Costly signals of skill

This doesn’t mean literally everything is transparent - there’s a huge amount of nuance in how to maintain people’s privacy as we push for the benefits that come with better contribution data. For example, it might be enough to simply know that someone is being paid by a DAO rather than exactly how much.

Perhaps the biggest question is how will the ecosystem continue to incentivize interoperability and collaboration given that first party data is still very valuable?

We are at the point where we need the initial valuable apps to pull the data out and do the work of structuring it for many more products to be built on top. After all, the platforms that own this data aren’t hoarding it in private vaults - that was web2 vibes.

-Cleaner graph/standards. This will be an obvious point to anyone building in web3 at the moment, but the data is a (beautiful) mess. If you want to use a contribution graph right now — which people are connected to which DAOs and which projects and so on — you have to do quite a bit of manual work. For example, there’s no ENS type solution for pro... See more

-Clear applications for contribution and affiliation data. Valuable applications of this data create the incentives for bringing more of it on-chain. This is one of the primary reasons we launched Backdrop, but there will be many different platforms all building on top of this same data.

-Contribution and role data. Right now there is simply no way to know who works in what DAO, who is in what guild, or who has done what project.

How might we make the system we imagined above more of a reality? What building blocks do we still need?

-If you fund me multiple times, you clearly believe I have done and will do good things with that funding.

-If we work together for many hours over a significant period of time, you probably feel I’m worthy of your time.