Kudos

Kudos is a new way for rewarding creation while keeping the best parts of the "free Internet". Kudos creates an attribution economy where end users record those who help them, and then later optionally fund their accounts with a monthly fee which will be proportionally distributed to all kudos attributions they generate for that month.

At its core, Kudos is two steps:

1. Recording the identifiers of those that help you.
2. Splitting a monthly budget between those identifiers.

Kudos is made possible because of a few key technologies:

• XRPL - The XRPL is a decentralized, open-source, and permissionless ledger that allows for fast, cheap, and secure transactions. Crucially, XRPL makes micropayments and escrow possible.
• Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (HD Wallet) - HD Wallets allow for the creation of multiple accounts from a single seed. This allows for the creation of multiple accounts without the need to store multiple seeds.
• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) - A DID is a decentralized identifier that can be used to identify a person, organization, or thing. It is used to associate a payment address with a person or organization.
• Verifiable Credentials - Verifiable Credentials are a way to associate a DID with a payment address. They are signed by a trusted party (such as a bank) and can be verified by anyone.

Repo Structure

This repo contains several sub-components of the reference implementation of Kudos:

• kudos-for-code - A reference implementation of Kudos to support open source code contributions
• kudos-for-content - A reference implementation of Kudos to support content creators
• ident-agency - Reference backend GraphQL and API services
• identity-wallet - Examples of identity wallets that allows users to send and receive payments but also manager their Identities, and of course settle Kudos. Setler is available as both a CLI and GUI application.
• rfcs - A collection of RFCs that describe the Kudos protocol and its components.

Overview Architecture

Further details on the motivation for Kudos can be found in the Kudos Sketch.

History

Kudos owes its start to the In-a-Moon project from 2009. In-a-Moon required websites to include an identifier which would be used to split up a monthly payment. For In-a-Moon to be successful required adding JavaScript to every website on the web, a task that became increasingly difficult as the web grew. Atri was the second attempt to solve the same problem but without the need to add JavaScript to every website. Atri was a browser extension that would record the social media handles already embedded in websites that a user visited. While Atri solved In-a-Moon's problem, it was difficult to split up the monthly payment between the social media handles as there wasn't a viable micropayment solution at the time. Kudos solves this problem by using the XRPL and its escrow capabilities which make delayed access micropayments possible.

License

Kudos is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for the full license text.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community. Please see CONTRIBUTING for details on how to contribute.

Code of Conduct

This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.