DEV Community: kishan 🐙

Web3 developers moving to AI: what the 2026 data shows, and why we widened Dapping

kishan 🐙 — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 16:24:47 +0000

Web3 developers are leaving crypto, and the work for those who stay is moving toward AI. Electric Capital counted 25,623 monthly active crypto developers in late October 2026, down 36% in a year; nobody has measured where the leavers went. What can be measured is what the stayers are asked to build: at ETHGlobal's in-person hackathons, sponsors asking for AI or agent work held at about five per event from 2025 to 2026 while every other kind of sponsor fell from about 21 per event to 5, so agent tracks went from 18% of sponsors to 53%. The Web3 skill that carries over is adversarial engineering, and the evidence a reviewer can check is the same in both fields.

Facts and counts checked on 5 November 2026.

Is the crypto developer pool shrinking?

Yes. Electric Capital's developer dashboard put monthly active crypto developers at 25,623 in the week of 28 October 2026, down 36% in a year and well below a peak of 45,931 in June 2025. The experienced core is shrinking too: developers with two or more years in crypto fell 25% over the year. They are still 11% above three years ago, likely because developers who arrived two and three years ago have now been around long enough to count as established.

Some of those who leave take their specialty with them. Sam Blackshear, co-founder and CTO of Mysten Labs, the company behind Sui, announced in August 2026 that he was joining Anthropic to do defensive security research. His turning point, he said at a security panel he hosted in April, was using Claude to port a static analysis tool he had built at Facebook over to Move, the language Sui contracts are written in.

How many Web3 hackathon sponsors now ask for AI agents?

At ETHGlobal's five in-person events in 2026, 29 of 55 sponsors put AI or agents in a track title, from a third of sponsors in Mumbai to 10 of 16 in New York. Sponsors fund the integrations they want built, so a prize page is a fair read of what Web3 companies want from developers, and the same count on the 2025 pages gives the baseline.

AI and agent tracks at ETHGlobal in-person events, 2025 and 2026

Event	Dates	Sponsors	Sponsors with an AI or agent track title	One such track
Taipei	4 to 6 Apr 2025	18	3	Celo, "Best AI Agent on Celo"
Prague	30 May to 1 Jun 2025	14	1	Hedera, "AI, Agents & Hedera Services"
Cannes	4 to 6 Jul 2025	28	4	Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, "Innovator's Edge: for most impactful and useful AI Agent"
New York	15 to 17 Aug 2025	27	8	OpenSea, "Best AI Experience with OpenSea MCP"
New Delhi	26 to 28 Sep 2025	21	4	Polygon, "Best Use of x402 Agentic Payments on Polygon"
Buenos Aires	21 to 23 Nov 2025	46	8	Circle, "Best AI Agent Wallet with Circle Wallets"
Cannes	3 to 5 Apr 2026	12	6	Ledger, "AI Agents x Ledger"
New York	12 to 14 Jun 2026	16	10	Google Cloud, "Best On-Chain Agent Economy Application"
Lisbon	24 to 26 Jul 2026	8	5	The Graph, "Best AI Tooling for The Graph"
Tokyo	25 to 27 Sep 2026	7	4	Curvegrid, "Best AI Agent Project"
Mumbai	5 to 7 Nov 2026	12	4	0G, "Physical AI: Agents with a Body"

Compiled from the prize page of each in-person hackathon on ETHGlobal's event calendar on 5 November 2026: 28 of 154 sponsors (18%) in 2025 against 29 of 55 (53%) in 2026. A sponsor counts when at least one track title names AI, an AI agent, "agentic", an LLM or an agent product such as World's AgentKit; ETHGlobal's own prizes and the finalist perks are left out, and without World's AgentKit tracks New York 2026 would be 9 of 16. Online events, including the agent-only Agentic Ethereum (2025) and Open Agents (2026), are excluded, and Mumbai was still running on the day of the count.

Most of that jump is sponsors leaving, not sponsors converting. Per event, AI and agent sponsors went from about 4.7 to 5.8, while everyone else went from about 21 to 5. Agent work is the part of the sponsor budget that survived the downturn, and it is specific: Web3 companies want agents to use their rails (wallets, payment flows, name services).

Several finalists took that brief seriously. By our reading of their project pages, six of the ten ETHGlobal Cannes 2026 finalists were agent projects (ENShell, DIVE, Corpus, ALMA, maki and npmguard), and half of those were built around limiting what the agent can do. ENShell runs every action "through a four-layer security pipeline before a single wei moves"; ALMA enforces an onchain whitelist of allowed calls with a revocable 30-day key; maki keeps key material in hardware, and its page says the model "interprets intent but never moves funds".

That is the same instinct Vitalik Buterin set out in April 2026 in his post on running LLMs securely: require human plus LLM 2-of-2 confirmation for risky actions, and allow a daily limit of about $100 to bypass the human. Smart-contract developers have spent years assuming every input is hostile and every key is a target, and an agent that holds a wallet needs exactly that habit.

The standards those tracks named point the same way. ERC-8004, a draft Ethereum standard from August 2025, gives agents identity, reputation and validation registries, and x402, an open payment standard documented by Coinbase's developer platform, lets a service charge a request whether "the buyer is a human or a machine". Google Cloud's 2026 New York track asked for both.

Is AI work a Web3 thing or an everyone thing?

An everyone thing. A count of the 678 top-level posts in Hacker News' October 2026 "Who wants to be hired?" thread, using a broad keyword list, finds that 461 of them, 68%, mention AI. Of the 34 who mention Web3, 26 do (76%), a little above the thread's rate. Web3 developers are doing what every developer on the market now does, and only about 1 in 20 job-seekers mention Web3 at all. A post counts even when it says "no AI work", so this measures what people put in front of an employer, not what they can do.

The job market shows the same spread. In the Indeed Hiring Lab's AI tracker data, 7.34% of US job postings mentioned AI at the end of September 2026, up from 3.71% a year earlier.

Are AI tools turning specialists into generalists?

They widen what one builder can attempt, and the review, testing and deployment work does not shrink with it. No dataset yet measures specialists becoming generalists, so the answer is pieced together from studies of parts of it.

METR's 2025 randomized study found 16 experienced open-source developers took 19% longer with AI tools on their own repositories, while expecting to be 24% faster. Its February 2026 update, with newer tools and 57 developers, estimates a speedup but calls its own signal unreliable. For smart contracts, Diana Levytska of AstraKode wrote in April 2026 that "generating code was never the real bottleneck" (her post on where the bottleneck moved): the bottleneck was testing and safe deployment.

The tools have adjusted to that bottleneck. Since February 2026, BuidlGuidl's Scaffold-ETH 2 has shipped an AGENTS.md file that coding agents read for project context, plus skill files, from ERC-20 to Solidity security, that an agent loads before it writes code.

What do reviewers trust when everyone lists AI?

Work that someone other than the builder stands behind, because the usual signals stopped working.

Take-homes went first. Tristan Hume, a lead on Anthropic's performance optimization team, wrote in January 2026 that on the company's own take-home, "Claude Opus 4 outperformed most human applicants" within the time limit (Anthropic's post on AI-resistant evaluations). Its replacement simulates novel work, and judgment about how to invest in tooling is part of the signal. In a Karat survey of 400 engineering leaders published the same month, 71% said AI makes technical skills harder to assess.

Skill badges answer a narrower question. LinkedIn's verified AI skills, launched on 26 January 2026, are issued by tool vendors such as Replit and Lovable based on how you use their product. That shows you used the tool, not what you built with the tool or whether it held up.

Simon Willison's December 2025 standard for code review is the useful frame: "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work" (his post on code proven to work). Stretch it from one pull request to a career and the evidence that a stranger in either field can check looks like this:

a pull request a maintainer reviewed and merged in a repository you don't control, where the thread shows a real change
a placement the organizer names on its own results page (a finalist spot or a top-three track finish, not a share of a pool prize), with your team
a role your employer confirms, rather than one you typed
a finding a third party paid for or ranked: an audit-contest result on Code4rena, Sherlock or Cantina, a bounty paid on Immunefi, or an eval an outside party ran

A demo with tests is still worth having, but it is your claim until someone else runs it.

These live in different places, and a reviewer rarely chases more than one. A Dapping profile puts the projects you shipped, the roles verified companies confirmed and the wins organizers recorded on one proof page, so a reviewer sees what you built and who signed off on it in one link.

Start with the agent work you would most want a reviewer to see. If it has none of the four behind it yet, the cheapest one to get this month is usually a maintainer's review on an upstream fix, or an entry in the next agent track at a hackathon that publishes its results.

Why we widened Dapping to builders in Web3 and AI

In October 2026 we widened our line from Web3 to Web3 and AI: Dapping is now the verified professional graph for builders in Web3 and AI. We made the call in mid-October on earlier readings of the same sources, Electric Capital's decline, the agent tracks at ETHGlobal New York and how developers describe themselves when they look for work. The fuller counts compiled for this piece point the same way. A line that named half of a builder's work was describing less of it every month.

A verified professional graph is a network of people, companies and work in which every claim shows whether someone else stands behind it. Nothing in that depends on a chain. When a company Dapping has verified confirms a role, the profile marks it, so a reviewer can see which roles are backed. The methodology page explains how to read each kind of proof.

What changed is what sits around builders. AI companies now have their own categories (AI x Crypto, AI Applications, AI Infrastructure and AI Research), and their jobs, hackathons and programs are being added the way the Web3 catalog was built. An AI project you add sits on the same proof page as your Web3 work and your confirmed roles.

Whatever you call the field on your next application, a reviewer will ask the same question of every line on it: who else stands behind this? Answer it before they ask: list the agent work you most want reviewed as a Project with your teammates credited, next to the roles that already have someone behind them.

Frequently asked questions

Should I call myself a Web3 developer or an AI engineer?

Name the work instead of the field. When about two-thirds of job-seekers on Hacker News mention AI, the word separates nobody, and "Web3 developer" undersells an engineer who builds agent wallets. A headline such as "smart-contract and agent engineer, built a spend-limit layer for agent wallets" tells a reviewer both stacks at once, and the link under it should open the backed version of that claim.

What counts as proof for a pseudonymous builder?

The same outside parties, tied to the handle instead of a legal name. Audit-contest results under a consistent handle, organizer-named hackathon placements, bounties paid to the handle's address and merged pull requests all attach to a pseudonym. A contract deployed from an ENS-named address shows the handle shipped something; it becomes proof once an auditor or an integrating protocol stands behind it. The one item that usually needs a real identity is an employer-confirmed role.

Are Electric Capital's and Artemis's developer counts comparable?

No. Electric Capital counts monthly active developers who author original code in crypto repositories. Artemis, as reported by CoinDesk in March 2026, counted about 4,600 active developers, down 56%. Both point down. Quote each with its own method, and never credit the Artemis decline to Electric Capital.

Devcon 8 for builders: how to plan your week in Mumbai

kishan 🐙 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:49:27 +0000

To get the most out of Devcon 8 in Mumbai (3 to 6 November 2026), do the work before you fly. Devcon is the Ethereum Foundation's conference for the people who build on Ethereum, and this year it runs at Jio World Centre in Bandra Kurla Complex. Ask now for 15- to 30-minute meetings with the people who decide things (grant staff, hiring managers, sponsors' developer relations leads), and pick side events by who hosts them and who they're for, not by title. At a developer week like Devcon, most of the builders you want are at the main venue, so the hallway between talks is worth more than a crowded side event across town.

Facts, prices and prize figures checked on 15 October 2026.

Is the main venue or the side events where builders meet?

At Devcon, the main venue. A side event is a meetup, workshop or dinner run by a company or community during a conference week, outside the official program, with its own guest list. A developer week like Devcon draws people who ship on one ecosystem, so they're all at the venue; a market week built around funds and exchanges pushes them out to side events.

Lane Rettig, a long-time Ethereum contributor, wrote after Devcon VII in Bangkok in November 2024 that he skipped side events during the conference days because each one cost half a day in traffic. He spent the week in the hallway track, the unplanned conversations in corridors and coffee lines, and wrote that he "met easily four or five builders for every investor or marketing person."

How do you pick Devcon 8 side events?

Pick by host first, then by who the page says the event is for, then by distance. A dinner hosted by a protocol you integrate with, or by a fund that backs teams at your stage, beats a 900-person side event, because the host chose the guests for the same reason you'd go.

Devcon's travel guide warns that a 3km trip that takes 10 minutes at dawn can take "45 minutes at 6pm". Jio World Centre is in BKC, so an evening event in South Mumbai costs you the evening.

The week's side events are scattered across Luma pages and Telegram groups, which makes sorting them by host slow. Dapping's conference calendars list each side event with its host company, the Devcon 8 calendar included, with 13 side events listed as of 15 October.

Go to at least one event run by an Indian builder community: those are the builders still working in Mumbai after the week ends. Skip events that sell seats at an investor table.

How do you get into invite-only side events?

Treat the registration form as an application. On approval-based Luma events, the host sees each pending guest's registration answers before deciding. Answer with one line on what you're building and a link the host can check in ten seconds, not "Name, dev".

Make that link show shipped work: a repository with a working demo, a verified contract, or a proof page with your projects and verified roles. Join waitlists even late, since hosts can approve waitlisted guests and free events usually lose some people who registered.

When should you book meetings, and with whom?

Start asking now and confirm a week or two out: fund partners and senior developer relations leads fill their calendars early. Nick Sawinyh, founder of DeFi Prime, put the rule plainly in his conference pipeline guide in 2025: "Your calendar should already be full when you land."

Build the list from what your project already depends on: the teams whose contracts or SDKs you use, the grant programs of the chains you deploy to, and the side-event hosts whose work touches yours. Send each one a short message by X DM or the email on their site:

"I'm building [one line] on [chain] and we use [their product] for [x]. I'm at Devcon from 3 to 6 November. Could I have 15 minutes near Jio World Centre on [day] to ask [one specific question]? Repo: [link]."

Book about five of these and leave the evenings open. Hunting for a job? Add the sponsors and hosts that are hiring, and check each role on the open Web3 jobs board or the company's careers page.

For Ethereum grants, the route has changed: the Ecosystem Support Program paused open applications in August 2025 and now funds through a Wishlist and Requests for Proposals. Book one of its 20-minute Office Hours before Devcon to ask whether your project fits an item; other open programs are on the grants list.

In the hallway, end every conversation by agreeing who sends what, a repo link or an intro to a named person, and note it on your phone before you walk away.

Should you enter ETHGlobal Mumbai?

Only if you'll give it the days. ETHGlobal Mumbai runs from 5 to 7 November, so it overlaps Devcon's last two days. If there are two of you, one can take the hackathon while the other keeps the meetings.

The ETHGlobal rules ask for a stake to confirm your spot, returned only if you check in and submit, and default to "from scratch", with no project code written before kickoff. If you already have a product, use the Continuity track instead, which lets you keep building on an existing codebase as long as you document what existed before. In Mumbai, 1inch and Definitive have posted prizes open only to Continuity entries.

ETHGlobal Mumbai sponsor prizes

The money is in sponsor tracks, and most of Mumbai's still weren't written with under three weeks to go:

Sponsor	Prize pool	Track rules published
1inch	$7,000	Yes: a ranked $5,000 track (1st $2,500, 2nd $1,500, 3rd $1,000) and a $2,000 Continuity-only track
Definitive	$5,000	Yes: a $3,500 track and a $1,500 Continuity-only track
World	$12,500	Not yet
0G, Uniswap Foundation, Arc, Hedera, Arkiv, Whitechain, Ethereum Foundation	$15,000 each	Not yet
ENS	$10,000	Not yet
Chainlink	$5,000	Not yet

Compiled from the ETHGlobal Mumbai prize page on 15 October 2026: 12 sponsors and $144,500 in sponsor prizes by our count, with track rules published for two of them, the same two as when we first checked on 8 October.

Read each track's structure when it appears. A ranked track pays a few teams properly, while a pool splits a fixed sum among every team that qualifies: at ETHGlobal Buenos Aires in November 2025, World's $3,000 pool was split with up to 30 teams, capped at $100 each. Pick ranked tracks with few serious entrants, and for the ten sponsors still to publish, ask their developer relations staff at Devcon, before kickoff, what a strong integration looks like.

How much are Devcon 8 tickets?

Builders can usually pay well under general admission, per the Ethereum Foundation's ticket announcement and the ticket FAQ:

Ticket	Price	Who it's for	How
General admission	$499 in ETH or $999 in fiat (current wave as of 15 October; final waves, date not yet announced, $599 or $1,199)	Anyone	Buy
Indian student	$25	Students in India	Apply
International student	$49 in ETH or $99 in fiat	Students elsewhere	Apply
India resident	$149	People living in India	Self-claim
Ethereum public goods contributor	$349 in ETH	Contributors to Ethereum public goods	Self-claim
Sanctuary Tech builder	$349 in ETH or $499 in fiat	Builders on Sanctuary Tech projects	Apply
Past Devcon POAP holder	$449	Past attendees holding a Devcon POAP	Self-claim
Core developer	Free	Ethereum core developers	Self-claim

The final student round closes on 23 October, with answers by 30 October. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis and places are limited per round, so apply early in the round rather than on the last day.

Do you need a visa for Devcon 8?

Most visitors from outside India do: apply now through India's official e-Visa portal, since scam visa sites exist, and Devcon can't provide visa support for general attendees. Devcon asked for ticket confirmation letter requests at least 90 days out, by 5 August, and can't guarantee requests in the final two weeks, so 20 October is the last date you can count on to ask for one. Book your flight out early as well: Diwali falls on Sunday 8 November, and the travel guide warns that rooms go fast around it.

How do you spot fake event pages and fake contacts?

Check every event page and every person through an official channel before you sign, install or join anything. In late 2025, security researchers documented fake "Ethereum Events" sites that drain any wallet connected to them, and the Security Alliance's Zoom hardening guide describes attackers posing as investors and podcast hosts to get remote control of a laptop on a call.

Before you fly:

Get event links only from the host's own account or from devcon.org, which lists Devcon's official X, Farcaster and Telegram channels in its footer. Never sign a transaction to register.
Turn off remote control in Zoom, never grant it accessibility permissions on a Mac, and join calls with strangers from the browser.
Run take-home tests away from the laptop that holds your keys.
Keep a separate wallet with limited funds for anything you sign during the week.

What should you do the week after?

Sort your contacts before you reply to any of them. For a builder the top tier is short: the grant contact, the hiring manager, the team you might integrate with, the person who offered an introduction. Message each of them that same week, naming what you discussed and the next step.

Include your Dapping proof page in each message, since a Telegram handle won't tell them what you built when they reread the thread three months on. While the work is fresh, ask the people you built or judged with this week for a written recommendation there.

Everyone else can wait a week or two.

Devcon 8 week, day by day

Devcon 8 runs from 3 to 6 November at Jio World Centre, and the deadlines that decide your week fall in the three weeks before it:

Now: claim the cheapest ticket you qualify for and, if you need a visa, start today.
By 20 October: send the short message above to the ten people you most want to meet, and book ESP Office Hours if your project fits.
By 27 October: confirm five meetings, register for gated side events, and decide on ETHGlobal Mumbai.
Arrival, 2 November: stay near BKC or along Metro Line 3, install a travel eSIM before you land, and set up a UPI app built for foreign visitors (the travel guide names CheQ and Mony). Visa and Mastercard work widely; carry some cash for autos.
3 and 4 November: meetings by day near Jio World Centre, one side event each evening.
5 and 6 November: Devcon's last days or the hackathon; choose one.

This week, send the first of your ten meeting requests to the team whose SDK you depend on most.

Frequently asked questions

Are Devcon talks recorded?

Yes. Devcon publishes its sessions on archive.devcon.org. Go to a session when you want to ask the speaker something afterward, since the conversation at the edge of the stage is the part you can't watch later.

Can I buy a Devcon ticket from someone else?

Only a general admission ticket. The ticket FAQ says general admission tickets are anonymous and transferable, with the name and email changed through the link in the original order confirmation email; discounted tickets can't be transferred. Buy only from someone you know, and never pay a stranger in crypto for a transfer.

How do you get from Mumbai airport to Jio World Centre?

Devcon's travel guide lists Metro Line 3 from the airport toward Bandra Kurla Complex, about five minutes to BKC, against 20 to 60 minutes by car depending on traffic. Official prepaid taxi counters sit inside the airport, a simple fallback if your phone isn't set up yet.

Web3 verifies everything except people

kishan 🐙 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:29:19 +0000

I have spent a lot of time around hackathons, and the same thing happens at every one.

A team ships something real in seventy-two hours. It works on Sunday. They demo it, the room is genuinely excited, and then everyone flies home.

By Wednesday the group chat is quiet. A month later the repo has not moved and the demo link is dead. Six months after that, one of those builders is applying for a grant or a role, and there is nothing left to point at. The work happened. The proof did not survive the week.

I saw the same failure from the other side of the table. Reviewing grant applications, past a certain number, I got faster. Not better. Faster. There were too many, they read alike, and I had no reliable way to separate a builder who had shipped for three years from someone who had written a very good paragraph. I know I passed on people I should not have. I still think about that.

For a long time I thought the problem was simply that proof was scattered. DAO contributions nobody could confirm. Reputation trapped in a Discord that went quiet. Builders I had mentored who could
ship a protocol and could not assemble a page that made a stranger believe it.

That diagnosis was right and too small.

What actually broke

The heuristic I was leaning on, without ever naming it, was writing quality. It worked because a compelling account of a technical contribution used to take understanding to produce. You could not
easily fake the texture of having done the thing.

That correlation is gone. Anyone can now produce a paragraph that reads like someone who did the work, and no filter further down the funnel recovers what that one used to catch.

So the pile got bigger and the signal inside it got weaker at the same time.

Then the other side of the conversation stopped being safe. Fake recruiter personas at crypto companies now deliver malware through coding assessments, hunting for wallet files and session
tokens. Microsoft documented one such campaign in March 2026. Separately, and widely documented, the traffic runs the other way: operators place workers inside legitimate companies using stolen identities.

Put those together and the shape of the problem changes. A builder receiving a message from a company, and a company receiving an application from a builder, now face the same problem from opposite ends. Neither can cheaply confirm the other is real. Both are being targeted by people who understand that.

The value of a verified professional identity went up. The cost of faking one went down.

Which leaves an industry built on not having to take anyone's word for it taking everyone's word for it. We verify transactions by default, contracts by convention, token supply by design. Professional identity is still self-reported.

The idea

Nothing on a profile should count for much unless someone other than you confirms it.

That is the whole of Dapping, and it came out of the grant pile. Self-attestation is precisely what stopped working, so we built the thing that does not rest on it.

It sounds obvious. It is also not how any professional network currently operates. Everywhere else, you write your own history and the platform prints it.

For a builder: a page you can send

A profile on Dapping is a proof page. Your projects, your skills, the ecosystems you work in and your history, at one link, built to be sent rather than maintained.

What separates it from a bio is where the history comes from. Experience is confirmed by the company you worked at, or through a work email checked against that company's own domain. Either
way, a badge exists because a named party with something to lose put their name on it.

That is the only kind of claim worth showing a stranger.

The point is not really the badge. The point is not starting from zero every time. Most builders I know have explained the same three years of work to twenty different people in twenty different formats, and watched the context fail to survive the retelling. A page that carries its own evidence is one you build once.

Pseudonymity survives it, because it has to. A great deal of serious Web3 work happens under a handle, for reasons ranging from jurisdictional risk to plain preference, and a verification system
that demands legal identity excludes the people it exists to serve. So what gets verified is the claim, not the identity behind it. What you show and what you keep private stays yours to set.

For a company: a page that outranks the strangers

Most Web3 companies are described by strangers. A Telegram admin using your logo. A job post on a board you have never heard of. Three contract addresses claiming your ticker.

A company hub is the page that outranks all of it. Claim it and it becomes canonical: your real team, your products, your open roles, the contract address you actually deployed. When someone says they work for you, there is finally somewhere to check.

It runs in the other direction too. Once your company is verified, your team's roles are attested through you, which is what makes their profiles worth trusting and yours worth checking.

That matters most at the moment of contact. When you reach out to a builder, you are asking a stranger to take a risk on you, and usually the only thing backing the request is a display name. The same holds in reverse when an application lands. Somewhere to check turns out to be what lets the conversation start.

Why it is a graph and not a directory

Every piece of this exists somewhere already. Job boards list roles. GitHub holds code. Explorers hold contracts. Conference sites hold events. What none of them hold is the connection between
them, and the connection is where trust actually comes from.

So jobs, grants, bounties, hackathons, accelerators and events sit in the same place as the companies behind them, and every listing opens into the company it belongs to. Projects open into the team that shipped them.
A message from someone you do not know arrives carrying their profile and the employer they have actually verified.

A role means more when the company confirming it is one you can open and inspect. A project means more when the team is attached to it. Each of those is a weak signal alone and a strong one together, which is why they had to be built in one place rather than integrated afterwards.

The other end of the same problem

The reviewer's problem and the builder's problem are the same problem wearing different faces. If a builder cannot prove what they did, then nobody evaluating them can tell either. So the graph has
to work in that direction too.

When you are hiring, you can search builders by the ecosystems they work in, by whether their experience has been confirmed, and by what they are open to. Every result opens into the evidence
rather than a headline, and a role you have already posted can be matched against the people whose history actually fits it. The part that normally costs hours, working out whether a promising
profile is real, is already done. The same search runs across projects rather than people when what you need is a team to partner with instead of a person to hire.

When you run a hackathon, a grant programme or a campaign, you can attest that someone took part. It takes a minute, and it is the difference between a builder holding a screenshot and holding a
credential. Go back to the team that shipped on Sunday and flew home on Monday. An attestation is the thing that still exists six months later, when they need it. The same record gives you a public
board of the people building in your community, so contribution stays visible after the event instead of dissolving into a group chat that goes quiet.

And if you are an ecosystem, the question you actually want answered is who is building on you. Not who posted about you, and not who applied for a grant eighteen months ago. That view is the projects, the companies, the builders and the opportunities connected to your chain, with the evidence behind each one graded rather than asserted, and the onchain activity across the whole portfolio in one place.

None of it is a separate product. It is the same graph read from the other side.

The part I would check first

If you are going to be sceptical about any of this, be sceptical about the score.

Karma is our answer to how much of your work someone else will stand behind. It is a signal, not a verdict, and I would rather you check the mechanism than trust the number.

Here is the mechanism. Without someone independent vouching for you, your score meets a ceiling that sits below the verified badge, and nothing you do on your own lifts it. That ceiling is enforced in the code rather than asserted in a policy. However much you post, however complete your profile, the badge stays out of reach until someone outside your own control puts their name to
your work.

You cannot verify yourself into it.

And none of it is for sale. Karma, verification and where a builder ranks are earned, and nothing you can spend changes any of them. A trust signal with a price is a trust signal with a market, and
a market in badges makes every badge worthless, including the ones issued before the market existed.

How each signal is weighed is at dapp.ing/trust/methodology. The mechanics
behind everything above, in more detail than belongs in an essay, are at docs.dapp.ing.

Why I am building it

I have built a reputation system before. The lesson that stuck from it is that reputation is worth nothing as a display. It only matters when it changes what someone can access, borrow, or be trusted with. A score nobody acts on is decoration.

That is the bar I am holding this to. Not whether a profile looks credible, but whether it changes who gets the grant, the role, the reply.

Proof of work was solved in 2009. Proof of worker is still open.

Dapping is in beta and free for builders. Claim your proof page.