# Hypercerts

> Open infrastructure for funding valuable work. Trust in times of AI.

Hypercerts is an open protocol to connect projects with those who review them, vouch for them, and back them, creating the trust it takes to fund what matters. Funders build on what others already know.

The Hypercerts Foundation is an independent nonprofit stewarding the protocol, maintaining open infrastructure, and helping organizations participate.

## How it works

- Projects and organizations publish profiles, progress updates, and evidence about their work.
- Networks publish memberships, badges, and endorsements.
- Evaluators and certifiers contribute certifications and assessments with supporting evidence.
- Funders use others’ assessments alongside their own and record support for the work.

These are independent contributions, not a mandatory sequence. Each contribution identifies its source; readers decide which evidence and judgments matter. There is no universal score. Publishing a record does not establish that a claim is true.

Hypercerts builds on AT Protocol for portable identities, user-controlled records, and connected applications. Organizations can share approved public information while keeping private information in existing systems.

Crowdfunding with matching funds is the current use. Crowdfunding signals determine distribution of matching funds. Outcome payments, prize competitions, and milestone bounties are possible next extensions. Impact investing, commerce, and procurement are future possibilities, not supported features or a release schedule. Procurement requires protocol changes.

Trust is shown in one illustrative section, "One project, many signals": one project's record gaining three signals over time. The chart draws the record as a line that steps up with each signal, on a trust axis with no scale. The first, a project update, and the third, a funding record, apply to any field. The second, third-party attestations, can come from several parties and takes two of the chart's four equal steps; what they are depends on the impact area: a peer endorsement, a community evaluation, impact data or certifications, or an expert assessment. Nothing on the page is a calculated trust score.

## Ma Earth case study

Ma Earth's third funding round supported 201 regenerative projects with almost $2.2M ($2.19M reported by Ma Earth). Over a three-week campaign, crowdfunders backed the projects they believed in, each donation a trust signal from donor to project. Those signals determined how $1M in matching funds was distributed. Bottom-up signals from a community that knows these projects keep due diligence costs down, making it possible to move funds to many small projects. Reuse by another application in a later funding process has not yet been demonstrated. Endorsements were not used to allocate the matching funds.

## Links

- [Homepage](https://hypercerts.org/)
- [About the Hypercerts Foundation](https://hypercerts.org/about)
- [Ma Earth case study](https://hypercerts.org/blog/3mvru46xfus2r)
- [Ma Earth results](https://www.maearth.com/)
- [Developer guide](https://docs.hypercerts.org/getting-started/building-on-hypercerts)
- [Documentation](https://docs.hypercerts.org/)
- [Contact the Foundation](https://hypercerts.org/contact)
- [Blog](https://hypercerts.org/blog)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/hypercerts-org)