The importance of reputation
Reputation is the cornerstone of all relationships. It is the very basis upon which we judge each other. Furthermore, we utilize reputation in order to discern who is trustworthy and who deserves more skepticism.
Historically, institutions such as universities and established firms were the primary gatekeepers of your social standing. Especially when our parents were growing up, these gatekeepers controlled access to status and respectability.
Wanted to fast track your career as a respected lawyer? Earn a degree from an Ivy League University. What about advancing in the developer ranks? Have IBM on your resume. So you’re telling me you have talent? Impress a Paramount Pictures producer.
The internet democratized reputation, but at a cost
With the advent of the internet, we saw these traditional gatekeepers lose their hegemony as the sole arbitrators of respectability and reputation.
People around the world are now able to amass influence and followers, in the process building a valuable identity for and by themselves. The internet has allowed creators to bypass the original gatekeepers and media producers of yesteryear.
Yet allowing Big Tech to control our new status systems has come at a cost. These companies are now the new centralized overlords controlling your reputation. They silo off a creator’s work and the reputation they earn from that work, ensuring that the creator always has to come back to their platform in order to improve their status.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest are closed gardens; gardens where all the plants you sow are hidden behind a gate, and all the crops you harvest are owned by a publicly traded Corporation.
It’s time we throw open the gates and declare rightful ownership to our identities on the internet.
Users deserve to own their digital reputation
We need a universal and open database of users; a place where users own their own identity, and are not locked into a closed, for profit, platform. Users must own the platform, and the platform must be there to serve the interests of the users, not third parties who pay for users’ data.
We know that the world would be a far better place if the users themselves owned their digital persona; a user should be able to take the reputation they earn from one platform with them to any other platform they so choose. Reputation should not be gated off and held in the centralized vaults of social media companies. User’s deserve to own their reputation.
It is for these reasons why we are so excited to announce the first step in creating a new system that allows a user to own their reputation online. We are turning the native insight-based reputation system of The Ether, called XP, into a non-transferable reputation token.
A user will be able to take the XP they earn on The Ether to any Web 3.0 application. This reputation system will live in the user’s wallet as a token called eXP. You, the user, will have ownership over your own reputation.
The reputation token that we are creating is based on Ethereum’s NFT ERC-721 smart contract standards.
The following will be the prototype model:
(e.g. www.theether.io XP → EXP erc721 NFT )
The prototype will be developed and used by theether.io. Furthermore, improvements to token operability and decentralized governance will be added as the project grows. In short, EXP is the first implementation of a larger tokenized reputation vision. We can and will reshape digital ownership of reputation.
Join Us
If you are interested in following our progress, we are submitting this project for the ETHOnline hackathon. You can find our open-source repo here.
If you believe that users, rather than Big Tech, deserve to own their digital reputation online, join us.
MC Masher (Mattison Asher), Greenfan (Russell Dwyer), and MC Derek (Derek Sturman)
