Hypercerts
= "Hypercerts are a new protocol for funding and rewarding positive impact".
URL = https://hypercerts.org/
Description
1.
"Every hypercert is a public claim on a discrete piece of work and impact resulting from that work. Projects can create hypercerts and distribute them to contributors. Funders can own hypercert fractions — and the rights that come with them. Impact evaluators can create value for projects and funders by assessing the quality of hypercerts and offering ratings.
Hypercerts create interoperability by serving as a single, open, shared, decentralized database for impact claims and funding mechanisms.
Recurring income for public goods: Retrospective funding rewards projects for the impact they have created. As long as projects create impact, they can create hypercerts for the impact and get retrospective rewards for these. In contrast to today’s grant systems, projects have recurring income streams.
High-potential public goods: Buying hypercerts retrospectively allows funders to increase their funding in relation to the impact created, incentivizing projects to maximize their positive impact. Funders benefit from a large positive impact and incur project risks. Retrospective funding encourages high-risk/high-potential public goods.
De-risking impact-funding: Retrospective funders allocate their funds more effectively as they face less uncertainty about the impact projects had. This is especially important when the impact of public goods doesn't increase linearly. Retrospective funders wouldn’t waste funds by rewarding a project for building half a bridge."
2. Benjamin Life:
"Hypercerts offer a formal framework for representing positive externalities—beneficial outcomes not captured by market prices— in the form of discrete non-fungible digital assets. Unlike traditional ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) metrics that reduce impact to risk factors for financial returns, Hypercerts define a formal grammar for making claims about causal relationships between actions and outcomes.
For example, a carbon removal project could issue a Hypercert representing the verifiable capture of atmospheric carbon. This claim can be independently verified, decomposed into smaller units, combined with other claims, and traded without requiring its reduction to a single financial metric. The value of the Hypercert emerges from the social consensus around the importance of carbon removal rather than from its financial return alone.
This approach parallels what philosophers Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum achieved through the capabilities approach—creating frameworks that recognize plural forms of value without requiring their commensurability under a single metric. The critical innovation lies in making these claims tradable without requiring their reduction to financial equivalents."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/beyond-narrow-optimization?)