How Event & Role Credentials can be a powerful tool for building Digital Reputation by Web 3 communities and beyond…
July 2023 saw over 500 loyal builders and fans of the Cosmos ecosystem arrive in Paris for Nebular Summit 2023, a 3-day event focused on diving deep into the tech, philosophy, and future of the Cosmos Ecosystem.
At the tail-end of a busy week of events in Paris, it certainly didn’t disappoint. Cosmos brought its best with a diverse range of talks and workshops from new and old leaders in the ecosystem, such as Juno, Neutron, dYdX, OKP4, cheqd 😉, and many more.
Importantly, we launched Creds.xyz at Nebular. Although Creds’ use case is much broader than just events and roles, we felt launching at a leading Cosmos gathering like this was a great opportunity to get our vision of an Interchain Reputation out to the ecosystem. As we were officially Credentials Partners of the event — meaning attendees could collect a unique Attendee cred and many more — we had a fantastic opportunity to get live feedback directly from end users of Creds. This was especially valuable from a product perspective, as rarely do you get the chance to launch a product and have in-person feedback.
This blog will provide a brief overview of the launch of Creds at Nebular Summit 2023, crucially explaining why we believe the ‘event creds’, tied in with a range of other creds (e.g. Roles, also utilised at Nebular) can be a powerful tool for community reputation within the Cosmos and beyond.
Bringing Creds to the Cosmos through Nebular Summit 2023
As a quick reminder, Creds, is a platform to issue digital credentials, or “creds”, which are a portable, reusable, privacy-preserving, and a secure way to prove identity, build a digital reputation, and establish trust.
Crucially, creds come in many flavours or “types”, flexible to adapt to the widely varying ways in which we as individuals build our reputation. A few of the types we’re proposing can be seen below.
For Nebular Summit 2023, the organisers saw a great opportunity to use Creds as a tool for both Event and Role creds. Throughout the event, attendees had the opportunity to collect an overall Nebular Summit 2023 Attendee cred, minted (issued) by Nebular Summit themselves, through scanning a QR code, which would both demonstrate that they were there, but also give the Nebular team an opportunity to reward those that attended future events and giveaways.
You can check out my attendee cred alongside my Discord Social Profile cred through this link.
In addition to the overall Attendance cred, Nebular Summit also minted Event creds for each of the workshops run on Hack Day.
Across Hack Day, a number of big brains from leading Cosmos projects ran technical workshops to hone in on what’s going on under the hood for other builders to learn from. For each of these workshops, attendees could simply scan a QR code and claim a credential, using our unique “Claim Code” solution to speed up the process of getting creds to users, something more commonly used by POAPs.
Workshop Event creds included names such as Gno.land., dYdX, Juno, OKP4, Lava and Neutron, with the addition of two of our own speech Event creds for both Fraser and Ankur’s talks.
In addition to these Event creds, Nebular Summit also chose to mint Role creds; creds which verify someone’s role within a community, company, event, DAO and so forth. Nebular minted two of these, a “Speaker” cred, available to the wide range of speakers and workshop hosts across the 3-days
and a “Volunteer” cred, available to the excellent group of individuals who gave up their time to support the running of the event (here’s a shot of two volunteers claiming theirs).
Why do these creds matter for Reputation Building?
Attending events comes at a cost in many ways. It’s, of course, a financial cost, requiring travel and accommodation, but it’s also more personal, in terms of the sacrifice made to work commitments and family, plus the social energy it requires (and anyone that’s attended big conferences knows it really takes it out of you!).
This is why recognising events attendance and building that into one’s reputation matters. Ultimately, what better way to demonstrate an individual cares about a project than to acknowledge their attendance, and in time, be able to reward them for doing so, which is exactly what the Nebular Summit team intends on doing (more to come on this…).
And this is not just for in-person events. Event creds can also be for online events, for example, just last week, we minted a cred for those that attended our X Space with Outlier Ventures (you can check out mine here).
Similarly, whether a volunteer, speaker, workshop host, team member or anyone else, proving the roles we have within communities is also an integral part of who we are, and what we want to be known for. The role we play and the contributions associated with that role is a clear example of what we do. For instance, building a personal brand and reputation as a reputable speaker through collecting creds across events is a great way to demonstrate knowledge and expertise in a way that others can trust AND verify.
Creds vs POAPs
Now, you might be thinking, why is this so special, given it’s been done before with POAP loads of times over the past few years? POAP, short for “Proof of Attendance Protocol” allows you to mint memories as digital mementos. With 36,587 issuers and 6,747,976 minted, they have had great success, however, they remain very much focused on attendance alone.
With Creds, we’re offering collectors the chance to not only show they were at an event, but also build this into their reputation, mixing and matching these with other creds, however they see fit. Yes, it’s great I can show I was at one of my favourite projects events, but what’s better is also to be able to show that “ I’m an Ambassador of the project (Role)”, “I have staked that projects token (Achievement)”,” I have completed a Zealy or Galxe learning journey created by that project (Learn)”, “I’m an approved Content Creator (Endorsement”) and, crucially, I can tie it all under the social handles I used in that context Telegram or Discord handle (Social Profile). Additionally, by combining multiple Event attendance with other types of creds, users can prove their uniqueness and that they’re not a Sybil or AI (an increasingly important proof).
Importantly, these creds are also all held in the users’ wallet and unlike POAPs which are essentially NFTs, they are non-transferable.This means that creds really are a true representation of the person’s contributions, and not just what they’ve chosen to pay for or attended on a one off-basis.
What’s next?
Stay tuned for more Event cred opportunities at Cosmos conferences and beyond after the summer break, plus more opportunities to build your reputation with creds through roles, achievements and much more.
Thank you to the Nebular Summit team for their excellent organisation and management of the overall event. It’s never an easy feat putting on an event at scale, and the golden duo of Mia and Seb did a phenomenal job.
Finally, if you want to collect your first cred, come claim a cheqd Community Member cred now by following the link below.
