Use Case For Aragon Court: A Reputation System

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An ethereum address, if treated as personal identifier, could be a basis for self-sovereign identity system (like 3Box). There are many ways to build a reputation system using these IDs, and one possible approach is verifiable claims model, where an on-chain claims registry is deployed to which anyone can submit a claim about some ethereum ID and everyone can verify the existence and validity of this claim. The problem arises when we need to decide which claims can be trusted and which ones can not. Decentralized arbitration system such as Kleros or Aragon Court could help solve this problem.

If someone is willing to submit a claim about himself, then he simply calls registry contract and provides evidence along with the arbitration fee. This action creates a dispute and then the jury verifies provided evidence. If it rules in favor of the ID owner, then the claim is included into registry. If the owner of the ID disagrees with the ruling then he can begin the appeal process. It is not clear whether 3rd parties should be able to submit a claim. But if they are allowed to do that, the process would be similar.

This allows a multi-dimensional reputation system with various types of claims including those based on offchain sources:

Different verifiers (such as DAOs and other voting systems) can set their own criteria on what constitutes a good reputation for an external actor by specifying types of claims they consider appropriate and trustworthy. Additionaly, they can set a requirement that certain claims must be issued within a certain time period.

What do you think?

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I think there is a lot of potential for using the Court for a global reputation, or more specifically a “credit” system. If you can leverage something like BrightID to establish a reasonable degree of sybil resistance, and leverage something like the Aragon Court to establish “penalties” for various types of misbehavior (eg non-payment). People may be able to use their reputation as non-financial collateral to facilitate more trusted interactions with counter parties, things like under-collateralized lending become much more feasible if lenders have confidence that their counter-parties will face significant consequences in the form of reputation loss.

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For Aragon DAOs we can create a forwarder app which would allow organizations to filter voting proposals according to submitter’s reputation and do other interesting things.

But to make such app really useful, a standard for reputation should emerge, because there could be many different kinds of claim-like things with different kinds of issuers (central authorities, arbitration systems or smart contracts). Initially I thought of a claims registry but it seems that this approach has been mostly abandoned and today non-transferrable NFTs are more practical.

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