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Impact Attestations

Impact Attestations

TL;DR:

Impact Attestations are social or onchain signals that say: this person or project made a valuable contribution. They don’t require tokens or money—but they build the legitimacy layer that can feed into other mechanisms like Retro Funding, Hypercerts, or Allo registries.


An attestation might come from:

  • A peer (e.g. “I vouch that X did valuable work”)
  • A steward council (e.g. round reviewers recognizing impact)
  • A smart contract (e.g. verified pull requests or protocol contributions)
  • A network (e.g. reputation-based platforms issuing badges or NFTs)


These attestations can be:

  • Onchain or offchain
  • Transferable or non-transferable (e.g. soulbound)
  • Quantitative or qualitative


They create a signal layer for ecosystems to assess who has done what, even when value is hard to measure in traditional terms. Over time, they can accumulate into reputational capital used in funding, governance, or registry access.

Best For

  • Surfacing and recording non-monetary value
  • Feeding into Retro Funding or registry inclusion
  • Strengthening trust in community contributions
  • Recognizing invisible labor, care work, or emergent impact

Good At

  1. Creating lightweight, verifiable recognition
  2. Supporting decentralized legitimacy building
  3. Enabling bottom-up value signaling
  4. Composing with other systems (funding, identity, governance)

Dependencies / Requirements

  • Mechanism to issue, store, and view attestations
  • Community or individual actors with attesting power
  • Optional: cryptographic verification or smart contract logic
  • Optional: integration with funding or governance systems

Not Good At

  • Replacing direct funding mechanisms
  • Contexts requiring precise metrics or KPIs
  • Environments with no shared values or trust
  • Standalone use without clear follow-on systems

Who Should Use It?

  • DAOs or networks wanting to capture reputation over time
  • Grant programs that want to honor more than just winners
  • Communities building decentralized registries or reputation graphs
  • Public goods ecosystems experimenting with post-token legitimacy layers

Example Use Cases

  • A contributor receives attestations from peers for mentorship and culture-building in a DAO
  • A RetroPGF round includes impact attestations from community members as part of project evaluation
  • A coordination network builds a public graph of who attested to whom, forming a trust map for future funding