open-proposal-emergent-reputation.md

Open Grant Proposal: Emergent Reputation

Name of Project: Emergent Reputation

Proposer: @ckartik

Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this RFP and dual-license under MIT and APACHE2 licenses?: Yes

Project Description

Problem Statement

Cyberspace can abstractly be seen as a means of information distribution. In a general sense, most applications can be broken down into two key objects: Users & Content. The focus of the current network infrastructure (layers below Application on OSI the Model) has been content, ensuring the content is Authenticated (Certificates) and holds Integrity (Hashes). However, it failed to provide any similar cryptographic provisions for the Users creating & consuming this content leading internet engineers to overload this into the Application Layer. The provisions relevant to Users are Reputation & Trust. Because of these being held at the application layer, monopolistic organizations (Twitter, Meta) have gained institutionalized control over these attributes without governance.

The monopolistic nature of these organizations has led them to create suboptimal solutions to Reputation & Trust of users and, they lack any incentive to improve the state of Trust. I purpose that the instability this creates, leaves significant slack left for leveraging the Internet as a large-scale social coordination system. This RFC presents a solution to this problem through the development of a distributed graph data structure that mimics single-degree trust relationships held in the physical world for each user. This would help emerge a larger web-of-trust that is highly composable at the application layer of traditional applications. Through the development of IPLD as a basis for distributing a decentralized data structure such as the social graph and the proliferation of wallets & blockchains as a mechanism for providing signing capabilities to browsers, this is the first time that a viable solution could be adopted with low friction has ever been possible.

There are three key components to the implementation of the solution, for which a working POC (here) has been enabled on testnet.

1. The edges of the graph will be stored on IPLD, we will call these attestations.
2. The nodes will be a key to a map stored on a Smart Contract, and will be driven from the wallet account number.
3. An engine will be provided in the library to provide the following functionality:
   • Addition of nodes & attestations
   • Revocation of attestations
   • Graph algorithms for driving proxy determinations of trust (Shortest Path, K-connectedness, etc)
   • If possible, we would also like to conduct research into mechanisms for zero-knowledge transfer of trust information.
     • Particularly research conducted to judge the usefulness of hyperedges as a method for providing privacy

What are the benefits of getting this right?

With the right execution, this technology could remove the propensity of Sybil attacks currently seen on Social Media platforms. It would also lead to community-driven censorship, rather than centralized control of censorship that can be abused. The technology is inherently composable with other platforms that can build on top of it.

What are the risks if you don't get it right?

A failed execution could lead to a fragmented development of trust on Web 3.0. Ensuring the architecture can be built with foresight in mind is also important.

What are the risks that will make executing this project difficult?

Difficult to get inflection point adoption to get value out of network effects

Deliverables

Please describe in detail what your final deliverable for this project will be. Include a specification of the project and what functionality the software will deliver when it is finished.

Development Roadmap

Milestone	Details	Hours & Expected Completion	Assignees	Funding
Library Architecture	Look into high-level architecture for the final library. This stage will help in determining access patterns for the core social graph. It will entail usability research.	80 hours - May 25, 2022	ckartik & jialin98	$4000
Composable Library V0	Convert POC into easily useable npm module architecture.	40 hours - June 20, 2022	ckartik	$2000
Composable Library V0.1	Add several graph algorithms for proxy determinations of reputation.	50 hours - June 28, 2022	ckartik	$2000
Composable Library V1.1	Deploy contract to Testnet & Provide mechanisms to easily connect.	40 hours - July 28, 2022	ckartik	$2000
Composable Library V1.2	Deploy the contract to mainnet, and allow the library to connect to both Testnet & Mainnet.	50 hours - August 28, 2022	ckartik	$2000
Cryptonomics Research	Complete research around the cryptonomics that would drive meaningful attestations and mechanisms for incentivizing businesses to compensate the graph for usability. Publish this research into the public domain. This has been started and the first prototype is here	150 hours - June 28, 2022	ckartik	$4000
Hypergraph Research for ZK	Hypergraphs are a generalization of a graph where the edges can be of arbitrary cardinality. An edge in a typical graph is restricted to be a subset of two objects from the vertex set. There is intuitively a credible mechanism for providing levels of privacy by turning highly connected regions of this social graph automatically into hyperedges.	180 hours - July 15, 2022	ckartik & jialin98	$8000
Privacy with NimaProtocol - exploration & research	Privacy is crucial to this project to avoid it becoming a social credit system. In effort to do this, we can leverage the nimaprotocol chain. This is a chain that leverages exclusively zk proofs of exeution and correctlness of state transitions. This will help us ensure we can provide some level of validity to signatures without explicitly	40 hours August 30, 2022	ckartik & jialin98	$4000

Total Funding Request: USDC 28,000

Team

Team Members

• Kartik Chopra Linkedin Profile | Github Profile
• Jialin Li Github Profile

Team Website

• Link to ETHGlobal showcase.

Relevant Experience

• Kartik has a junior background in Applied Cryptography & Network engineering, Kartik currently works at FinTech as a backend engineer, researching cryptocurrencies & the De-fi space. Kartik previously worked:

  • As a Programmer for the Canadian Military
  • A Network Security Developer at ISARA Corporation with a focus on Network Cryptography & authentication systems like PKI.
  • Has an academic background in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo with a focus on Network Security & Cryptography

• Jialin has a Master of Computer Science with a focus on Zero-Knowledge and Cryptography from the University of California, Berkeley

Team code repositories

• Here are some of Kartik's Repositories:
  • Emergent Reputation POC built with @jialinli98
  • A system for tracking CIDs to implement versioning on IPFS
  • Enterprise NFT platform
  • Emergent Reputation POC 2.0 with added crypto-economic incentives and games

Thank you to @TheDiscordian for assistance & guidance.