A Novel Framework for Reputation-Based Systems

Reputation tokens on digital platforms typically serve two purposes: * To identify and reward the users who have contributed value to the platform—a form of signaling, which those users can parlay into public reputation. * To provide a form of compensation that enables contributors to liquefy some of the value they have created into an exchangeable... See more

One idea is to treat the token as reputation, and distribute them using rules one would use for distributing reputation: e.g. if a member did something that helped the organization, give them more tokens, and if someone did a horrible thing then strip away some of their tokens. Ideally, this would result in an organization ruled by those with the m... See more

Thus, establishing reputational capital requires fully (or at least mostly) non-transferable tokens. The question, then, is how to translate reputation into liquidity.

So armed with this understanding, how do we design a mechanism in which participants of a network can stake tokens to each other to signal a person’s value to the network? At a high-level, we can think of this behavior as a natural evolution of “following” someone. But now, the action of “following” is no longer binary; it’s a gradient. If you thin... See more

Power and authority in the contributor economy must be emergent, not assigned. In traditional systems, compensation and authority are explicitly defined and pre-negotiated (titles, roles, and compensation), even though trust and responsibility are implicitly earned. Token mechanisms create infinite possibilities for how credit can now be attributed... See more