Today we are unveiling ZTrust, the world’s first protocol for Anonymous Reputation powered by Ethereum and made possible by ZK-SNArKs. ZTrust uses reputation accounting to provide economic incentive for cooperation in any agreement.

Decentralization is all about making transactions trustless, but many decentralized platforms still benefit from being able to place some trust in their users. This is clear from the various reputation schemes that many decentralized projects are implementing. Almost every marketplace has some sort of system to verify vendor and buyer reputation. Swarm City, Monetha, LaborX, and Ethlance, for example, all have reputation systems for this reason, but they lack privacy and their reputation is non-interchangeable. Furthermore, it is our opinion that their reputation schemes are not optimized to their full potential. The economics of trustworthiness are quite complex, and it would be impractical for every DApp to engineer their own perfectly game-theoretically sound reputation scheme. Imagine if they could all share one protocol instead; this is our vision for ZTrust.

As a ubiquitous protocol for reputation, ZTrust’s most obvious application is a peer-to-peer marketplace, it is difficult to trust users on these marketplaces because they are often anonymous and weakly accountable. Most market forums have simple reputation systems to foster trust, but they are often poorly designed and their reputation scores lack potential value because they can’t easily be interchanged with other platforms. ZTrust allows users to open a contract that holds them accountable to one another through their reputations. The value being trusted to the other user is balanced against the reputation accountability of each user with the goal of making noncooperation economically irrational.

ZTrust was designed with real world commerce in mind, but it is still an excellent building block for other kinds of decentralized protocols. For example, the Golem Network and Swarm protocol both use reputation systems to reduce expenses on data audits. We have some proposals as to how ZTrust can lower costs and provide more anonymity for these systems. See our website ztrust.tech and read our white paper for more details.