Jul 8, 2021
Using Taraxa’s audit log of informal transactions to quantify off-chain reputation.
In line with our recently updated vision statement, we start exploring how Taraxa’s audit logging of informal off-chain transactions can benefit online and crypto communities by adding substantive metrics to online identity and reputation. Diving right it!
How do you build a reputation online?
Online reputation today is full of inconsistencies and black holes: with tons of social media metrics to track, major social media platforms share very little data on real user engagement, with poor data visibility and ad fraud only mounting year after year. Building identity and reputation on-chain is an even bigger challenge: we basically need to build user reputation systems from scratch because pseudonymity in crypto makes it impossible to track users’ past interactions and online behavior patterns.
What we propose here is a system for verifying and quantifying social media performance data by anchoring online interactions on a public Taraxa blockchain. In doing so, we’ll be able to get a better picture of user engagement and interaction with 100%-verifiable metrics: real conversion and referral rates, link impressions and reach, influencer/brand volume, and other stats to better analyze online conversations and user sentiment.
This will ultimately create a clear model for tracking, measuring, and verifying the impact made by users in online communities. Better data visibility and more advanced metrics will allow us to quantify reputation and build more advanced analytics systems, ultimately benefiting social media platforms and tokenized communities, DAOs, DeFi lending protocols, and many more crypto-based entities that need to be able to establish user credibility and reputation. Possible use cases include credit scoring for DeFi based on the user’s financial history, better metrics to design social tokens, and better analytics for social media platforms to track and quantify creator reputation.
Better data visibility and reputation system for online communities.
From follower counts to post engagement percentages, the world of social media metrics can be confusing to keep track of. Yet, despite their abundance, the existing social analytics tools make analyzing engagement and reputation very tricky: from getting access to relevant user engagement stats, to fact-checking and looking at only subsets of a data set. What social media platforms lack is a comprehensive and transparent way to distill and verify data shared in threads and chat groups.
Opening up the ‘walled gardens’ of social networks.
Social media data is known to be kept behind the ‘walled gardens’, i.e. siloed across companies, can’t be indexed by Google, and is ultimately hard to get access to.
The crypto community mecca, Telegram, for instance, does not have clear visibility of the impact made by a post, with most of the data being fragmented and hard to collect. A closed, non-searchable system that won’t let you put in a keyword and search its database of posts and links, it provides very few metrics on link impressions and overall user sentiment and engagement. These inefficiencies in Telegram’s analytics lead us to believe that anchoring this data on the Taraxa blockchain will add substantial value to its channels and groups by adding elevated visibility and traceability to data sharing.
Having a quantified, transparent metric will make it easy to elicit and analyze more advanced data on who shares what and when, along with the engagement rates of community members. This will ultimately allow marketing teams and single influencers:
- Tracking link sharing and ownership to measure engagement and reputation in a group.
- Verifying the track record of creators and influencers.
- Measuring the impact of influencer endorsements.
- Incentivized discovery mechanism for influencers and other creators.
Tokenized communities, organizations, and DAOs.
Creating social token primitives and tokenizing social graphs is now in its inception stage. While social token models can be built on social data sets and metrics, it remains pretty challenging to measure and quantify social graphs. Having a robust system for quantifying models for social tokens will let us establish a clear picture of an individual’s interactions and endorsements online to back social tokens with relevant, quantifiable data models.
Linking off-chain credit scores with DeFi applications.
DeFi loans have so far been based on collateral but we’re now starting to observe a growing need to build out a new credit score primitive that will embrace not only an individual’s past crypto lending history but also link to their existing off-chain reputation:
- Linking off-chain credit scores with DeFi applications is a big challenge not yet been resolved.
- We believe that Taraxa’s audit logging of informal, off-chain transactions will enable a quantified reputation system to bridge off-chain credit scoring with DeFi applications and protocols.
