[G3] - Abrey 🏅

We believe your reputation is more valuable than any token, and you should be able to own and express it all on-chain. A significant aspect of your reputation is derived from your positive interactions and impact on others. This should be acknowledged, and Abrey aims to achieve this by putting endorsements on-chain. Abrey is a decentralised peer-to-peer endorsement standard centred around communities. Anyone can create a community. However, only those that meet the community criteria can endorse each other. This juxtaposition of permissionless access with permissioned interaction is what generates reputational value in each endorsement. Endorsements are written to user-owned smart contract profiles and not distributed through NFTs. This approach ensures that the endorsements are genuinely owned by the receiver and not by a centralised smart contract elsewhere. These endorsements can then be displayed and shared to verify your reputation in the community. We’ve all contributed to a DAO. It would be valuable for us to have a verified endorsement from one multisig signer. With our new standard, we could create a group that checks: Did the profile receive tokens? Is the endorser a signer on the multisig? If those checks pass, then they can endorse. If not, rejected. We could then take these endorsements with us to prove verifiable contextualized our good standing.

Abrey is building Web3 reputation through a decentralised peer-to-peer endorsement standard centred around communities. Anyone can create a community. However, only those that meet the community criteria can endorse each other. This juxtaposition of permissionless access with permissioned interaction is what generates reputational value in each endorsement. Abrey is currently live on Polygon Mainnet. However, we have also decided to deploy to Base to leverage Coinbase’s reputation, customer base and expected roadmap. Abrey has been built as a standard to allow various communities to set up their groups using different criteria. As a reputation-based application, it’s essential that we use chains that are also held in high regard. Coinbase’s reputation as an exchange and regulation as a publicly traded company fit this mould and allow us to capture the portion of users that value this. From a technical perspective, Base’s roadmap around cross-chain attestations with AA and gasless operation aligns with Abrey’s goals. These functionalities would vastly improve Abrey’s user experience and reduce friction in profile setup and endorsement attestations. Base’s use of OP superchains stack would also remove the need for us to deploy to multiple chains.

Abrey is building Web3 reputation through a decentralised peer-to-peer endorsement standard centred around communities. Anyone can create a community. However, only those that meet the community criteria can endorse each other. This juxtaposition of permissionless access with permissioned interaction is what generates reputational value in each endorsement. We chose Polygon due to its network effect, scalability and low gas fees. Large institutions and enterprises would use Abrey to create gated communities where employees can send endorsements to each other and remain on their network of choice. As the endorsements sent in this protocol do not generate an economic return, it was important to have low gas fees. Polygon’s continuous drive to build the latest blockchain technology is also an important consideration. Large institutions are risk averse and fearful of choosing a “losing” chain and pick Polygon, knowing that Polygon will continue to implement the latest innovations and technologies. Polygon has shown this through its work on POS side chains, Supernets Appchains and zkEVM. For our demo, we have also integrated with Lens and the welook SporkDAO BNFT, both of which are on Polygon. For these reasons above, Polygon is our top chain of choice.

Abrey is building Web3 reputation through a decentralised peer-to-peer endorsement standard centred around communities. Anyone can create a community, however, only those that meet the community criteria can endorse each other. This juxtaposition of permissionless access with permissioned interaction is what generates reputational value in each endorsement. We use filecoin to store all of our endorsement data. This implementation introduces three key benefits to our product: decentralization, security and a reduction in gas fees. Decentralization is achieved as the endorsement data is now stored across all of Filecoin’s FVM nodes instead of on the user profile’s smart contract. Security is improved as the endorsement data is now secured by a decentralized storage network and is not mutable by the smart contract owner. This creates more trust and authenticity in the endorsement data as it is validated by the FVM node network a Gas fees are reduced for the end user due to the lower cost of writing to the Filecoin FVM than writing directly to the user profile’s smart contract. Low gas fees are essential for our application as there is no economic return on its usage.

Abrey is building Web3 reputation through a decentralised peer-to-peer endorsement standard centred around communities. Anyone can create a community. However, only those that meet the community criteria can endorse each other. This juxtaposition of permissionless access with permissioned interaction is what generates reputational value in each endorsement. Abrey is currently live on Polygon Mainnet. However, we have also decided to deploy to Scroll to leverage Scroll’s fast run time, low latency and extremely low transaction cost. These features offer near-instant finality at a low cost leading to a much better user experience. For our longer-term strategy and roadmap, Scroll’s low cost and high throughput, in combination with AA allows us to implement gasless transactions at scale. This is required to onboard the masses and move to a seamless Web2-like experience with near-instant finality at no cost to the user.

Abrey is building Web3 reputation through a decentralised peer-to-peer endorsement standard centred around communities. Anyone can create a community. However, only those that meet the community criteria can endorse each other. This juxtaposition of permissionless access with permissioned interaction is what generates reputational value in each endorsement. Abrey has four features integrated with Lens. The first automatically displays a user’s Lens handle when an endorsement is sent. The second is a follow on Lens button, allowing users to follow their endorser in 1 click. The third and fourth integration features are custom community criteria to restrict who can send endorsements. One checks whether the community members have Lens profiles, and the other checks whether the endorser is following the receiver Abrey’s integration promotes composability and uses the social graph already established by the Lens protocol. Abrey also drives additional traffic and attention to Lens whilst being mutually beneficial for Abrey as Lens users will be exposed to Abrey endorsements in the future. The composability and integration of the two applications are extremely harmonious, help create a stronger network effect and are aligned in ethos and philosophy.

Abrey is building Web3 reputation through a decentralized peer-to-peer endorsement standard centered around communities. Anyone can create a community, however, only those that meet the community criteria can endorse each other. This juxtaposition of permissionless access with permissioned interaction is what generates reputational value in each endorsement. We’ve integrated Chainlink into our application to allow our communities to use off-chain data as part of their criteria. In our demo, we have used price feeds to demonstrate an exclusive community that is gated by how much USD equivalent value you hold. Chainlink allows us to access previously impossible data without an oracle feed. This dramatically increases the number of possible use cases for our application. As our application has been written as a standard, this level of flexibility and composability must be kept to a maximum so that our end users can accomplish their goals.