Redefining Trust in Web3: The Pioneering Vision of OpenRank Protocol

As the Web3 landscape continues to unfold, it brings with it a new frontier of digital interaction and commerce, tempered by the age-old challenge of establishing trust. In this burgeoning ecosystem, where transactions and interactions often occur anonymously, discerning trustworthy entities from malicious actors has become increasingly complex. 

The rise of issues such as Sybil attacks, impersonation, phishing schemes, and the dreaded “rug pulls”—where developers abruptly abandon projects and abscond with invested funds—highlights the precarious nature of trust in this decentralized environment. One poignant example was the “Squid Game” cryptocurrency scam, where creators vanished with $3.38 million, exploiting the hype around a popular Netflix series to lure unsuspecting investors.

While the robust systems of the Web2 era, like Uber’s driver ratings or Amazon’s seller reviews, provide a semblance of security and reliability, they fall short in addressing the unique complexities and requirements of decentralized networks. This gap not only affects the user experience but also stifles the potential and growth of Web3 applications. In traditional and digital societies alike, reputation is the bedrock of human interaction. Whether it’s choosing a service provider, engaging in business collaborations, or making governance decisions, reputation facilitates high-signal, meaningful coordination free from the noise that often pervades massive, impersonal networks.

Consider the indispensable role of reputation systems in Internet marketplaces and communities— systems that became foundational as billions turned to digital platforms for information, commerce, and social interaction. Tools like Google’s PageRank and Amazon’s user ratings not only organized vast amounts of information but also built layers of trust and safety, enabling these platforms to scale and serve global audiences effectively. However, as digital footprints expand and our lives become increasingly online, the control over these reputation systems has concentrated in the hands of a few, often at the expense of privacy and accessibility.

Genesis of Karma3 Labs

Karma3 Labs was born from that compelling recognition that this trust deficit is plaguing the Web3 space. Sahil Dewan, along with a seasoned team that brought deep expertise from building foundational technologies at companies like Google and Facebook, as well as extensive experience in blockchain projects such as Ethereum,Harmony, Celo and Ontology, made their mandate to create a solution that could address these fundamental challenges head-on.

Dewan’s journey into the world of Web3 reputation systems was marked by a keen interest in leveraging blockchain technology to enhance digital trust. The idea was to transpose the reliability and user-centric ethos of Web2’s infrastructure—like Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s Horizon platform— to the decentralized web, ensuring that trust is not just a byproduct of centralization but a built-in feature of decentralized interactions.

Karma3 Labs’ Vision: Establishing an Open Reputation Layer in Web3

In Web3, where transactions are decentralized and identities are anonymous, establishing trust is both crucial and challenging. Unlike Web2, no central authority owns or controls user data, which remains firmly in the hands of individuals, protected and made portable by cryptographic methods.

This new paradigm demands a system where trust is not a luxury but a standard. Karma3 Labs envisions an open reputation layer in Web3 as a decentralized, user-owned framework that is immune to manipulation and fraud, underpinned by social or peer-to-peer attestations to ensure accessibility, verifiability, and resistance to Sybil attacks. This shift from traditional, centrally controlled trust systems to one that is open, modular, composable, and operable across various blockchain ecosystems is essential.

Such a layer would not only promote safer and more reliable interactions but also empower users to make well-informed decisions based on transparent, community-verified reputation metrics. These systems, curated through honest algorithms and open data, are managed by communities and designed to be adaptable and robust against centralized interference or collusion. By establishing this foundational layer, Karma3 Labs believes that Web3 can fully realize its potential to provide a secure, scalable, and user-centric internet, where trust is built, not assumed.

OpenRank Protocol

The vision crystallized with the development of the OpenRank protocol, utilizing the EigenTrust algorithm— originally developed to combat malicious nodes in peer-to-peer file sharing networks—to compute trust in decentralized networks. Adapted to the modern Web3 environment, OpenRank provides a robust framework for verifying and quantifying trust among users, applications, and services, integrating blockchain’s inherent transparency and security with peer-to-peer attestations.

Data Layer: This enables any developer or application to bring their own data sets for compute. This involves two main operations - Data sourcing and Pre-processing. Any data source such as on-chain attestations, blockchain transactions, open data repositories can participate for sourcing the data. In addition, data analysis and data science communities can bring their own heuristics to form input data sets or reputation graphs as an input for the ranking and reputation compute. 

OpenRank: A decentralized reputation computer to ensure verifiable, scalable and permissionless ranking and reputation compute. This rollup network computes the desirable algorithm (EigenTrust/Hubs and Authorities/ Graph neural networks) on the reputation graphs committed by the data layer or clients and provides the converged ranking results (output). The compute nodes provide guarantees of computation and leverage a data availability layer for storing the input and output for any compute operation.

The architecture of OpenRank v1 is includes (a) a sequencer, that accepts trust computation requests and sequences them, (b) a block builder, that requests the compute nodes to compute the trust computations and accepts their responses, (c) compute full nodes, which compute EigenTrust given the data passed to them by the block builder, (d) verifying nodes, which verify the compute of the compute nodes and pass their verifications to the block builder, and (e) an external data availability layer, where both the input local trust matrices, as well as the output final trust scores, are published.

Apps and Clients using Rankings: Developers, Protocols and Data scientists can utilize the verifiable rankings data to build desirable reputation, filtration, airdrop, search and discovery, feeds or gating strategies and applications. Rankings of one context can serve as input data for compute for another use case. 

Example: On-chain reputation system for Social Apps

OpenRank revolutionizes how social graphs—spanning social networks, on-chain communities, and other blockchain networks—manage moderation and censorship through a decentralized ranking and reputation system. This system is crucial in fostering safe, personalized user engagement without centralized control.

Benefits of OpenRank include:

• Empowering User Choice: OpenRank grants users the freedom to explore and interact with content through trusted, user-selected algorithms, ensuring a more personalized and secure experience.
• Fostering Innovation: By driving the development of new decentralized applications (dApps), OpenRank enhances user experiences across the board. It enables smarter, more effective recommendations and rankings, pushing the boundaries of what decentralized platforms can offer.
• Enhancing Security: OpenRank actively detects and mitigates spam and Sybil attacks, crucial for maintaining the integrity and usability of platforms. 

Fueling Innovation: Karma3 Labs’ $4.5M Seed Round

Karma3 Labs recently announced a significant milestone in their journey—a successful $4.5 million seed round to develop OpenRank. This infusion of capital, led by Galaxy Digital and IDEO CoLab Ventures and supported by an array of prominent investors such as Spartan, SevenX, HashKey, Flybridge, Delta Fund, Draper Dragon, and Compa Capital, marks a pivotal moment for the project. Notably, the round also saw contributions from angel investors from Xooglers Fund and industry veterans from Coinbase, Consensys, and IPFS, among others.

The funds raised will be strategically utilized to demonstrate early use cases of OpenRank and to launch the first version of the protocol for developers. This initiative is poised to usher in a new era of permission-less and verifiable reputation computation, addressing the urgent need for trust and reputation mechanisms as Web3 prepares to onboard the next wave of users.

Karma3 Labs is not working in isolation but in collaboration with several prominent ecosystems such as Metamask, Farcaster, and Lens, to integrate reputation compute algorithms powered by OpenRank. The applications are diverse:

Metamask Snaps: Launched a prototype for the Snaps Permissionless App Store that uses OpenRank as a reputation computer. It enables a Community Sentiment system based on a reputation graph to identify safe Snaps for end users. The algorithm and the parameters are open for the community to configure. This system can be replicated by any permissionless marketplace to run a community powered rating and ranking system. 

Lens and Farcaster (Decentralized social platforms): Developing ranking and recommendation APIs that refine content curation and user engagement.

• Farcaster: OpenRank APIs allow developers to create configurable Profile Rankings, For You Feeds, Personalized Frames Feeds, Channel Rankings and Feeds. 25+ Developers used these APIs for the ETH Global Frames Hackathon.
• Lens: Ranking APIs to build better profile rankings and content feeds based on Lens social graph. Top clients like Orb, Hey, MadFi using APIs for powering Search, Profile rankings and Content feeds. Recently Bonsai Airdrop permissionlessly used the Lens Profile rankings to identify and reward reputable Lens users.

Consumer Apps and Wallets: OpenRank powers an onchain feed based on social and onchain transaction graphs and surfaces personalized recommendations. Wallets, consumer and social app front-end developers can power feeds and experiences that show personalized onchain artifacts for users, providing them aggregated lists and feeds of most popular apps, tokens, NFTs and mints based on their personalized social graphs.

Decentralized Governance: Facilitating reputation-based voting and governance mechanisms that empower community-led decision-making.

Since the launch of Ethereum in 2015, smart contracts have enabled developers to permissionlessly create and capture value on blockchains. It led to innovative financial applications, peer-to-peer marketplaces, onchain communities and unlocked many new primitives. In Web3, the trust problem was solved through trustlessness. This approach has been useful in many contexts, but has failed in others. Millions of users suffer from rug pulls. Protocols and on-chain communities struggle with leaky airdrops and fail to identify and retain reputable participants. The costs of discovering and using safe and relevant apps, contracts, frames, snaps are high, making users rely only on handful of trusted smart-contracts.

In this new phase of permissionless innovation in Web3, marketplaces and open protocols like Uniswap Hooks, Farcaster Frames, MEV searchers, and Metamask Snaps are getting rapid adoption from developers. Decentralized social and onchain communities are onboarding users permissionlessly and creating novel user experiences. These apps and protocols are going to onboard millions of new participants. 

Trustlessness does not solve the problem of whether to trust and use a Farcaster Frame or Metamask Snap. Or whether to incentivize a social community purely based on their activity on a social app. These applications and use cases need another trust primitive — trust based on reputation.

This funding enables Karma3 Labs to not only refine and expand OpenRank but also to pioneer a foundational infrastructure for a decentralized web of trust. As Web3 evolves, OpenRank emerges as a cornerstone for building trust across decentralized networks, transforming how trust is perceived and managed. By setting new standards for digital interactions, OpenRank is redefining the fabric of digital trust in line with the decentralized ethos of Web3. It extends far beyond enhancing user experience or preventing fraud; it ensures that every interaction within the Web3 space is secure, reliable, and inherently aligned with the principles of decentralized governance.

To learn more about the innovations driving  blockchain forward – read the full report here. 

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