TL;DR

• Shape Network, a culture-first Ethereum Layer 2 focused on NFTs, partnered with Human Passport to ensure that its community rewards reach real human users – not bots or fake accounts.

• By integrating Human Passport’s Custom Passport dashboard and Onchain Passport, Shape verifies proof of personhood for users participating in its two flagship incentive programs: Gasback (gas fee rebates for creators) and Stack (a gamified points-and-medals reputation system).

• Users are required to mint their Passport (an identity “badge”) onchain to Shape, which generates Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) attestations of their identity score. Shape’s smart contracts then leverage a Passport decoder contract to query these onchain attestations and gate rewards based on each user’s “humanity” score.

Scroll to the bottom for key takeaways 👇

This case study explores how Shape’s proof of personhood integration works, the challenges it addresses, and the impact on fostering a Sybil-resistant NFT ecosystem.

Shape Network’s Reward Economy

Shape Network is an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup built on the OP Stack, designed as a home for creators and the new NFT economy. Emphasizing culture and art, Shape provides a low-cost, high-speed environment for onchain creation and experimentation. A unique hallmark of Shape is its Gasback program, which rewards contract owners by reimbursing 80% of the sequencer fees from onchain activity. This means developers (“creators”) get back the majority of gas fees spent on their smart contracts, incentivizing them to build and contribute creative projects on Shape.

Alongside Gasback for creators, Shape introduced Stack, an onchain reputation system that turns user interactions into progress and rewards. Users on Shape can mint a “Stack” NFT – essentially an achievement tracker – and earn medals (Silver, Gold, Special) by engaging with NFT apps and contracts. Both Gasback and Stack exemplify Shape’s mission to reward real engagement and onchain culture participation, but to keep these rewards fair and meaningful, Shape needed a reliable way to distinguish genuine individual users from Sybils (multiple accounts controlled by one entity).

Challenge: Sybil Resistance Without User Friction

As Shape rolled out Gasback and Stack, it faced a classic web3 challenge: Sybil attacks – where one person or bot army creates many fake identities to claim disproportionate rewards. Without safeguards, an attacker could spin up many wallet addresses to farm Gasback rebates or earn Stack medals and future token allocations meant for unique community members.

The challenge was to ensure that each participant in these reward programs was a unique human (Proof of Personhood), without introducing burdensome KYC or centralized identity checks that would undermine the open, permissionless ethos of the platform. Shape needed a Sybil-resistance solution that could scale with its growing user base and NFT ecosystem, preserving the integrity of rewards like gas fee rebates and reputation medals. Additionally, Shape wanted a solution flexible enough that third-party dApps on Shape could leverage it for their own campaigns, creating a unified trust layer across the entire Layer 2. In short, the network sought to block bots, reward real users, and maintain a seamless user experience in its NFT-driven world.

Solution: Gasback & Stack with Human Passport Integration

To address these challenges, Shape Network integrated Human Passport as the backbone of its identity verification for both Gasback and Stack programs. Human Passport provides a Custom Passport system that Shape tailored to its needs, complete with a branded dashboard and a custom scoring algorithm. Here’s how Shape applied this solution to each program:

Gasback – Verifying Creators for Gas Fee Rebates

Gasback is Shape’s novel mechanism of returning 80% of network fees to contract deployers as a reward for their contributions. To prevent abuse (e.g., the same entity deploying multiple trivial contracts or simulating fake activity to farm rebates), Shape uses Human Passport to verify the personhood of contract owners. Developers who wish to claim Gasback incentives are encouraged (or required for certain campaigns) to have their Passport score minted on Shape. This means the creator must sign in to the Shape’s Custom Passport dashboard and collect identity Stamps that they’re comfortable with (verifications like KYC, web3 activities, web2 activities, biometrics) to build up their Unique Humanity Score within Passport.

Once ready, they mint their Passport onchain to Shape. This onchain minting triggers Human Passport’s smart contracts to publish the user’s identity data via EAS attestations. Shape’s Gasback distribution contracts can then query the Passport decoder contract onchain with the creator’s address to retrieve their Passport information (e.g., total score or specific verified credentials).

By gating Gasback eligibility to creators with a sufficiently high Passport score (i.e., real, unique humans), Shape makes sure gas rebates go to genuine builders, not Sybil attackers. In practice, this Sybil check has helped preserve Gasback as an incentive for authentic community contributors rather than a loophole for exploitation.

Stack – Gamified Proof-of-Personhood for Users

Stack is Shape’s gamified reputation and rewards system for users. Community members earn points and medals for engaging with NFT applications, collecting art, and contributing to onchain culture. Shape integrated Human Passport into Stack to ensure these achievements truly represent unique individuals. The process is seamless: a user connects their wallet to Shape’s Custom Passport dashboard, featuring Shape’s branding, messaging, CTA, and a custom Stamp weighting, and completes various identity verification Stamps.

Shape’s custom scorer emphasizes high-value “proof of humanity” Stamps – for example, government ID/KYC and advanced ML models analyzing transaction history across several networks – assigning them significant weight. Many lower-signal stamps (those easier to game or not relevant to their ecosystem) were removed or de-emphasized on the Shape Passport, focusing the scoring on robust proofs of uniqueness.

After collecting enough Stamps, the user pushes their Passport and score onchain by clicking “Push Onchain” in the dashboard. This writes an attestation to the Shape blockchain via EAS, recording the user’s Passport data immutably. Now armed with an onchain Passport, the user can gain the Shape Stack reward for Proof of Personhood, assigning medals and points to their Stack.

Shape’s contracts call the Passport decoder to get the user’s score and determine for which medal tier they qualify. For example, a lower score would mean a user could receive a Silver medal, while a higher score would provide a more valuable one. These medals are issued as onchain NFTs to the user’s Stack, publicly showcasing their verified “unique human” status and participation. By tying Stack progression to Passport scores, Shape effectively elevates the reputation rewards for unique humans – bots with low or zero scores cannot easily obtain these medals or advance in rank. This system has created a fun, competitive environment for users to verify their humanity and earn recognition, while keeping out low-effort fake accounts.

Moreover, Stack medals have real weight in the Shape ecosystem. They can unlock perks and are poised to influence $SHAPE token allocations for community members, based on one’s Stack rank. In other words, Passport-verified humans who engage more get a higher reputation and potentially a larger share of future network rewards. This closed the loop on Sybil resistance: without a valid Passport, one would have a more difficult time farming Stack rewards or the tokens, removing the incentive for bot swarms in the first place.

Results & Impact

By implementing Human Passport for Gasback and Stack, Shape Network established a strong foundation of Sybil resistance that protects its rewards economy. Every Passport minted onchain is a tamper-proof attestation of a user’s unique humanity, which Shape uses to ensure only eligible users (and creators) receive rebates or medals.

In the months following integration, the Shape community enthusiastically adopted the Human Passport system. Thousands of users verified their identities and pushed their Passport onchain to participate in Stack, leading to the creation of over 11,000 Stack NFTs and tens of thousands of medals awarded to real users (Silver, Gold, Special) across various campaigns. Notably, the “Proof of Personhood” campaign within Stack (the initiative rewarding users for verifying uniqueness) became one of the most popular, with the community minting roughly 28,000 medals under that category alone – a clear indicator of user interest in building a genuine onchain identity.

On the creator side, Gasback has seen sustained participation from verified developers, recycling a significant portion of transaction fees back to those driving activity on Shape. This has contributed to Shape’s growth, with over 21,000 contracts deployed and 90,000+ users on the network to date, while maintaining trust that those users are legitimate.

Importantly, the onchain nature of Passport data allowed the Shape team to analyze participation patterns and strengthen their defenses. By leveraging data science tools on the Passport attestations, they detected clusters of accounts with suspiciously low Passport scores – likely attempts at Sybil farms. These insights informed adjustments to the custom scorer and eligibility criteria, tuning the system to be even more bot-resistant. For example, if many low-score accounts were found using only cheap-to-get Stamps, Shape could further lower the weight of those Stamps or raise the minimum score threshold for rewards. This adaptive approach, powered by real data, ensured that “human-proof” scoring stayed one step ahead of malicious actors.

Overall, Shape’s integration of Human Passport has fostered a fairer and more vibrant ecosystem. Real users feel incentivized and appreciated – they see tangible rewards (gas refunds, medals, future tokens) for verifying their identity and contributing genuinely. Meanwhile, malicious actors are largely kept at bay, unable to easily profit from the system. This has strengthened community trust in Shape’s programs and set the stage for the sustainable growth of its NFT economy built on authentic participation.

Conclusion

Shape Network’s case study demonstrates the power of onchain Proof of Personhood in a real-world web3 ecosystem. By integrating Human Passport, Shape tackled the critical challenge of Sybil attacks in its NFT-focused Layer 2 network without sacrificing user privacy or decentralization. The Custom Passport dashboard and scoring system enabled Shape to align identity verification with its community values, while Onchain Passport and the decoder contracts provided a trustless way to enforce eligibility rules for rewards.

As a result, Gasback and Stack have thrived as Sybil-resistant reward mechanisms – Gasback fueling open-source creativity by rewarding real developers, and Stack building a loyal user base by celebrating genuine participation. Perhaps most significantly, Shape has created an infrastructure that any project in its ecosystem can leverage: an interoperable “proof of personhood layer” available to dApp developers who want to ensure their airdrops, loyalty programs, or games only reward true individuals. This collaborative Sybil defense model strengthens the entire Shape ecosystem’s integrity.

As the $SHAPE token distribution and new NFT campaigns roll out, the proof of personhood groundwork laid with Human Passport means those initiatives could proceed with confidence in their fairness by relying on existing personhood proofs. Shape’s bold experiment in weaving identity verification into an NFT economy offers a blueprint for others: with the right web3 identity tools, it’s possible to build communities that are both open and Sybil-proof, where creators and users alike can trust that everyone is a real, unique human.

Key Takeaways

• Proof of Personhood is Key to Fair Rewards: Shape Network recognized that to fairly distribute gas rebates and reputation points, it needed to verify each participant as a unique human. By using Human Passport’s proof-of-personhood framework, Shape effectively neutralized Sybil attack vectors that could exploit its Gasback and Stack programs.

• Custom Passport Integration: Through a Custom Passport dashboard and scorer, Shape tailored the identity verification process to its ecosystem. High-value identity Stamps are weighed more heavily (e.g. advanced ML models looking at onchain transaction history and KYC) and count toward Shape’s “humanity score,” ensuring users put in real effort to prove uniqueness. This custom scoring feeds directly into how rewards (medals, rebates) are allocated.

• Onchain Attestations for Trustless Enforcement: Shape requires users to mint their Passport onchain, which creates tamper-proof EAS attestations of their identity data. Using the onchain decoder contract, Shape’s smart contracts automatically check the user’s Passport score before allowing reward claims. This onchain verification means no central party is needed to approve users – the blockchain enforces the rules (e.g., “score must be >= x to claim reward”) transparently.

• Sybil Resistance Across the Ecosystem: The Passport-based gating is used to assign Stack medal tiers (Silver, Gold, etc.) and restrict Gasback eligibility only to those meeting personhood criteria. This has dramatically reduced bot participation. Early data analysis even uncovered clusters of low-score bot accounts, allowing Shape to further tune its scoring and stay ahead of attackers. Human Passport thus provides not just one-time filtering, but an adaptable Sybil defense layer.

• Empowering Third-Party Projects: Because the Passport attestations are onchain and open, any project on Shape can opt to leverage this identity layer. Whether it’s an NFT airdrop that only real people can claim, a game that limits one account per human, or a community giveaway, developers can query the same Passport decoder to verify users. Shape’s integration showcases how an entire network can share a unified Proof of Personhood standard, benefiting all participants.

• NFT Innovation with Integrity: Ultimately, Shape Network’s integration of Human Passport enabled it to reward its NFT community without compromise. Gasback and Stack are innovative mechanisms to reward engagement, and thanks to Sybil resistance, those rewards retain value and credibility. Shape has shown that an NFT-centric blockchain can remain permissionless and fun while seriously defending against fraud and exploitation.

Interested in building Sybil-resistant communities?

Shape Network’s success with Human Passport illustrates that decentralized identity verification can be game-changing. If you’re a web3 builder or protocol looking to ensure fair rewards and real users, consider integrating Human Passport into your project.

Visit the Passport docs to learn more about the Custom Passport and Onchain Passport, or reach out to the Human Passport team for guidance on tailoring Proof of Personhood to your app.

By prioritizing unique human identities, you can create a more trustworthy and vibrant ecosystem, just like Shape. Get started with Human Passport today and put Sybil attacks on the sidelines of your platform’s story!