Onchain reputation as a stand-in for a credit score

Onchain reputation is emerging as a transparent, user-driven alternative to the credit score, aligning with Open Money's vision for financial agency.

As we move deeper into the era of programmable money, a new type of reputation is beginning to form: onchain reputation. It’s not just about how much you borrow or repay — it’s about what you do on the network, how you interact with others, and what your digital fingerprint says about your intent, integrity, and participation.

This kind of reputation isn’t handed down. It accrues through presence and practice. It compounds in a way, based on experience and actions.

Imagine a world where your participation in DAOs, your history of supporting public goods, your punctual staking activity, or your sustained engagement in governance votes all contribute to a living, breathing profile of credibility — open, composable, and portable across applications.

Instead of something like a traditional credit score, which feels very closed and detached and myopic in a way, what if there was a better way to decide things like apartment rental agreements, or credit applications?

Onchain reputation offers new possibilities. It portrays reputation not as a score, but as a story — told through provable actions rather than opaque formulas. This is more than a technical shift. It’s a cultural one. It reframes trust as a public good and positions individual people as an active node in its construction.

This evolution speaks directly to the core themes of the Open Money Project:

Transparency over obscurity: Traditional credit systems operate as sealed boxes. They trade on trust, but offer none. Onchain reputation, by contrast, is transparent by default. Anyone can verify a record, trace a credential, or audit the logic behind a reputation score — not because they’re snooping, but because the system was built to be accountable.
Human agency over institutional authority: You no longer need to be approved by a centralized bureau to be deemed trustworthy. Your onchain actions — whether lending, building, governing, or funding — are your credentials. Reputation becomes a self-generated resource.
Fluid identity over fixed status: Traditional scores flatten identity into a single metric. Onchain systems allow for contextual identity: you might be a top contributor to a mutual aid protocol, a reliable validator on a PoS chain, or a trusted peer in a knowledge exchange network. Each of these roles can coexist, reflect, and evolve — not despite your complexity, but because of it.

The tools are already here. Gitcoin Passport offers a mechanism for aggregating proof-of-personhood signals. Lens Protocol enables social graphs that are portable and composable. Soulbound tokens explore the idea of non-transferable achievements and affiliations. And decentralized identity standards like DID and Verifiable Credentials offer the scaffolding for trust without central gatekeepers.

Of course, we must proceed with care. Reputation is powerful — and power can be abused. Systems must be designed to resist sybil attacks, prevent social slippage, and preserve user privacy. But the key difference is: these systems are ours to build. We can encode ethics into the protocol. We can debate the values that shape credibility. And we can exit or fork when the defaults no longer serve us.

In a world where money is software, reputation becomes infrastructure. And in that world, onchain reputation may not replace the credit score — but it will certainly rival it.

This post is part of the Open Money Project, an ongoing series that forms the basis of a longer work. Subscribe to get a weekly update as it unfolds.

Recent Open Money Posts