Why Reputation Matters? — Between 154 million and 435 million people work in the online gig economy without reliable contractual protections.

Agreements in gig work need credible commitments to prevent breach. Following Williamson's hostage model, an effective deterrent must be valuable to the promisor but carry zero liquid cash value to the counterparty. Non-transferable on-chain reputation fulfills this principle. It takes consistent, honest delivery to build, cannot be bought or sold, and deters default because losing accumulated standing costs far more than any short-term gain from cheating.

Gig marketplaces suffer from adverse selection because clients cannot easily verify worker quality beforehand. Traditional star ratings fail because throwaway accounts and fake reviews are cheap to produce. Graph-based reputation traces transaction relationships from trusted seed nodes and normalizes degrees. Peripheral bot clusters cannot inflate scores, keeping signals authentic.

Flat deposit requirements penalize honest professionals while failing to stop high-risk attackers. Adaptive staking calibrates collateral according to uncertainty and past track records. New profiles face strict concurrency limits to stop hit and run attacks, while proven contributors unlock discounts. Downside dominance ensures slashing penalties strictly exceed successful contract rewards, guaranteeing that dishonest behavior leads to an expected net loss.

Centralized platforms have structural conflicts of interest when acting as payment processors and judges at the same time. Reputask separates dispute resolution into an independent panel of five jurors filtered by network distance to eliminate social bias and collusion. Jurors vote through sealed commit-reveal ballots. All milestone specifications and evidence are permanently anchored on-chain with cryptographic SHA-256 hashes to prevent retroactive tampering.