Why We Are Building Hypercerts: Recognizing and Rewarding Value Creators

November 2025 | Hypercerts Foundation

The Problem

A Simple Observation

Let’s start with a simple observation: lots of the work that benefits us the most is funded the least.

• We underfund digital public goods.
• We underfund the regenerative land projects that protect ecosystems and communities.
• We underfund high-risk, high-potential research that sits between academia and commercialization.
• We underfund investigative journalism and community-run events.

In short: our economic system fails to recognize and reward what we collectively value.

Because the people doing this work don’t receive enough recognition or support, too few talented people pursue it, too few resources flow into it — and we end up far worse off than we could be.

Why This Happens: We Confuse Price with Value

Markets are extraordinary information systems. They take millions of individual decisions — what we buy, what we ignore, what we’re willing to pay for — and compress them into a single signal: price.

Price works beautifully for private goods: food, tools, cars, software services, consumer technology. These are things you buy for yourself, based on your individual preferences.

But price fails systematically when it comes to collective goods.

• If a forest is healthy, everyone benefits.
• If scientific knowledge increases, everyone benefits.
• If investigative journalism holds power accountable, everyone benefits.

But because these benefits are shared, the willingness to pay for them isn’t concentrated in any one person. And when benefits are diffuse, markets often go blind. Price easily sees private value, but it struggles to see collective value.

Often, governments have been the approach we solve this. And in many cases, they still do: public education, healthcare systems, basic research funding, environmental regulation.

But the systems we rely on today were built for a world that was: Slower, simpler, more centralized, less data-rich, and far less interconnected They were not designed for global supply chains, digital ecosystems, environmental instability, decentralized science, or community-run movements.

And so we’re left with a structural mismatch:

• Markets don’t recognize collective value well.
• Governments struggle to keep up with the pace and complexity of today’s world.

The Shift We Need: Value Recognition Networks

If our existing institutions struggle to recognize and reward collective value, we need systems that can.

Not replacements for markets. Not replacements for governments. But a new layer that complements both — systems designed specifically to make collective value visible.

We call these value recognition networks.

Value recognition networks are systems built to do three things:

1. Identify the work that contributes to a shared goal
2. Evaluate that work using data, expertise, and community insight
3. Recognize and fund the people and organizations doing it

Until recently, building such systems would have been impractical: too much information to collect, too many evaluators to coordinate, too many data sources to integrate. But the technological foundations have changed. We now have the tools to make value recognition networks feasible.

This also makes our contribution possible: The Hypercerts Protocol.

Hypercerts provide a simple, interoperable way to structure claims about who did what, when, and where — and to attach the evidence and evaluations needed to make those claims meaningful. This evidence layer turns hypercerts from impact claims into impact certificates that can be held by both financial and non-financial contributors.

With Hypercerts, we can begin building value recognition networks in practice. So what exactly are Hypercerts, and how do they work?

Hypercerts: A Common Language for Contributions

What They Are

At its core, a hypercert is a structured digital record of a contribution: who did what, when, and where.

You can think of it as a small, standardized piece of information that captures a specific unit of work. A hypercert can represent:

• a contribution to an open-source repository
• a regenerative land activity on a defined plot
• a research milestone in a scientific project
• a community event or educational program
• any action that creates positive impact

Each hypercert links this claim with whatever evidence or context is available: documentation, measurements, expert assessments, community input, or other data that helps evaluate the contribution.

Hypercerts don’t judge whether something is valuable. They don’t impose a single metric or worldview. They simply make contributions legible – to people, organizations, communities, and increasingly, AI systems.

Once contributions are legible, many different actors can use the same underlying information to evaluate work, coordinate funding, reward contributors, and build trust. Hypercerts turn impact from something abstract and dispersed into something structured, portable, and usable across platforms.

In short: a hypercert is a common language for describing contributions — a building block that other systems can rely on.

What They Contain

For hypercerts to support many funding mechanisms and evaluation models, each one needs a clear, consistent internal structure.

A hypercert typically includes:

1. Contribution Metadata: A structured description of who did what, when, and where. This anchors the contribution in time, space, and authorship.
2. Evidence: Links to documentation, measurements, reports, data, or other materials that help others understand and verify what happened.
3. Evaluations: Assessments from domain experts, peers, communities, or automated systems. These are not embedded inside the hypercert, but referenced — and they accumulate over time.
4. Attribution and Ownership: A record of who holds which share of the contribution, allowing both contributors and funders to prove their role in creating the result.

This structure provides a standardized container that many different actors can build on. With clear components, hypercerts become the common language from which richer systems — funding platforms, evaluations, trust models, and AI agents — can emerge.

What Hypercerts Unlock

With this foundation in place, hypercerts unlock a range of new possibilities — from funding mechanisms to evaluation systems and incentive models.

1. Collective Funding Mechanisms

Because hypercerts are portable and interoperable, projects can raise resources in whatever way suits them: selling hypercerts directly on their own website, joining crowdfunding or retrofunding platforms, validating milestones or bounties, or using entirely new mechanism designs.

Hypercerts do not dictate how funding works — they provide the shared structure that all these mechanisms can rely on. This shared structure makes it easy for builders to create new platforms without reinventing impact data, and it allows multiple funders to coordinate and pool resources around the same contributions. Different funders can support the same project through their own mechanisms while still operating on a common, verifiable foundation.

Each impact domain can therefore develop funding approaches tailored to its specific needs — regenerative land projects, scientific research, open-source software, and community organizing all require different designs — while remaining fully interoperable through hypercerts.

2. Proof of Contributions

Hypercert ownership gives funders and contributors a way to prove their role in creating impact: they hold a percentage of the resulting contribution, not just a record of how much money they spent. This moves recognition beyond inputs. Funding one project versus another can lead to vastly different outcomes, and hypercerts make this difference visible.

This ability to demonstrate contribution matters to many stakeholders — employees who care about what their company stands for, industry groups coordinating voluntary standards, regulators assessing corporate claims, and even citizens evaluating whether governments allocate public resources effectively. When the value of a hypercert depends on demonstrated outcomes, all of these groups gain a clearer picture of whether resources were used well.

This also means funders must care about the quality of the evaluations attached to the hypercerts they buy or reward. Poorly evaluated certificates may lose value later, making rigorous assessment in their own best interest.

3. Evaluations Become Essential

These dynamics also reshape incentives for evaluators. Evaluators become central to the ecosystem, because their assessments directly influence how credible and valuable a hypercert becomes. They can be rewarded for adding meaningful insight — not for producing redundant or superficial reviews. For example, a fourth evaluation that simply repeats what three others already concluded adds little value; a fourth evaluation that challenges the earlier ones and ultimately proves correct is highly informative. Hypercert systems can reward this kind of insight directly.

As a result, new business models for evaluators can emerge — from domain experts working independently, to community-driven review networks, to AI-assisted evaluators that help synthesize evidence and highlight inconsistencies. Evaluation becomes a meaningful, rewarded contribution in its own right, strengthening the quality of information across the entire ecosystem.

4. Fast Decisions, Iterative Feedback: How the System Improves Itself

When the challenge is to fund many projects repeatedly at scale, as with regenerative land projects, funding decisions need to be fast. Contributors shouldn’t be slowed down by heavy applications, or long decision cycles. Hypercerts make this possible: they provide enough structure for funders or automated systems to make quick, lightweight decisions without placing extra burden on projects.

But fast decision-making alone isn’t enough — it must be paired with a slower, deeper feedback loop that evaluates how good those decisions were. Over time, more evidence and more evaluations accumulate around each hypercert. This allows the ecosystem to assess which decisions were effective, which evaluators were accurate, and which mechanisms worked best.

These two layers reinforce each other:

• Fast loops enable projects to move forward without friction.
• Slow loops refine the system, improving future decisions.

Together, they create a self-improving funding environment where learning compounds over time — without ever placing unnecessary load on the people doing the work.

5. Why AI Makes This Critical

These incentive shifts become even more important as AI transforms fundraising and grantmaking. Today, most projects already use AI to write applications. Soon, most projects will have AI agents handling fundraising, and funders will use AI to filter and select proposals. In this world, every project will present a convincing narrative. Narrative advantage disappears. What remains meaningful is verifiable data: structured contributions, linked evidence, and transparent evaluation histories. Hypercerts provide exactly that substrate.

Ultimately, the goal is simple: projects should be able to focus on doing impactful work, not on navigating complex application processes. When their contributions are captured clearly through hypercerts, the resources and recognition can flow to the people doing the work — without the administrative burden that holds so many back today.

Who Buys Hypercerts?

The question that naturally arises is: who will actually buy hypercerts? In practice, several different groups already have strong reasons to do so, each for their own purpose.

As they adopt hypercerts, many of them will need new decision-making processes and shared frameworks for allocating resources. Together, these emerging processes form what we can think of as collective funding institutions — new structures for deciding how we support work that benefits many.

1. Philanthropists and Foundations Who Want to Support Impact Directly

Philanthropists, foundations, and mission-driven organizations buy hypercerts because they want their resources to create as much impact as possible. They aim to support effective work rather than persuasive narratives. Hypercerts give them a credible way to see which projects actually delivered outcomes, whether they are funding work prospectively by buying hypercerts or milestone commitments, or retroactively by rewarding projects whose value has already been demonstrated.

Hypercerts also allow these funders to build a coherent, data-rich impact portfolio. Because every hypercert follows the same structure and can incorporate evaluations, evidence, and trust signals from many different sources, funders can analyze their portfolio across domains, compare results more consistently, and allocate resources toward the areas where they see the strongest demonstrated value.

2. Organizations That Need to Demonstrate Impact

Companies, NGOs, research institutions, and philanthropic funds often need verifiable evidence of the outcomes they support — whether for employees, customers, partners, industry bodies, or regulators. Hypercerts provide portable, auditable proof of contributions across domains such as open-source software, scientific research, regenerative land stewardship, or community programs. They strengthen reporting, support compliance, and offer a consistent way to demonstrate responsibility and effectiveness.

3. Communities That Coordinate Funding Together

Crowdfunding groups, DAOs, community funds, and citizen coalitions buy hypercerts to express collective priorities. Hypercerts give these communities a transparent, durable record of what they chose to support, enabling clear accountability and shared decision-making. Because hypercerts are open and portable, communities can coordinate funding without depending on a centralized platform or intermediary.

4. National and Local Governments That Prove How Public Resources Were Used

Governments also have strong reasons to buy or hold hypercerts. They fund significant amounts of public-value work — from environmental restoration to digital infrastructure, scientific initiatives, and social programs. Hypercerts give governments a verifiable way to show how public resources were used and what outcomes were achieved. This supports transparency, improves procurement and grant making, strengthens performance-based budgeting, and gives citizens a clearer understanding of government effectiveness.

The Hypercerts Architecture (For Builders and Technically Interested Readers)

To unlock value recognition networks, hypercerts must move freely across platforms, accumulate evaluations over time, and connect seamlessly to funding systems. This is not possible with traditional data silos, proprietary databases, or isolated reporting tools.

The Data Layer: AT Protocol

To make value recognition networks possible, contributions need to live in a system where they can be stored, referenced, and shared across many different platforms. Hypercerts require a data layer that is open, portable, and not controlled by any single institution.

That’s why the Hypercerts Protocol is built on top of AT Protocol (ATProto), the decentralized social data layer that also powers Bluesky.

ATProto gives Hypercerts three essential properties:

1. Portable, user-controlled data
Hypercerts are stored in data repositories on Personal or Shared Data Servers (PDS or SDS).
A PDS holds the data for an individual user; an SDS extends this model to organizations, allowing multiple people to write to the same repository with access control.

Users can choose where their data lives:

• on servers run by the Hypercerts Foundation,
• on servers run by other platforms, or
• on servers they self-host.

This ensures contributors, evaluators, and funders retain full control over their own data. They can switch hosting providers at any time without losing their records, and without needing permission from any platform. Applications read from PDS and SDS—they do not own or lock in the underlying data.

2. Shared schemas across applications
ATProto allows different applications to use common data schemas. Hypercerts rely on these shared schemas to describe contributions, evidence, and evaluations in a consistent, machine-readable format.

Because the structure is standardized across the network, any application built on ATProto can understand and work with hypercert data. A contribution recorded in one application can be evaluated in another, viewed in a third, and incorporated into funding mechanisms elsewhere — without custom integrations or duplicated data.

Shared schemas ensure that the information around impact is interoperable from the start, enabling a growing ecosystem of tools and platforms to build on the same underlying records.

3. A decentralized trust-graph for impact
ATProto provides persistent identities for both individuals and organizations. These identities can receive endorsements and badges, and over time they accumulate a visible record of their activity: the contributions they make, the evaluations they provide, and the hypercerts they are associated with. Together, these signals form a durable trust-graph — a reputation layer that follows users and organizations across platforms.

Funding mechanisms can use this trust-graph to guide their decisions. Instead of relying on isolated applications, private networks, or opaque institutional histories, funders can draw from a shared, ecosystem-wide view of identity, contribution, and credibility. This makes evaluation more robust, reduces dependence on centralized gatekeepers, and enables new funding models that leverage trust built across many different contexts.

Together, these capabilities make ATProto the ideal data layer for Hypercerts: contributions remain portable, interoperable, and connected through a shared trust-graph. But while most of the information that powers value recognition networks can — and should — live in this flexible data layer, some elements benefit from stronger guarantees. That’s where onchain anchoring and tokenization come in.

The Ownership & Funding Layer: Onchain

ATProto provides the open, user-controlled data layer where contributions, evidence, evaluations, and trust signals live. But funding mechanisms often require something more: clear ownership, strong guarantees about immutability, and the ability to transfer or trade rights.

This is where blockchains complement ATProto.

Onchain anchoring allows certain parts of a hypercert — such as its ownership or the final version of its metadata — to be secured with cryptographic guarantees. Tokenization adds the ability to represent hypercerts as transferable certificates, enabling mechanisms like milestone-based payouts, retroactive rewards, collective funding pools, or entirely new funding models built around tradable impact certificates.

Different token standards can be used for different use cases — from non-transferable recognition to fully tradable certificates — and these tokens can live on whichever blockchain best fits the needs of a project or community.

In other words, ATProto provides the open, decentralized data layer where contributions and evidence live, while onchain components provide the guarantees and flexibility needed to connect that data to real funding flows across many chains and mechanisms.

Where We’re Headed

We’re building toward a world where:

• Projects are less burdened — they can focus on doing impactful work instead of navigating complex applications and reporting cycles.
• Funders have better information — with structured contributions, evidence, and evaluations that support faster, more confident decisions.
• Evaluators are recognized and rewarded — with clear incentives and sustainable business models for producing high-quality assessments.

This is the foundation for value recognition networks: systems that make collective value legible and reward the people who create it.

Start Building With Us

Hypercerts are an open protocol, and the ecosystem is growing. We are especially interested in hearing from you if:

• you operate or build a funding platform, or
• you are a funder in an impact domain such as climate, science, digital public goods, open-source, journalism, or community programs.

If you want to help build the infrastructure that recognizes and rewards collective value, we’d love to collaborate.

You can reach us at: team [at] hypercerts.org