From ‘Citizens’ to ‘Metazens’ in Web3
As Web3 moves commerce to a more decentralized global marketplace where people transact and interact pseudonymously, a reliable digital reputation, i.e. decentralized identity (DID), becomes vital. DIDs will facilitate greater trust and transactions among people, protocols, and DAOs.
Additional DID use cases
- Counter surveillance capitalism of government and big tech
- Faster onboarding to blockchain services
- Remove the need to carry physical IDs
In the DeFi context, a reliable DID component is the difference between over-collateralized and under-collateralized lending. At RociFi Labs, we are creating the L1 for a permissionless, web3 credit economy by pioneering a new approach to on-chain credit, identity, and reputation that will drive increased utility to Web3.
To do so, RociFi links disparate data points such as DAO participation, social graphs, NFTs, and on-chain behavior to build a ‘Web3 citizen’ (metazen) profile of users; applicable to both borrowers and lenders.
Ultimately the premise of Web3 citizenship (metazenship) is to improve upon the legacy system of national citizenship.
The difference as we see it between citizen ID and DID is that rather than owing your freedom, portion of wealth, and geography to a single government, a metazen is free to move and choose their digital location, pay relevant taxes (i.e. network fees), and buy services; globally.
With government issued digital IDs and central bank-issued digital currencies, official identifiers could become more compulsory in order to access goods and services. Unlike the aforementioned top-down system, the decentralized comparable is bottom-up with citizens controlling their data.
Ultimately a metazen wants a streamlined, portable single ID rather than having multiple IDs and wallets. By bringing together data points from the main areas of Web3 and DeFi into RociFi’s non-fungible credit score (NFCS), it is attempting to build the ‘bitcoin standard’ for creditworthiness and reputation that protocols, DAOs, and individuals can use.
The NFCS pulls inputs from several data sources and they in turn can use the NFCS output to verify their own users’ behavior.
For example
- DID protocols can use NFCS to verify the humanity of a user based on their ‘uniqueness’ profile.
- DEFI protocols can use NFCS to detect fraudulent actors before interacting with a user.
- NFT investors can use NFCS as part of creator due diligence to avoid ‘rug’ or scam collections.
- DAOs can use NFCS to credit check individuals behind new governance proposals to spot conflicts of interests.
Furthermore, there are 3 ways in which RociFi reciprocates with Web3 protocols and applications
- Earn — achievements, contributions, and other types of ‘earned’ data captured by Web3 protocols can be used on RociFi to improve credit score, thus trust within the ecosystem.
- Verification — the growing Web3 ecosystem allows RociFi to connect disparate data, providing a one-stop shop for verified credit and reputation scores; all controlled by the user, i.e. users can delete their NFCS at-will.
- Social recourse — a user’s earned reputation capital and verifications can be damaged in the event of debt non-repayment, providing a strong incentive to good behavior.
RociFi is weaving the tapestry for the metazenship into Web3 by building a ‘bitcoin standard’ for creditworthiness and reputation with its NFCS. As NFCS adoption grows along with the Web3 ecosystem, the utility and use cases to protocols, DAOs, and individuals will increase dramatically.
The next article will discuss perhaps the most important aspect of NFCS, Social Recourse, which will serve as the mass adoption inflection point for DeFi and Web3 going forward.
In later posts, we will go deeper into the mechanics of Rocifi’s credit scoring, lending architecture, and how we interact with other protocols.
RociFi is the Layer 1 for a permissionless web3.0 credit economy.