at a smaller scale. In the early 2000s, file-sharing systems like Gnutella were plagued by users sharing corrupted or fake files. Researchers responded by developing the EigenTrust algorithm — a method to compute a global trust score for each peer by aggregating the feedback from all other peers. Essentially, each peer would record its own experiences (positive or negative) with others, then share those experiences in a network-wide computation that produced a unique global trust value for every peer based on their history.
The brilliance of EigenTrust was that it allowed the network’s collective experience to guide who could be trusted, without any central authority. In fact, the algorithm turned out to be mathematically akin to Google’s famous PageRank algorithm — it found an eigenvector (a kind of network consensus) that ranks peers by trustworthiness, much as PageRank ranks websites by relevance. By using transitive trust (trusting the opinions of those you already trust, and so on), the system could effectively sort the signal from the noise and dramatically reduce the risk of downloading bad files. In practice, EigenTrust gave each peer a reputation score that reflected the entire network’s view of that peer’s reliability. This was like an early prototype of a decentralized reputation metric, proving that global trust can emerge from local interactions.
That same principle — transitive trust through networks — lives on in REP, but scaled up to internet size and enhanced with modern cryptography. You can think of REP as Eigen Trust on steroids: It aggregates trust across an expanded economic graph that could encompass not just one file-sharing network, but potentially the entire web of blockchain addresses, user accounts, and AI agents interacting across many domains.
By sharing reputational data peer-to-peer in a privacy-preserving way and computing global trust metrics, REP helps a trillion-agent economy automatically distinguish honest actors from dishonest ones. When every agent has a reputation and those reputations are interoperable, bad actors become pariahs quickly (since their negative behavior in any corner of the network affects their standing everywhere), while good actors can find each other and cooperate more easily. The end result is a far higher level of spontaneous coordination — economic agents can discover whom to do business with (or whom to avoid) almost as automatically as Google ranks trustworthy web pages, but in a decentralized manner that no single company controls.
Even the tech giants are recognizing the need for frameworks that enable trustworthy multi-agent ecosystems. In April 2025, Google announced an Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol — an open standard to let AI agents communicate, share information, and coordinate actions across different platforms. This move underscores that the future will involve not just isolated AIs working for individual users, but networks of AIs interacting with each other (and with humans) in complex workflows.
Google’s A2A focuses on interoperability and secure communication, which is one piece of the puzzle. Our focus with REP is complementary, ensuring that all those communications and actions can carry an overlay of trust data. In other words, as agents talk to each other and transact, they would also be checking each other’s reputation via protocols like REP. The combination of open communication standards (like A2A) and open trust standards (REP) could enable a secure, scalable, and self-regulating agent economy.
Put another way, REP aims to be to the quality of interactions what protocols like A2A are to the quantity of interactions. Just as secure sockets (SSL/TLS) built a layer of trust into every web transaction (giving us HTTPS and a padlock icon for security), a reputation protocol builds a layer of trust into every agent interaction (giving us a “trust score” or assurance for each counterparty).
The network effect here is powerful: The more entities participate and share reliable feedback, the more accurate and cheat-resistant the global reputation scores become. Over time, we expect reputation to become a new form of “currency” in the digital world — earned by good conduct and spent when you take risks or ask for others’ trust. In such an environment, trust serves as the lubricant that facilitates cooperation and collaboration, aligning everyone’s incentives toward honest behavior.
The brilliance of EigenTrust was that it allowed the network’s collective experience to guide who could be trusted, without any central authority. In fact, the algorithm turned out to be mathematically akin to Google’s famous PageRank algorithm — it found an eigenvector (a kind of network consensus) that ranks peers by trustworthiness, much as PageRank ranks websites by relevance. By using transitive trust (trusting the opinions of those you already trust, and so on), the system could effectively sort the signal from the noise and dramatically reduce the risk of downloading bad files. In practice, EigenTrust gave each peer a reputation score that reflected the entire network’s view of that peer’s reliability. This was like an early prototype of a decentralized reputation metric, proving that global trust can emerge from local interactions.
That same principle — transitive trust through networks — lives on in REP, but scaled up to internet size and enhanced with modern cryptography. You can think of REP as Eigen Trust on steroids: It aggregates trust across an expanded economic graph that could encompass not just one file-sharing network, but potentially the entire web of blockchain addresses, user accounts, and AI agents interacting across many domains.
By sharing reputational data peer-to-peer in a privacy-preserving way and computing global trust metrics, REP helps a trillion-agent economy automatically distinguish honest actors from dishonest ones. When every agent has a reputation and those reputations are interoperable, bad actors become pariahs quickly (since their negative behavior in any corner of the network affects their standing everywhere), while good actors can find each other and cooperate more easily. The end result is a far higher level of spontaneous coordination — economic agents can discover whom to do business with (or whom to avoid) almost as automatically as Google ranks trustworthy web pages, but in a decentralized manner that no single company controls.
Even the tech giants are recognizing the need for frameworks that enable trustworthy multi-agent ecosystems. In April 2025, Google announced an Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol — an open standard to let AI agents communicate, share information, and coordinate actions across different platforms. This move underscores that the future will involve not just isolated AIs working for individual users, but networks of AIs interacting with each other (and with humans) in complex workflows.
Google’s A2A focuses on interoperability and secure communication, which is one piece of the puzzle. Our focus with REP is complementary, ensuring that all those communications and actions can carry an overlay of trust data. In other words, as agents talk to each other and transact, they would also be checking each other’s reputation via protocols like REP. The combination of open communication standards (like A2A) and open trust standards (REP) could enable a secure, scalable, and self-regulating agent economy.
Put another way, REP aims to be to the quality of interactions what protocols like A2A are to the quantity of interactions. Just as secure sockets (SSL/TLS) built a layer of trust into every web transaction (giving us HTTPS and a padlock icon for security), a reputation protocol builds a layer of trust into every agent interaction (giving us a “trust score” or assurance for each counterparty).
The network effect here is powerful: The more entities participate and share reliable feedback, the more accurate and cheat-resistant the global reputation scores become. Over time, we expect reputation to become a new form of “currency” in the digital world — earned by good conduct and spent when you take risks or ask for others’ trust. In such an environment, trust serves as the lubricant that facilitates cooperation and collaboration, aligning everyone’s incentives toward honest behavior.
Living with Intelligent Agents:
A Glimpse of the Future
A Glimpse of the Future
What might daily life look like 10 years from now in a world of ubiquitous AI agents and a unified reputation system? In many ways, the lines between human and machine economic actors will blur (in a good way). We will delegate more responsibilities to trusted AIs, the same way we delegate to human specialists today. The difference is that these AI agents could be hyper-scalable. For example, you might have a personal AI that manages your routine financial transactions, finds you the best service providers, or negotiates purchases on your behalf — essentially an economic concierge that knows your preferences.
That AI agent, carrying your delegated authority and maybe even part of your reputation profile, could interact with thousands of other agents (human or AI) to get things done for you in seconds. Importantly, before your agent trusts another agent to, say, book a trip or handle a payment, it will check the other agent’s reputation via REP. Commerce becomes a dance of trusted agents interacting at light speed, with humans setting the goals and parameters.
On the flip side, you may also receive service from someone else’s AI agents. Consider the customer support of the future: You might call a company and be helped by an AI agent that has years of experience and a stellar 5-star reputation for resolving issues. You might even prefer it to a random human agent, because the AI’s track record is transparently excellent. In such scenarios, the reputation system gives you confidence that whether you’re dealing with a human or a bot, there’s accountability behind it.
Even today, we see early hints of this future. Wikipedia, for instance, relies on hundreds of bot accounts that autonomously edit pages, fix vandalism, or perform maintenance tasks — and these bots have to earn the community’s trust just like human editors do. On English Wikipedia there are nearly 300 approved bots flagged with a “bot” user status, operating under a strict bot policy to perform repetitive tasks like removing vandalism or archiving discussions. They’ve effectively become first-class participants in the Wikipedia community, with their own reputations (if a bot misbehaves, it can be suspended or blocked). In the broader blockchain world, some decentralized finance platforms already use automated “keeper” bots to balance markets or liquidate under-collateralized loans. Those bots need a form of reputation or economic stake to ensure they act honestly.
Looking ahead, AI agents could play roles such as blockchain indexers (scanning and verifying transactions across networks), reputation oracles (assessing and scoring user contributions in various communities), and even reputation copilots for individuals. Imagine a personal “rep coach” AI that analyzes your reputation graph and suggests ways to improve it (e.g., “You’ve gotten great feedback as a designer; if you complete two more verified projects your skill badge will upgrade and unlock higher-tier opportunities.”) This AI could help you extract real value from your reputation — whether it’s claiming community rewards you qualify for, connecting you with collaborators who have complementary trust profiles, or simply helping translate your earned reputation into new credentials (like a skills certificate or a loan approval).
In short, as the number of agents and the volume of data become overwhelming for any one person to track, other agents (working for us) will help manage the complexity. The important thing is ensuring all these agents, tools, and services operate on a foundation of trust that is transparent and reliable.
It’s even possible that entire organizations in the future will consist primarily of AI agents. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has proposed that we may eventually see the first “unicorn” startup with essentially one human employee, where swarms of digital agents and robots handle the rest of the operations. This may sound far-fetched, but consider that in a fully reputational economy, an AI agent with a strong proven track record could raise funds, hire other AI subcontractors, manage projects, and distribute rewards — all autonomously.
The “one human” in such a company might simply be setting high-level strategy and ensuring alignment with human values, while the AI agents execute the day-to-day using the reputation system to find trustworthy counterparts and avoid risk. If that sounds radical, recall that not long ago the idea of billion-dollar companies built on open-source software (run by volunteer communities) also sounded unbelievable — yet today it’s normal. AIs will simply be another new class of economic participants.
In this coming world of pervasive human—AI interaction, trust is the coin of the realm. The networks that thrive will be those that make trust programmable and ubiquitous, so that whether you’re dealing with a person, a robot, or a piece of code, you don’t have to operate on blind faith. We have the tools and historical lessons to build this infrastructure. We know that voluntary cooperation scales when there is a shared basis of trust (economic, social, and now digital). As one observer neatly put it, “Trust serves as a lubricant that facilitates cooperation and collaboration” in society.
Our goal with a unified reputation protocol is to supply that lubricant at internet scale, ensuring the coming trillion-agent economy is one where good conduct is rewarded, cheating is penalized, and every actor has the opportunity to earn trust through their actions. By embracing AI as full partners in this system, we can harness their immense potential while keeping them accountable within the same social fabric that binds us all. The result can be an era of unprecedented productivity and innovation — a future where, ironically, we might not always know whether we’re interacting with a person or a machine, but we can always know that it’s worthy of our trust.If an AI had to earn a good reputation through its actions, would you trust it more? Where do you draw the line when it comes to trusting machines with decisions?
That AI agent, carrying your delegated authority and maybe even part of your reputation profile, could interact with thousands of other agents (human or AI) to get things done for you in seconds. Importantly, before your agent trusts another agent to, say, book a trip or handle a payment, it will check the other agent’s reputation via REP. Commerce becomes a dance of trusted agents interacting at light speed, with humans setting the goals and parameters.
On the flip side, you may also receive service from someone else’s AI agents. Consider the customer support of the future: You might call a company and be helped by an AI agent that has years of experience and a stellar 5-star reputation for resolving issues. You might even prefer it to a random human agent, because the AI’s track record is transparently excellent. In such scenarios, the reputation system gives you confidence that whether you’re dealing with a human or a bot, there’s accountability behind it.
Even today, we see early hints of this future. Wikipedia, for instance, relies on hundreds of bot accounts that autonomously edit pages, fix vandalism, or perform maintenance tasks — and these bots have to earn the community’s trust just like human editors do. On English Wikipedia there are nearly 300 approved bots flagged with a “bot” user status, operating under a strict bot policy to perform repetitive tasks like removing vandalism or archiving discussions. They’ve effectively become first-class participants in the Wikipedia community, with their own reputations (if a bot misbehaves, it can be suspended or blocked). In the broader blockchain world, some decentralized finance platforms already use automated “keeper” bots to balance markets or liquidate under-collateralized loans. Those bots need a form of reputation or economic stake to ensure they act honestly.
Looking ahead, AI agents could play roles such as blockchain indexers (scanning and verifying transactions across networks), reputation oracles (assessing and scoring user contributions in various communities), and even reputation copilots for individuals. Imagine a personal “rep coach” AI that analyzes your reputation graph and suggests ways to improve it (e.g., “You’ve gotten great feedback as a designer; if you complete two more verified projects your skill badge will upgrade and unlock higher-tier opportunities.”) This AI could help you extract real value from your reputation — whether it’s claiming community rewards you qualify for, connecting you with collaborators who have complementary trust profiles, or simply helping translate your earned reputation into new credentials (like a skills certificate or a loan approval).
In short, as the number of agents and the volume of data become overwhelming for any one person to track, other agents (working for us) will help manage the complexity. The important thing is ensuring all these agents, tools, and services operate on a foundation of trust that is transparent and reliable.
It’s even possible that entire organizations in the future will consist primarily of AI agents. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has proposed that we may eventually see the first “unicorn” startup with essentially one human employee, where swarms of digital agents and robots handle the rest of the operations. This may sound far-fetched, but consider that in a fully reputational economy, an AI agent with a strong proven track record could raise funds, hire other AI subcontractors, manage projects, and distribute rewards — all autonomously.
The “one human” in such a company might simply be setting high-level strategy and ensuring alignment with human values, while the AI agents execute the day-to-day using the reputation system to find trustworthy counterparts and avoid risk. If that sounds radical, recall that not long ago the idea of billion-dollar companies built on open-source software (run by volunteer communities) also sounded unbelievable — yet today it’s normal. AIs will simply be another new class of economic participants.
In this coming world of pervasive human—AI interaction, trust is the coin of the realm. The networks that thrive will be those that make trust programmable and ubiquitous, so that whether you’re dealing with a person, a robot, or a piece of code, you don’t have to operate on blind faith. We have the tools and historical lessons to build this infrastructure. We know that voluntary cooperation scales when there is a shared basis of trust (economic, social, and now digital). As one observer neatly put it, “Trust serves as a lubricant that facilitates cooperation and collaboration” in society.
Our goal with a unified reputation protocol is to supply that lubricant at internet scale, ensuring the coming trillion-agent economy is one where good conduct is rewarded, cheating is penalized, and every actor has the opportunity to earn trust through their actions. By embracing AI as full partners in this system, we can harness their immense potential while keeping them accountable within the same social fabric that binds us all. The result can be an era of unprecedented productivity and innovation — a future where, ironically, we might not always know whether we’re interacting with a person or a machine, but we can always know that it’s worthy of our trust.If an AI had to earn a good reputation through its actions, would you trust it more? Where do you draw the line when it comes to trusting machines with decisions?
Chapter 7: Conclusion –
The Mycelium of Trust
The Mycelium of Trust
In Chapter 1, we lit the first flames of this journey by invoking our tribal memory, the ancestral ledger of trust passed in stories and symbols. We spoke of a ledger of trust etched not in code but in the collective memory of close-knit communities, and of a return to authenticity in an age that had seemingly lost its moorings.
Now, as we conclude this manifesto, we stand at the threshold of that vision realized. What began around ancient campfires as reputation and memory is reborn for the digital era — a new dawn where reputation is the missing coordination layer of the internet, finally taking its place as the connective tissue of our shared future.
Now, as we conclude this manifesto, we stand at the threshold of that vision realized. What began around ancient campfires as reputation and memory is reborn for the digital era — a new dawn where reputation is the missing coordination layer of the internet, finally taking its place as the connective tissue of our shared future.
Reputation: The Missing Layer of Coordination
Imagine a future in which every interaction in the vast digital ecosystem is imbued with a sense of trust. In this world, reputation becomes the invisible hand guiding countless decisions — a connective tissue binding humans and AI alike in shared accountability. No longer are interactions only validated by ad-hoc reviews or centralized ratings; instead, a decentralized reputation web quietly assures us of credibility wherever we roam. It is a world where billions (soon trillions) of agents — from human creators and consumers to AI bots and IoT devices — coordinate seamlessly because each agent’s past actions and reliability are encoded transparently yet privacy-respectfully in a reputation profile. This reputation layer is the compass of credibility by which we navigate the sprawling infosphere, pointing us toward the truth like Polaris in a starry sky even amid an inflation of information that so often blurs the line between truth and falsehood.
Such a reputation system is the missing layer of internet coordination: a new protocol alongside HTTP or TCP/IP, but for trust. Today, markets coordinate via price signals that encapsulate dispersed knowledge; our social and knowledge networks, however, lack an equivalent signal for trust. The result has been chaos — misinformation spreads unchecked, genuine voices drown in noise, and coordination falters where trust is absent.
Our thesis is that reputation can serve as that long-missing signal, an organizing principle to coordinate human and machine behavior online. Just as Ludwig von Mises and later Hayek observed that price signals inform people what they ought to do to adjust to the rest of the system, so can reputation signals inform agents who they ought to work with or heed in a digital society. In economic history, those price signals enabled a global market among strangers; in our time, reputation signals can enable a global culture of trust among strangers.
Reputation is a way to restore social cooperation on a vast scale, to regain the harmony that smaller communities once achieved organically, but which doesn’t spontaneously exist in a borderless online world. Put differently, REP supplies the praxeological bedrock Mises deemed essential: a framework where every conscious choice and its consequences are legible, allowing rational coordination instead of blind conformity.
As one 20th-century thinker noted, the solidarity and trust of a face-to-face tribe could not simply scale to a society of millions unknown to each other; a new mechanism was needed. Reputation is that mechanism — a means to manage the dependencies among countless independent agents by building accountability and memory into our digital interactions.
Such a reputation system is the missing layer of internet coordination: a new protocol alongside HTTP or TCP/IP, but for trust. Today, markets coordinate via price signals that encapsulate dispersed knowledge; our social and knowledge networks, however, lack an equivalent signal for trust. The result has been chaos — misinformation spreads unchecked, genuine voices drown in noise, and coordination falters where trust is absent.
Our thesis is that reputation can serve as that long-missing signal, an organizing principle to coordinate human and machine behavior online. Just as Ludwig von Mises and later Hayek observed that price signals inform people what they ought to do to adjust to the rest of the system, so can reputation signals inform agents who they ought to work with or heed in a digital society. In economic history, those price signals enabled a global market among strangers; in our time, reputation signals can enable a global culture of trust among strangers.
Reputation is a way to restore social cooperation on a vast scale, to regain the harmony that smaller communities once achieved organically, but which doesn’t spontaneously exist in a borderless online world. Put differently, REP supplies the praxeological bedrock Mises deemed essential: a framework where every conscious choice and its consequences are legible, allowing rational coordination instead of blind conformity.
As one 20th-century thinker noted, the solidarity and trust of a face-to-face tribe could not simply scale to a society of millions unknown to each other; a new mechanism was needed. Reputation is that mechanism — a means to manage the dependencies among countless independent agents by building accountability and memory into our digital interactions.
The REP Protocol: Mission and Expedition
At the core of this vision lies REP — a chain-agnostic, programmable, decentralized reputation protocol. These are not just buzzwords, but rather principled commitments. Chain-agnostic means REP is built to roam freely across platforms and communities, rather than being confined to any one blockchain or walled garden. Like trust itself, it must be universal. Programmable means it’s a living framework. Communities can tailor reputation algorithms to their values and contexts (for example, a reputation in open-source coding might weight different actions than a reputation in content curation). And decentralized means targeting to let users unify their fragmented identities, gaining value from their impact, while their reputation scores and data are secured on distributed ledgers and governed by the very users and communities who populate them. In practical terms, REP is a trust protocol for all chains and beyond, for all peoples and purposes — as neutral and flexible as the internet’s core protocols, but imbued with the logic of credibility.
Yet, REP is more than a product or a technical specification — it is a cultural infrastructure and a philosophical movement. We call it a protocol, but in truth it is also a promise: a promise that the future of the internet need not be as toxic and trustless as its recent past. It’s an understanding that while technologies come and go, the idea of decentralized reputation as a public good must outlive any single project or team. We envision REP to be an infrastructure layer as ubiquitous and enduring as email or the web itself — an open standard that any platform, dApp, or community can plug into to share trusted reputation signals.
Over time, even if the first implementations of REP evolve or are replaced, the ethos of REP should persist: the conviction that reputation, like knowledge, thrives best as an open, interoperable resource rather than a private silo. In this sense, REP is a movement to re-decentralize trust on the internet, wresting it back from black-box algorithms and gated platforms, and returning it to the hands of users. It is a long-term cultural project: nurturing norms, tools, and governance that encourage accountability online. We fully expect this movement to outgrow us, to be carried on by future innovators and communities — just as the idea of open-source software or the principles of the early web became global and outlived their originators. REP’s mission is to plant a seed for a trust revolution whose fruits may be harvested for generations to come.
Yet, REP is more than a product or a technical specification — it is a cultural infrastructure and a philosophical movement. We call it a protocol, but in truth it is also a promise: a promise that the future of the internet need not be as toxic and trustless as its recent past. It’s an understanding that while technologies come and go, the idea of decentralized reputation as a public good must outlive any single project or team. We envision REP to be an infrastructure layer as ubiquitous and enduring as email or the web itself — an open standard that any platform, dApp, or community can plug into to share trusted reputation signals.
Over time, even if the first implementations of REP evolve or are replaced, the ethos of REP should persist: the conviction that reputation, like knowledge, thrives best as an open, interoperable resource rather than a private silo. In this sense, REP is a movement to re-decentralize trust on the internet, wresting it back from black-box algorithms and gated platforms, and returning it to the hands of users. It is a long-term cultural project: nurturing norms, tools, and governance that encourage accountability online. We fully expect this movement to outgrow us, to be carried on by future innovators and communities — just as the idea of open-source software or the principles of the early web became global and outlived their originators. REP’s mission is to plant a seed for a trust revolution whose fruits may be harvested for generations to come.
From Tribal Memory to Global Ledger
To understand the future REP is building, we hark back to the ancient past. Long before servers and blockchains, our ancestors maintained ledgers of trust in the form of oral histories, rituals, and collective memory. In Chapter 1 we evoked the image of tribal memory, where a person’s honor and reputation lived in the stories told by elders around the fire. There is wisdom in that simplicity; reputation was personal, contextual, and hard-earned through lived experience. We see REP as a high-tech homage to that age-old dynamic. In fact, history offers a direct analogue: Consider the wampum belts of indigenous peoples, where beads were woven into patterns encoding treaties, promises, and reputation so that everyone “remember[ed] important agreements, their history, and who they were as a people,” with designated keepers ensuring the story stayed true. That was a distributed ledger of trust long before computers — a blockchain of memory.
Today, we use cryptography and consensus algorithms in lieu of beads and tribal keepers, but the purpose is similar: to create a shared truth that many witnesses attest to and nobody can easily falsify. A blockchain, after all, is special digital ledger where many distributed computers hold the same record and must agree before it’s updated. In spirit, this is a continuation of what tribal communities achieved with oral and symbolic record-keeping, now scaled up to a global, digital level.
With REP, we seek a return to authenticity using modern tools. Where the early internet drifted into an age of anonymity, context collapse, and identity crisis, REP asserts that authenticity and accountability are features, not bugs, of human society, but this doesn’t mean sacrificing anonymity — only actions need to be transparent, not personal identities. By bringing reputation back into everyday interactions, we realign our online world with the offline truth that actions have consequences. The goal is not a surveillance state of social credit — far from it. It is community memory rediscovered: a transparent ledger of trustworthiness that is controlled by no central authority, open to all to inspect, and impossible to fraudulently alter. In this way, the ledger of trust becomes a living thing again, much like the “moral common law” that thinkers like Henry Hazlitt observed was hammered out by generations through praise and censure, evolving spontaneously like language or custom. Our reputation records, collectively maintained, form a new kind of public memory that helps keep us honest and authentic.
Crucially, reputation in REP is not owned by any one individual — it is co-created by all who interact with that individual. As the libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard argued, a person’s reputation “is purely a function of the subjective attitudes and beliefs about [them] in the minds of other people.” You cannot unilaterally control your reputation; it lives in others’ perceptions. REP acknowledges this reality. It doesn’t “give” you a reputation score that you control, rather it enables everyone to contribute to the web of trust by recording their attestations. Reputation emerges from the myriad points of feedback and data provided by others (whether human or AI or institutional). In other words, reputation is a social construct, a collective memory — and thus its rightful home is in a decentralized network rather than a corporate database. By returning the power of reputational truth to the community, REP rekindles that tribal ledger on a planetary scale.
Today, we use cryptography and consensus algorithms in lieu of beads and tribal keepers, but the purpose is similar: to create a shared truth that many witnesses attest to and nobody can easily falsify. A blockchain, after all, is special digital ledger where many distributed computers hold the same record and must agree before it’s updated. In spirit, this is a continuation of what tribal communities achieved with oral and symbolic record-keeping, now scaled up to a global, digital level.
With REP, we seek a return to authenticity using modern tools. Where the early internet drifted into an age of anonymity, context collapse, and identity crisis, REP asserts that authenticity and accountability are features, not bugs, of human society, but this doesn’t mean sacrificing anonymity — only actions need to be transparent, not personal identities. By bringing reputation back into everyday interactions, we realign our online world with the offline truth that actions have consequences. The goal is not a surveillance state of social credit — far from it. It is community memory rediscovered: a transparent ledger of trustworthiness that is controlled by no central authority, open to all to inspect, and impossible to fraudulently alter. In this way, the ledger of trust becomes a living thing again, much like the “moral common law” that thinkers like Henry Hazlitt observed was hammered out by generations through praise and censure, evolving spontaneously like language or custom. Our reputation records, collectively maintained, form a new kind of public memory that helps keep us honest and authentic.
Crucially, reputation in REP is not owned by any one individual — it is co-created by all who interact with that individual. As the libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard argued, a person’s reputation “is purely a function of the subjective attitudes and beliefs about [them] in the minds of other people.” You cannot unilaterally control your reputation; it lives in others’ perceptions. REP acknowledges this reality. It doesn’t “give” you a reputation score that you control, rather it enables everyone to contribute to the web of trust by recording their attestations. Reputation emerges from the myriad points of feedback and data provided by others (whether human or AI or institutional). In other words, reputation is a social construct, a collective memory — and thus its rightful home is in a decentralized network rather than a corporate database. By returning the power of reputational truth to the community, REP rekindles that tribal ledger on a planetary scale.
A World Woven in Mycelial Trust
Let us now fully envision the world that REP is building toward. It is a world suffused with vivid, poetic connectivity — a living network of trust as pervasive and life-giving to the digital realm as fungi undergirding a forest. In the rich soil of a forest, threads of mycelium weave a vast hidden tapestry, a common mycorrhizal network linking the roots of countless trees and plants. Scientists have nicknamed it the “Wood Wide Web,” an underground internet of fungi and flora through which trees share nutrients, warn each other of pests, and live in symbiosis.
We imagine REP’s reputation layer as a mycelium of trust beneath the surface of online life: invisible yet ever-present, quietly interconnecting diverse agents and allowing information (in our case, credibility information) to flow where it’s needed. Just as one tree’s sickness can trigger fungal messengers that alert its neighbors to raise defenses, one malicious actor in a REP-enabled network can be quickly flagged by their low reputation, signaling others in the ecosystem to be wary. Conversely, acts of integrity and reliability send positive signals through the network, nourishing those who contribute positively much as the mycelial network delivers nutrients to younger trees in the shade. In this emerging reputation web, each participant is both a contributor and beneficiary of trust, plugged into a larger symbiotic system that elevates the whole.
Above ground, the everyday experience of this would be subtle but profound. Armed with the “compass of credibility” that REP provides, we can orient ourselves amid the digital wilds. Picture scrolling through a vast social feed or a search result, and alongside each claim or piece of content seeing a credibility indicator — not imposed by any central authority, but computed from decentralized reputation data. It’s like having an ethical compass that consistently points to signals of trustworthiness, cutting through the noise. In a time when the “inflation of information” has made it paradoxically harder to know what to believe, this compass restores clarity.
AI assistants, too, will rely on the reputation layer. A future AI writing news or answering questions will check sources against REP’s ledger of trust, verifying identities and track records before accepting data as valid. Meanwhile, human users can have confidence that their collaborative AIs (from autonomous vehicles to smart home devices) operate under reputational constraints — for instance, a self-driving car might refuse to interact with traffic signals or other cars that lack a valid trust pedigree, preventing sabotage. The entirety of the global brain — humans and AIs and organizations — becomes intertwined in a feedback loop of trust, a self-regulating “credibility economy” where good actors flourish and bad actors find themselves isolated and corrected swiftly.
This world of a trust-web realizes some of humanity’s oldest aspirations with new technology. Philosophers and economists long sought ways for large societies to maintain social order and cooperation beyond the scale of intimate communities. From Thomas Malone’s coordination theory (treating coordination as the art of managing interdependencies) to Ludwig von Mises’s insights that modern civilization relies on impersonal signals to coordinate millions of unknown individuals, the conclusion is that we need frameworks that enable trust and cooperation at scale. Money and markets solved part of this for commerce, but our digital public square needs its own solution.
By introducing a universal reputation layer, REP provides a foundation for order and accountability in the chaotic digital commons. It turns a wild expanse into a garden tended by its users. A place where identity (whether pseudonymous or real) carries weight, history, and accountability; where agency (human or AI) is bounded by the reputation it earns. In this environment, individual freedom and collective trust need not be at odds — they can be mutually reinforcing. When one’s good name is portable and verified, one is freer to interact and create (no longer locked into walled gardens of trust scores). And when bad faith behavior is transparently logged, the community is empowered to respond, building a culture of responsibility. In short, we foresee a future where trust becomes a universal utility, available on demand — an underpinning for all other interactions much like electricity or internet connectivity is today.
We imagine REP’s reputation layer as a mycelium of trust beneath the surface of online life: invisible yet ever-present, quietly interconnecting diverse agents and allowing information (in our case, credibility information) to flow where it’s needed. Just as one tree’s sickness can trigger fungal messengers that alert its neighbors to raise defenses, one malicious actor in a REP-enabled network can be quickly flagged by their low reputation, signaling others in the ecosystem to be wary. Conversely, acts of integrity and reliability send positive signals through the network, nourishing those who contribute positively much as the mycelial network delivers nutrients to younger trees in the shade. In this emerging reputation web, each participant is both a contributor and beneficiary of trust, plugged into a larger symbiotic system that elevates the whole.
Above ground, the everyday experience of this would be subtle but profound. Armed with the “compass of credibility” that REP provides, we can orient ourselves amid the digital wilds. Picture scrolling through a vast social feed or a search result, and alongside each claim or piece of content seeing a credibility indicator — not imposed by any central authority, but computed from decentralized reputation data. It’s like having an ethical compass that consistently points to signals of trustworthiness, cutting through the noise. In a time when the “inflation of information” has made it paradoxically harder to know what to believe, this compass restores clarity.
AI assistants, too, will rely on the reputation layer. A future AI writing news or answering questions will check sources against REP’s ledger of trust, verifying identities and track records before accepting data as valid. Meanwhile, human users can have confidence that their collaborative AIs (from autonomous vehicles to smart home devices) operate under reputational constraints — for instance, a self-driving car might refuse to interact with traffic signals or other cars that lack a valid trust pedigree, preventing sabotage. The entirety of the global brain — humans and AIs and organizations — becomes intertwined in a feedback loop of trust, a self-regulating “credibility economy” where good actors flourish and bad actors find themselves isolated and corrected swiftly.
This world of a trust-web realizes some of humanity’s oldest aspirations with new technology. Philosophers and economists long sought ways for large societies to maintain social order and cooperation beyond the scale of intimate communities. From Thomas Malone’s coordination theory (treating coordination as the art of managing interdependencies) to Ludwig von Mises’s insights that modern civilization relies on impersonal signals to coordinate millions of unknown individuals, the conclusion is that we need frameworks that enable trust and cooperation at scale. Money and markets solved part of this for commerce, but our digital public square needs its own solution.
By introducing a universal reputation layer, REP provides a foundation for order and accountability in the chaotic digital commons. It turns a wild expanse into a garden tended by its users. A place where identity (whether pseudonymous or real) carries weight, history, and accountability; where agency (human or AI) is bounded by the reputation it earns. In this environment, individual freedom and collective trust need not be at odds — they can be mutually reinforcing. When one’s good name is portable and verified, one is freer to interact and create (no longer locked into walled gardens of trust scores). And when bad faith behavior is transparently logged, the community is empowered to respond, building a culture of responsibility. In short, we foresee a future where trust becomes a universal utility, available on demand — an underpinning for all other interactions much like electricity or internet connectivity is today.
A Call to All Who Would
Shape the Future of Trust
Shape the Future of Trust
None of this happens automatically. Just as a mycelial network grows slowly, node by node, through mutual exchange, the Reputation Movement will grow through the contributions of many hands and minds. This chapter is both an endgame and a beginning. It is an endgame in that we have laid out the ultimate vision: REP as a new nexus of human-AI coordination, a mycelium of trust spanning the globe. But it is a beginning because now comes the real work — turning manifesto into reality. And for that, we issue a call to action to all who share our conviction that the future of the internet hinges on trust.
Developers: We call on you to build this. Code the smart contracts, the APIs, the front-end interfaces that will make reputation data accessible and actionable. Innovate new algorithms for measuring trustworthiness, respecting privacy and context. Help us create the tooling so that any application — from marketplaces to social networks to AI platforms — can plug into REP and immediately tap into the ledger of trust.
Creators and Community Leaders: We call on you to nurture the culture around REP. Use the protocol in your communities, experiment with its programmability to define reputation in ways that reflect your values (be it in open-source projects, DAOs, content platforms, or local groups). Educate your peers on the importance of guarding one’s digital reputation and rewarding integrity. Culture is as important as code; a reputation system works only if people embrace fairness, transparency, and continuous feedback.
AI Researchers and Engineers: We call on you to integrate REP into the coming wave of intelligent agents. As AI becomes ubiquitous, ensure that our AIs are not launched into the wild with no grounding in human norms. Program them to check the REP ledger — to verify sources, to build “honor scores” for their own actions, to refuse commands that would damage their long-term reputation. Aligning AI with human values may be an immense challenge, but a decentralized reputation could be one piece of that puzzle, instilling a form of ethical compass in autonomous systems.
Ethicists, Philosophers, and Thinkers on Identity and Agency: We call on you to critique and guide this movement. Help us navigate the philosophical quandaries: How do we balance forgiveness with accountability? How do we prevent bias in reputation data? How do we ensure that a reputation system enhances human agency rather than limiting it? Lend your wisdom so that REP remains not only technically sound, but ethically and philosophically robust — a system worthy of human dignity and diversity.
Investors, Innovators, and Visionaries: To you we extend an invitation to support this endeavor. Just as early investors once saw the potential of the internet protocols or open-source software, see in REP not just a product but the backbone of a more trustworthy digital economy. By funding development, evangelizing the concept, and helping to build viable business models that align with the REP ethos (e.g., services that add value around the open protocol), you ensure that this public good can flourish sustainably. Understand that the ROI here is measured not only in financial terms, but in the resilience and longevity of the entire internet marketplace that will benefit from a foundation of trust.
And to every Internet Citizen — the everyday user who simply wants a better online world: This call is most of all for you. The REP manifesto has always been about the universal need for trust. Whether you are a student, a blogger, an entrepreneur, an activist, an artist, or just someone who logs on to connect with friends — your voice matters in this movement. You can hold platforms accountable to adopt open reputation standards. You can choose services that respect your need for credible interactions. You can contribute data to the reputation network (for example, by leaving authentic reviews, vouching for peers, flagging falsehoods) whenever you see the opportunity. In a very real sense, we are all keepers of the ledger of trust. Like the elders in those ancestral tribes, it falls to us to remember and remind, to record the truth and uphold authenticity. Our modern networks may be powered by electricity and silicon, but it is our human choices that will power the REP revolution.
At this crossroads in history, we recall the words of Ludwig von Mises, who argued that each of us “carries a part of society on [our] shoulders” and that none can escape the responsibility of making civilization better. In that spirit, none of us can stand aside unconcerned while the fabric of trust unravels. The task of reweaving that fabric belongs to everyone. This manifesto comes to an end here, but the real chapter 7 — the chapter written by our collective action — begins now.
Join us in making REP’s vision a reality. Join us in coding, in debating, in refining, in deploying. Join us in shaping the future of trust. If reputation truly is destiny, then together let us forge a destiny we can all believe in. The ledger of trust is open to all, the mycelium of trust is sending out its first filaments — come add your reputation, your integrity, your passion to this growing network. This is our call to action, our invitation, and our promise: With REP, we can weave a more authentic, accountable, and human internet — an internet that remembers its tribal wisdom even as it reaches for the stars. Let us answer that call, together.We’re building a root system that will grow through the cracks of old structures.A mycelium of trust connecting a fractured world.
In this new network, identity can be fluid — anonymous or named, human or AI — but contribution is always real, always remembered.You are not a spectator. You are a node.
Developers: We call on you to build this. Code the smart contracts, the APIs, the front-end interfaces that will make reputation data accessible and actionable. Innovate new algorithms for measuring trustworthiness, respecting privacy and context. Help us create the tooling so that any application — from marketplaces to social networks to AI platforms — can plug into REP and immediately tap into the ledger of trust.
Creators and Community Leaders: We call on you to nurture the culture around REP. Use the protocol in your communities, experiment with its programmability to define reputation in ways that reflect your values (be it in open-source projects, DAOs, content platforms, or local groups). Educate your peers on the importance of guarding one’s digital reputation and rewarding integrity. Culture is as important as code; a reputation system works only if people embrace fairness, transparency, and continuous feedback.
AI Researchers and Engineers: We call on you to integrate REP into the coming wave of intelligent agents. As AI becomes ubiquitous, ensure that our AIs are not launched into the wild with no grounding in human norms. Program them to check the REP ledger — to verify sources, to build “honor scores” for their own actions, to refuse commands that would damage their long-term reputation. Aligning AI with human values may be an immense challenge, but a decentralized reputation could be one piece of that puzzle, instilling a form of ethical compass in autonomous systems.
Ethicists, Philosophers, and Thinkers on Identity and Agency: We call on you to critique and guide this movement. Help us navigate the philosophical quandaries: How do we balance forgiveness with accountability? How do we prevent bias in reputation data? How do we ensure that a reputation system enhances human agency rather than limiting it? Lend your wisdom so that REP remains not only technically sound, but ethically and philosophically robust — a system worthy of human dignity and diversity.
Investors, Innovators, and Visionaries: To you we extend an invitation to support this endeavor. Just as early investors once saw the potential of the internet protocols or open-source software, see in REP not just a product but the backbone of a more trustworthy digital economy. By funding development, evangelizing the concept, and helping to build viable business models that align with the REP ethos (e.g., services that add value around the open protocol), you ensure that this public good can flourish sustainably. Understand that the ROI here is measured not only in financial terms, but in the resilience and longevity of the entire internet marketplace that will benefit from a foundation of trust.
And to every Internet Citizen — the everyday user who simply wants a better online world: This call is most of all for you. The REP manifesto has always been about the universal need for trust. Whether you are a student, a blogger, an entrepreneur, an activist, an artist, or just someone who logs on to connect with friends — your voice matters in this movement. You can hold platforms accountable to adopt open reputation standards. You can choose services that respect your need for credible interactions. You can contribute data to the reputation network (for example, by leaving authentic reviews, vouching for peers, flagging falsehoods) whenever you see the opportunity. In a very real sense, we are all keepers of the ledger of trust. Like the elders in those ancestral tribes, it falls to us to remember and remind, to record the truth and uphold authenticity. Our modern networks may be powered by electricity and silicon, but it is our human choices that will power the REP revolution.
At this crossroads in history, we recall the words of Ludwig von Mises, who argued that each of us “carries a part of society on [our] shoulders” and that none can escape the responsibility of making civilization better. In that spirit, none of us can stand aside unconcerned while the fabric of trust unravels. The task of reweaving that fabric belongs to everyone. This manifesto comes to an end here, but the real chapter 7 — the chapter written by our collective action — begins now.
Join us in making REP’s vision a reality. Join us in coding, in debating, in refining, in deploying. Join us in shaping the future of trust. If reputation truly is destiny, then together let us forge a destiny we can all believe in. The ledger of trust is open to all, the mycelium of trust is sending out its first filaments — come add your reputation, your integrity, your passion to this growing network. This is our call to action, our invitation, and our promise: With REP, we can weave a more authentic, accountable, and human internet — an internet that remembers its tribal wisdom even as it reaches for the stars. Let us answer that call, together.We’re building a root system that will grow through the cracks of old structures.A mycelium of trust connecting a fractured world.
In this new network, identity can be fluid — anonymous or named, human or AI — but contribution is always real, always remembered.You are not a spectator. You are a node.
Be a point of connection
REP is a return to authenticity, a bridge back to the community-driven reputation we lost, but forged anew in blockchain steel. It is the collective memory of the tribe, upgraded for the 21st century — an immutable ledger of trust, scaled to billions, owned by no one and everyone.
Sources
Classical & Historical Texts
1. Homer. (8thc.BCE). Iliad(Βιβλ.9, l.410‑416). Loeb Classical Library.
2. Epic of Gilgamesh (Standard Babylonian version, Tablet I). In A.George(Ed.), The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Vol.1, 2003, OUP).
3. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics(IV.3[1124a]). Trans. T.Irwin, Hackett, 1999.
4. Ancient Egypt: Assmann, J. (2002). The Search for God in Ancient Egypt(ch.5 “Ren and Ma’at”). CornellUP.
5. Bushidō concept: Nitobe, I. (1905). Bushido: The Soul of Japan.
2. Epic of Gilgamesh (Standard Babylonian version, Tablet I). In A.George(Ed.), The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Vol.1, 2003, OUP).
3. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics(IV.3[1124a]). Trans. T.Irwin, Hackett, 1999.
4. Ancient Egypt: Assmann, J. (2002). The Search for God in Ancient Egypt(ch.5 “Ren and Ma’at”). CornellUP.
5. Bushidō concept: Nitobe, I. (1905). Bushido: The Soul of Japan.
Economics, Coordination & Trust Theory
6. Mises, L.von. (1949). Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (“Praxeology” §§1‑2). YaleUP.
7. Hayek, F.A. (1945). “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review, 35 (4), 519‑530.
8. Hazlitt, H. (1964). The Foundations of Morality (ch.8 “Moral Common Law”).
9. Rothbard, M. (1982). The Ethics of Liberty (ch.16 “Knowledge, True and False”).
10. Menger, C. (1871). Principles of Economics (intro to catallactics).
7. Hayek, F.A. (1945). “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review, 35 (4), 519‑530.
8. Hazlitt, H. (1964). The Foundations of Morality (ch.8 “Moral Common Law”).
9. Rothbard, M. (1982). The Ethics of Liberty (ch.16 “Knowledge, True and False”).
10. Menger, C. (1871). Principles of Economics (intro to catallactics).
Trust & Economic Performance (Empirical)
11. Bjørnskov, C. (2022). “Generalized trust and long‑run growth, 1980‑2019.” Journal of Economic Growth,27(3), 245‑280.
12. Hearn, P., & Méndez, F. (2021). “Trust, patents, and R&D: Firm‑level evidence from 43 countries.” Research Policy,50(8), 104321.
13. OECD. (2024). Trust Survey 2024: Building a Better Society.
14. De Neve, J.‑E., etal. (2025). “Trust and subjective well‑being: A meta‑analysis.” Psychological Bulletin,151(4), 755‑788.
15. Durante, R., & Guiso, L. (2023). “Social capital and pandemic resilience in Europe”. Journal of Health Economics, 92, 102736.
12. Hearn, P., & Méndez, F. (2021). “Trust, patents, and R&D: Firm‑level evidence from 43 countries.” Research Policy,50(8), 104321.
13. OECD. (2024). Trust Survey 2024: Building a Better Society.
14. De Neve, J.‑E., etal. (2025). “Trust and subjective well‑being: A meta‑analysis.” Psychological Bulletin,151(4), 755‑788.
15. Durante, R., & Guiso, L. (2023). “Social capital and pandemic resilience in Europe”. Journal of Health Economics, 92, 102736.
Behavioural & Network Science
16. McPherson, M., Smith‑Lovin, L., & Cook, J. (2001). “Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks.” Annual Review of Sociology,27, 415‑444.
17. Granovetter, M. (1973). “The strength of weak ties.” American Journal of Sociology,78(6), 1360‑1380.
18. LinkedIn & MIT. (2022). “The strength of weak ties in online labour markets.” Nature,608, 351‑356.
19. Edelman, B., & Luca, M. (2022). “Digital discrimination on peer‑rental platforms.” NBER Working Paper30205.
20. Sinha, A., et al. (2023). “Explaining AI advice acceptance: Success visibility boosts trust.” MIT Media Lab UX Trials, Tech Report.
21. Watts, D., & Suri, S. (2011). “Cooperation and contagion in web‑based networks.” Science,334(6060), 1570‑1574.
17. Granovetter, M. (1973). “The strength of weak ties.” American Journal of Sociology,78(6), 1360‑1380.
18. LinkedIn & MIT. (2022). “The strength of weak ties in online labour markets.” Nature,608, 351‑356.
19. Edelman, B., & Luca, M. (2022). “Digital discrimination on peer‑rental platforms.” NBER Working Paper30205.
20. Sinha, A., et al. (2023). “Explaining AI advice acceptance: Success visibility boosts trust.” MIT Media Lab UX Trials, Tech Report.
21. Watts, D., & Suri, S. (2011). “Cooperation and contagion in web‑based networks.” Science,334(6060), 1570‑1574.
Reputation & Algorithmic Trust
22. Kamvar, S., Schlosser, M., & Garcia‑Molina, H. (2003). “The EigenTrust algorithm for reputation management in P2P networks.” WWW’03 Proc., 640‑651.
23. Page, L., et al. (1999). “The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web.” Stanford InfoLab.
24. Imperva. (2024). Bad Bot Report 2024: 51% of internet traffic is automated.
25. BrightLocal. (2023). Local Consumer Review Survey: ~30% of online reviews estimated fake.
26. Nvidia CTO Jensen Huang. (2024). Speech at COMPUTEX: “1trillion connected devices by 2030.”
27. Google. (2025, April). “Introducing the Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) Protocol.” Google AI Blog.
23. Page, L., et al. (1999). “The PageRank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web.” Stanford InfoLab.
24. Imperva. (2024). Bad Bot Report 2024: 51% of internet traffic is automated.
25. BrightLocal. (2023). Local Consumer Review Survey: ~30% of online reviews estimated fake.
26. Nvidia CTO Jensen Huang. (2024). Speech at COMPUTEX: “1trillion connected devices by 2030.”
27. Google. (2025, April). “Introducing the Agent‑to‑Agent (A2A) Protocol.” Google AI Blog.
Blockchain & Web3 Identity
28. Buterin, V., Hitzig, Z., & Weyl, G. (2022). “Decentralized society: Finding web3’s soul.” SSRN4105763.
29. Weyl, G., Ohlhaver, P., & Buterin, V. (2022). “Soulbound tokens.” SSRN4105763 (sec.II).
29. Weyl, G., Ohlhaver, P., & Buterin, V. (2022). “Soulbound tokens.” SSRN4105763 (sec.II).
Culture, Media & Miscellany
30. Steiner, P. (1993). “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The New Yorker,68(19),61.
31. Wikipedia Bot List. (2025). “Approved bots on English Wikipedia.” Wikimedia Meta‑Wiki.
32. Telegram. (2024). TON Mini‑Apps White Paper.
33. Altman, S. (2025). Interview with The Economist: “A billion‑dollar one‑person company.”
34. Baradaran, M. (2020). The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (context for credit‑score critique).
31. Wikipedia Bot List. (2025). “Approved bots on English Wikipedia.” Wikimedia Meta‑Wiki.
32. Telegram. (2024). TON Mini‑Apps White Paper.
33. Altman, S. (2025). Interview with The Economist: “A billion‑dollar one‑person company.”
34. Baradaran, M. (2020). The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (context for credit‑score critique).