On-chain trust using Attestations. DeVouch allows Attestation holders on Optimism to vouch for the projects they trust in the ecosystem.
Context
We saw in RPGF 3 the natural behaviour of sharing and seeking other’s opinions of projects within the Badgeholder community. Some Badgeholders found a solution such as adding projects to lists without committing to a specific number they believe should be allocated. Vouching for a projects integrity, but remaining non-committal. Example
Many platforms such as Growthepie, Agora and West tracked the list counts for projects to use as signals for RPGF 3 participants. 
However this was sometimes hard to follow. Without using lists, information such as this was kept inside small Telegram chats, you needed to keep up with the conversation to be in the know.
Trust is still an important component of our community and we often look for the opinion of people/groups we trust to make our decisions.
Problem
- There are hundreds of projects in the ecosystem applying for funding, it’s hard to tell which projects can be trusted with funding.
- As a person allocating capital, parsing through metric evaluations provided by others is time consuming & often ineffective
- It’s hard & time consuming to get clear information from trusted groups (e.g. Optimism Badgeholders) of their value alignment with certain projects
- Voters/Capital Allocators look for suggestions on how they should allocate/vote but information is shared asymmetrically
Solution
Maintain an open, accessible layer of attestation data that makes it easy to see endorsements of projects listed on various web3 funding platforms.
DeVouch will bring in projects from many different platforms such as RF applicants, Giveth projects and Gitcoin grants into a unified but filterable list.
Anyone on the website can attest to a project listed either by vouching for its integrity or flagging it as untrustworthy or suspicious.
Attestations are organized & shown based on what “Attester Group” the attester belongs to. Imagine Attester Groups as groups such as “Optimism Badgeholders”, “OSO Reviewers”, “Metrics Garden Maintainer”.
Attester Groups are defined by holders of a given attestation schemaID that was issued by a specific address AKA Issuing Authority (e.g. passport.gitcoin.co, giv.eth, hypercerts.eth )
On the DeVouch website it will be easy to search and filter projects seeing how many unique Attestations have been made from Attestor Groups as well as the details of attestations from individual addresses.
DeVouch will provide easy to use APIs allowing it to be queried and integrated by any analytics team, website or grants/donation platform. Anything on the DeVouch platform can be queried and used elsewhere permissionlessly.
What are Attestor Groups?
We define Attestor Groups as groups of people who hold the same type of attestation issued by the same person. The most familiar example is the RPGF Badgeholder Attestation, another example is Gitcoin Passport Scores, both of which live on Optimism.
Current Status of Project
We have nearly completed the design phase of DeVouch and have started coding the back-end services for indexing attestation data as we need it. We are also working to integrate the various APIs which allow us to get project data from many different platforms.
The real beauty of this project will be the APIs and standardized schema for other organizations/platforms to use for not only reading from this data layer but also writing to it. This will enable integration a 1000 different ways across the ecosystem.
However, we will boast a slick front-end as well. There’s 3 main views provided by our future website:
Main view
Project Details
User’s Attestations
Next Steps
We will continue working on the extensive back-end services, including defining external API endpoints for other platforms and also sharing the finalized standard schema with ecosystem organizations who already want to start contributing!
Also Front-End development will begin within the next 1-2 weeks.