Stop Calling Them Badges.

For many people in Web3, badges are often referred to and used in conversation as signals of social recognition or participation. As tokens, whether fungible or non-fungible, badges have found their place in the market as memorabilia that an individual is expected to cherish rather than value.

Historically, badges have been little more than a way to flex one's collection. With the extremely limited product definition and usage scope of so many already-existing solutions, the adoption of badges has plateaued as individuals and organizations struggle to adopt the far too idealistic models that have been proposed.

Today, what is so easy to call a badge, is more appropriately just a bad smart contract and, likely, feature(less) product.

Badges can be much more than meaningless memorabilia jpegs offered when one doesn't want to offer something of value. "Jimmy, you did so well on this! Get him a badge, Nancy!" they say as they miss the single biggest operational-unlock Web3 has seen yet.

Drilled into the ground by ideas that cannot stand on their own without the marketing efforts of VCs chasing the next shiny things, the open market adoption and development of badges have been non-existent; Until Badger. (You can find detailed docs for Badger on the GitBook.)

Badges should be extremely powerful access keys driving complex and granular access policies on- and off-chain. That hasn't been the case until now, though. You can find the full whitepaper on cosanostra at Badger: On-Chain Credentialing

With the introduction of Badger, every on-chain organization and individual can enjoy the benefits of an improved badging ecosystem, on-chain access policy, and organization management tool.

To fully understand why we are redefining what a "badge" is, we will start by digging into what's wrong with the previous implementations and what a badge isn't followed by exploring the new capabilities of an ecosystem with available Badges.

From a world of valueless participation trophies, Badges can finally serve as powerful keys that hold power to unlock the kingdom.

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Attestations

Early into the concept development of badges, many individuals coalesced on building attestation engines that allow external parties to write data on-chain that points to a specific account. For example, did you dump all of your Optimism