TrustGraph: Making Reputation Verifiable with WAVS

When DAO governance relies on wallet balances instead of actual trust, something's broken.

Most DAOs today operate with a fundamental blindspot: they can see tokens, but they can't see trust. Token-weighted voting concentrates decision-making power among capital holders, while pseudonymous participation makes it structurally impossible to recognize real contributors. 

The result is governance systems that privilege wealth over wisdom, creating communities that can measure financial stakes but cannot operationalize the social fabric holding them together.

TrustGraph addresses this gap by making trust verifiable, legible, and portable across the Ethereum ecosystem, built using WAVS.

‍The Trust Problem

Web3 reputation systems face a structural limitation: they exist either as centralized platforms or as isolated silos. You can build substantial trust contributing to public goods or working within a DAO, but there's no composable mechanism for translating earned reputation. 

The ecosystem needs a trust layer that functions like infrastructure: modular, interoperable, and credibly neutral.

How TrustGraph Works

TrustGraph's architecture combines on-chain attestations with verifiable off-chain computation in a three-layer system:

On-chain attestations via Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS): digital vouches that create web of trust relationships across any EVM network.

Off-chain computation via WAVS: building merkle trees, calculating TrustScores, and uploading to IPFS without bloating the chain.

Verification anchors submitted back on-chain: merkle roots and IPFS hashes for full auditability and historical tracking.

This architecture exploits a key insight: attestations must live on-chain to remain censorship-resistant, but the computation transforming raw attestations into trust scores can happen off-chain as long as cryptographic commitments anchor the results back to the blockchain. 

WAVS enables this separation by providing verifiable off-chain compute where multiple independent operators execute identical calculations, sign their results, and submit consensus outputs.

Why WAVS for TrustGraph

Traditional approaches would force an impossible choice: run everything on-chain (prohibitively expensive), rely on centralized servers (defeats the purpose), or spend months building custom infrastructure from scratch.

WAVS provides a third option: verifiable off-chain compute. 

Operators run TrustGraph's computation logic in WAVS runtime processing attestations, building merkle trees, and calculating scores.

Multiple independent operators verify the results making it truly decentralized.

Signed outputs get submitted on-chain with cryptographic signatures validating operator participation.

With WAVS, TrustGraph can process complex reputation graphs using sophisticated algorithms off-chain at native speeds while maintaining the same security guarantees as smart contracts themselves.

Composable Trust Infrastructure

What makes TrustGraph powerful isn't just what it does, it's how modular it is.

TrustScores as outbound signals: DAOs can integrate TrustScores via on-chain merkle proofs and IPFS-stored merkle trees and plug them into governance logic, access control, or funding allocation—without rebuilding reputation systems from scratch.

External signals as inbound inputs: TrustGraph can incorporate credentials from Gitcoin Passport, POAPs, Hypercerts, Hats Protocol, or any EAS-based attestation system composing trust from multiple sources.

This bidirectional composability is only possible because TrustGraph separates computation from consensus. WAVS handles the heavy lifting off-chain, while the on-chain contracts provide coordination and verification.

Real-World Deployment

TrustGraph is currently being explored in partnership with organizations facing concrete governance challenges:

• Localism Fund for grants infrastructure and programming
• OpenCivics Consortium for civic innovation coordination
• Regen Commons for regenerative finance governance
• Network Nations Alliance for trust-based participation models
• ReFi DAO for working group access and contributor recognition

TrustGraph brings together builders from across the Ethereum public goods ecosystem:

• Jake Hartnell, CEO at WAVS/Layer
• Noah Saso, Product Lead at WAVS/Layer
• Benjamin Life, Co-Founder at OpenCivics, Co-Founding Steward at Localism.Fund
• Patricia Parkinson, Co-Founder at OpenCivics, Co-Founding Steward at Localism.Fund
• Monty Merlin Bryant , Co-Founder of ReFi DAO, Regen Coordination, and Localism Fund
• Grace McLain, Research & Evaluation Consultant
• Kevin Owocki, Co-Founder of Gitcoin, Greenpill Network, and Allo.Capital

TrustGraph is open source and built for modular interoperability.

Explore TrustGraph: Check out the Github and the TrustGraph website

Explore WAVS: Visit wavs.xyz to learn more about building verifiable applications and our partners or check out our demo videos

Contribute: Explore the WAVS repository on GitHub and join the development community shaping verifiable infrastructure

Connect: Join our development team in the WAVS Dev Telegram for technical discussions and support or follow WAVS on X