Decentralized Reputation: How Gems is using Bloom Protocol to Mitigate Sybil Attacks
Bloom’s mission is to bring credit scoring to the blockchain.
Credit scores have uses far beyond loans.
- Employers often check a limited credit report to get insight into candidates, including signs of distress that might increase risk of theft or fraud.
- Insurers often use your credit-based insurance score to determine your premiums.
- When renting an apartment, landlords often pull a credit score to determine how much they’ll require as a security deposit.
- Utility companies frequently use your credit score to assess if they will require a deposit.
- Companies like Uber or AirBnB pull identity data from credit bureaus as part of a background and identity check.
Despite this, decentralized applications do not have the luxury of tapping into credit reports. Just like in the traditional world, credit reports are used far beyond lending.
Regardless of the need, we still don’t have a decentralized system for credit checking or reputation management. This is problematic. This significantly limits the potential of many dApps.
Decentralized protocols that would otherwise have valuable applications cannot properly prevent fraud and ensure a quality user base.
Bloom changes this by providing a system for decentralized reputation. Bloom will be a core support structure for decentralized reputation in future protocols, providing new capabilities to properly assess fraud and ensure a quality user base.
Today, we are excited to announce Gems as our first partner in using Bloom for decentralized reputation in their protocol. Gems is not a lending platform, but rather a decentralized application using Bloom to prevent Sybil attacks and ensure a high quality user base.
What is Gems?
Gems is a protocol for decentralized micro tasks. The micro-task industry is more important than ever with the need for training machine-learning algorithms and participants for studies. We have seen the rise of platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower. Yet, today’s centralized platforms still suffer from inefficiencies, such as:
- Challenges coordinating payments
- High middleman fees
- The need for multiple workers to perform the same task to gain consensus (i.e. consensus by redundancy)
- The requirement for bank accounts, which many workers have trouble obtaining
- The lack of participants from particular countries
Gems looks to provide access to the unbanked, decrease consensus by redundancy, provide an interface for protocols/dApps to tap into the labor market, and onboard millions to their first crypto experience.
The Team Behind Gems
Gems is founded by Rory and Kieran O’Reilly. The O’Reilly brothers both studied at Harvard before dropping out, going on to become Thiel Fellows and Forbes 30 under 30 recipients. Gems Advisors include — co-founder of Augur Joey Krug, co-founder of reCAPTCHA Ben Maurer, co-founder of Aragon Luis Cuende — and co-founder of District0x Joe Urgo.
Why Gems is Partnering with Bloom
Gems workers will need to be established in the network with unique, verified identities for a number of tasks.. Through decentralized reputation, BloomID will act as a verification method to ensure that each identity is verified correctly. Gems verifies these participants’ identities in order for them to participate in tasks or studies.
Let’s take a psychology research study as an example. It requires demographic information to accurately collect data. This research study may call for participants born in the United States and are over the age of 35. For workers to participate in tasks, Gems must verify information that workers provide in order to authorize individuals that fall under the given criteria and limit those who don’t. This ensures that researchers only receive results from applicable participants. This is one of the many types of micro-tasks that highlights why Gems must utilize decentralized reputation for their network participants.
“The Bloom team is incredible. We’re very lucky to have gotten to know them and seen up close, their passion for the space over the past few years. When we realized we needed to verify identities to allow access for particular tasks, we found BloomID to be the perfect solution” says Gems co-founder Rory O’Reilly.“Working with others in the blockchain space is imperative for the success of the decentralization movement. BloomID will be one of the cornerstones for identity management — we’re happy and privileged to partner with them early on,” shares Kieran O’Reilly.
We are proud to support decentralized reputation through BloomID for their protocol, which enables opportunities for the underbanked and provides new possibilities for the labor market.