The web3 work reputation token landscape
If you’re looking to build up your web3 on-chain work reputation, you may be feeling that when it comes to collecting tokens to represent your skills and experience, you’re spoilt for choice. We hear you, so we’ve put together a helpful snapshot of the reputation token landscape to give you an idea of where you might like to start, and hopefully you’ll see there are some cool ways to leverage your past, present and future contributions.
POAPs
A POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) does pretty much what it says on the tin - it rewards participants for their involvement in a whole range of activities including attending events, contributing to projects or hitting a team target. POAP tokens can be collected in your wallet and displayed across your web3 profiles, so you can share your impressive achievements with whoever might be interested. They’re a fun and satisfying way to collect and display your skills, interests and activities to reflect your well-rounded attributes. POAPs are traditional NFTs in the sense that they can be transferred and traded between wallets and identities, so may need to be treated with an element of caution if intended to be used as proof of contributions or capabilities.
POAPs:
KUDOS
In the same vein as POAPs, these tokens are purely out there to create good vibes and offer a way for people to send out well-deserved kudos to their teams and peers. Kudos tokens are designed to go one-way, from the gifter to the recipient, so to build up a good collection you do have to rely on your contribution being recognized by a generous team member. That does mean that these badges represent genuine appreciation of your efforts - you can let someone else celebrate and enthuse about your amazing work, so you don’t have to. Kudos tokens also tend to be non-transferable so anyone can be assured the credit is earned by the recipient.
Kudos:
BOUNTIES
Some tokens have gamified the experience of reputation building, encouraging you to complete tasks to collect credentials. These badges incentivise learning by rewarding players at each completed level, with the goal to ultimately achieve a recognized standard or qualification. As well as a great way of harnessing people’s competitive streaks to teach new skills, these tokens verify that the owner has reached a certain qualification level. As yet, these tokens don’t retrospectively reward previous experience or skills not achieved in-game, so the reputation they build only reflects activities completed on the host platform.
Bounties:
DAO BADGES
DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are built on reputation… a person’s credentials might form part of the criteria that defines whether they can become a member of a DAO, or determine the influence they can have in terms of governance once accepted. DAO badges or tokens enable a member’s actions and activities, such as voting records and proposal submissions, to form a reputation which could enable them to rise through the ranks of decision making. It’s also possible that tokens could enable DAOs to identify and assemble rotational teams of experts within the membership to make decisions relating to their area of expertise, thereby increasing the likelihood of a successful outcome. Ideally, DAO reputation tokens are soulbound and non-transferable to reflect the genuine talents and expertise of members.
DAO:
PROFILE/REFERRALS
Think of profile-based reputation tokens as a web3 version of LinkedIn… you build up a record of your skills and experience primarily for the purpose of getting suitably matched to an employment opportunity. You can create attested tokens to represent your work history, then, via the easily queried token format, employers or recruiters can find you based on your minted skills and experience, safe in the knowledge that your credentials are verified. What’s great about hosting this in a web3 environment (in contrast to LinkedIn) is that your profile can stay completely pseudonymous, so no-one’s accessing or exploiting your personal data without your permission. The token platforms can then facilitate referrals and messaging on your terms. It’s a win-win approach that restores the principles of trust and integrity in the talent market and opens up the potential of a future of work which rewards merit and removes unfair biases.
Profiles:
ACCESS/KEYS
Access tokens are all about using your reputation to open up doors in web3 and beyond. Your tokens contain attributes which make you eligible for memberships to exclusive communities, DAOs or events. Similarly, if you’re a community or event manager, they allow you to gate access based on desired credentials. Many access tokens in this space are transferable NFTs, which can mean memberships are sold to the highest bidder… but at their core, these tokens are designed to bring together like-minded and engaged communities and, particularly where tokens are soulbound (non-transferrable and forever linked to a single digital identity), reward the skills and experience of the owner.
Access:
Okay… so where do Tribz fit in?
You’ll see we’ve added a surrounding cycle flow which summarises each category within the landscape; we’ve named each stage Participation, Contribution, Skillsets, Reputation, Profile and Access. We think these represent the consecutive building blocks to a meaningful digital reputation - so to ultimately enable the later access opportunities your reputation might open up, we believe you’ll first need to look at completing the earlier steps… (hint to our logo).
As POAPs are out there successfully offering participation-based reputation, we’ve focused on adding value from the ‘Contribution’ stage. Contribution tokens form the foundation of any on-chain reputation because they go further in detailing the skills you offered to a project or the impact you had on a community, and can capture those details in the baked-in metadata. We believe that metadata is key to unlocking the later stages of your digital reputation - it can be used to record your skillsets, verify your DAO status, validate your skills for employers or prove your eligibility for specific cohorts in the web3 economy. Unlike kudos tokens in the same category, with Tribz you can claim your own contribution without having to rely on anyone else for recognition.
We also think a meaningful digital reputation has to be soulbound so there’s no doubt you can actually do what you say you can do, which instils trust in the whole cycle.
Right now, you can think of Tribz as contribution tokens capturing details to form the foundations of your unique reputation. In the meantime, we’re continuously working on an exciting roadmap to take those contributions into the next stages, enabling you to build pseudonymous work profiles and DAO reputations, open up access opportunities and more… join our discord community to be the first to hear about our latest updates.
You can get your web3 soulbound reputation started with us right away, check our souldrops to find out if you already have Tribz waiting for you.