Overview

REFER PROTOCOL is an on-chain referral system built on EVM-compatible blockchains, designed to create and manage web-of-trust communities. It provides mechanisms for mapping and authenticating referrals, creating dependency trees, programming incentives into onboarding flows, and implementing slashing mechanisms to monitor and govern web-of-trust-based systems.

Key Features:

1. On-chain Referral Tracking: Map and authenticate referrals directly on the blockchain.
2. Dependency Trees: Create and manage hierarchical referral structures.
3. Slashing Mechanism: Implement penalties for violating community rules or bringing in unwanted members.
4. Customizable Parameters: Allows deployers to set specific rules for their referral programs.
5. Multi-level Rewards: Incentivize direct referrers and those higher up in the dependency tree. 1.
6. Onboarding Automation: Determine what events to trigger on onboarding or conditions that delay additional verified onboarding of connection or down the dependency graph.
   1. Proof of Same Location
   2. Token Gate
   3. Allow for recording of interaction or additional information
7. Web-of-Trust Authentication: Use the referral system as a basis for proof-of-personhood or access control.
8. On-chain Proof of Completion: Confirm the referral was succesful only upon proof of transaction.

Use Cases:

• Web-of-trust communities
• Sybil attack prevention in smart contracts
• Programmatic access control based on trust networks
• Multi-level marketing (MLM) structures in Web3
• Decentralized identity verification

Problem

• Referrers usually stop at 1 dimension and do not reward up “the dependency tree” for who onboarded them. This means early onboarders are not incentivized for get their referrals to generate network effects with their own links.
• For proof of personhood and other web of trust applications, we cannot attribute who brings someone into an ecosystem. This lack of attribution it makes it hard to build incentive mechanisms into this and disincentivize people from bringing unwanted community members or violating the rules of onboarding.