While building the feedback and reputation system within Ink Protocol, we initially wanted to decouple the payments from the reputation to keep things simple. However, as we progressed, we soon discovered that tying reputation to payments was essential for two main reasons:

1. Without evidence of a payment or purchase, the reputation you receive is easily faked and essentially useless.

A good example of this issue can be seen on Amazon, Yelp, Google, etc, because their reputation systems are easily gamed. One way is to simply ask your friends and family to leave some feedback about their past transactions or made up transactions. You could also give away a lot of your product in exchange for reviews or simply pay for reviews outright. At the other end of the spectrum, you could also leave fake negative reviews for competitors. These services do put some effort into detecting fraudulent reviews, but they can’t block them all, so fake reviews still get through.

This would be a disaster in a decentralized system, because there is no central service to help weed out the fake reviews. It would be easy to quickly generate a lot of fake feedback for little to no cost.

Ink Protocol solves this problem by tying each feedback to an Ink payment. This way, every feedback is based on a “verified purchase”, meaning you can only leave feedback for a seller after you have paid that seller. This raises the bar considerably because real value needs to be transferred in order to leave feedback for someone.

2. Sending payment only to the reputation holder’s address guarantees they are who they claim to be.

Ink Protocol’s reputation system is easy to use because you can simply paste your address anywhere, like in a Craigslist or FB Marketplace listing, and anyone can easily look up your reputation based on that address. However, there’s no direct way to prove that the address is really yours. Every address is public, so you could theoretically just copy and paste an address that has great reputation and call it your own.

Ink Protocol solves this issue automatically because payment needs to be sent to the same address. So, if a seller tries to use someone else’s address as their reputation, they won’t be able to receive payment. Only the reputation owner can receive payment, so there’s actually no useful way to use someone else’s reputation as your own.

By including both reputation and payments in the same system, Ink Protocol has created a layer that can be used on top of any peer-to-peer marketplace. The marketplace’s job is to house the listings and aggregate supply and demand, but now any marketplace can leverage Ink Protocol to handle the payment, dispute resolution, and reputation layers. Over time, we believe this will spawn a new generation of fully decentralized marketplaces.