The greening of Bitcoin, bringing Rating Systems to Flare

A group of young Serbians came together in 2016. They shared a love of blockchain and bitcoin, all were self confessed nerds and they enjoyed working together. They wanted to stay working together and they wanted to bring Web3 (although it was yet to be named that) to the masses. In 2018, they formalized that relationship and formed Bloxico. Bloxico is developing Reputation Score on Flare.

Dusan Vukadinovic, product manager of Bloxico & Reputation Score, explains that he is proud to be Serbian; for such a small country they enjoy a deep tech reputation.

“I reckon that most major Web3 projects have a Serbian employee.”

As they formalized the company in 2018, they found more work came to their door, employee numbers grew and soon wanted to build their own project, not just provide IT services.

“We wanted to build a tool that would make people happy to use blockchain and to narrow the divide between groundbreaking innovations and practical usability.”

Greening of Bitcoin

The company began as a small team of six people. Today, it employs more than 30 people full time and moreover employs a further 40 people on a part time basis as and when projects demand extra hands on deck.

The origins of Reputation Score were based on a real need for a rating system to reduce barriers to entry for the ever-complex world of blockchain infrastructure and dapps.

“As we worked on different ecosystems, protocols, DAOs and even assets, we were always searching for partners, entities, validators and oracles that can be trusted.

“We often asked ourselves – can we trust this individual or entity? Or what kind of risk might be associated in working with them? And we’re nerds so we looked at the idea of rating. Our CEO Nenad Tanaskovic has 40 years’ experience and steered us towards the rating systems set up by traditional fintech companies such as Bloomberg or Reuters.”

For Vukadinovic the concept of constructing a rating in Web3 made a lot of sense. Despite the absence of existing models, blockchain would provide transparency required.

“It’s weird to think a rating system had not been established before. There is a lack of regulation for sure, but the possible implementation of such a rating system could easily be done and ratified.”

Vukadinovic and the rest of the Reputation Score team set to work. They had just met with Flare who expressed similar ideas – based on creating trust and decentralized reputation ratings as a means to encourage more onboarding of users in a safer way.

Building Reputation Score for the Flare ecosystem, which is an EVM blockchain, meant the team uses Solidity for writing smart contracts, Typescript for the backend and React for the frontend.

For Vukadinovic, the resulting rating system is interesting.

“People and entities are gauged by their activities and the rating reflects that – so I may prefer to work with someone or something who does more of what I consider important, rather than more generic interactions.”

For someone to access the system they need to use their EVM address and a decentralized ID. The users create their decentralized identity on the reputational score platform so they can interact with the system.

“Everything is transparent, even down to how each decentralized identity votes. Currently we base the rating on an algorithm and that will be updated over time.

“Also, if you are a service provider, a validator, partner or an oracle then you get additional points.”

Vukadinovic points out that it is a numbers game.

“If there are only two people involved then it’s easy to be scammed – but if there are millions of people using it then scamming becomes impossible. Each parameter contributing to the reputation score is derived from activities associated with an address on the blockchain. Consequently, the susceptibility of the reputation score product to scams is directly proportional to the vulnerability of the underlying protocol – it relies on the blockchain decentralization paradigm..”

Users set up their decentralized ID and get their NFT – they pay a small fee for this.

“It’s negligible to be honest and each transaction and vote also incurs a tiny fee;  this is because we want the system to be completely decentralized. In time, we also want to build a DAO so that people with more reputation can vote on the governance of the tool.

“The dream is that even if I die, even if the entire team dies, the platform will work by itself.”

Work began two months ago and Reputation Score is close to launch.

“Some testing is still planned before we go to market. We are all very excited about this.”

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