Problem:

Over 50% of internet traffic is non-human. Social networks are flooded with AI content, misinformation, and bot farms that manipulate narratives.

In the near future, billions of humans will no longer be able to distinguish what’s real from what’s not. As a result, existing platforms will introduce stricter identity verification at the cost of users’ privacy and personal information.

Solution:

Openbands lets anyone prove they are human or verify real-world credentials, such as nationality, age, company affiliation, university enrollment, memberships, concert attendance, or stock ownership, in a privacy-preserving manner.

These proofs are stored as badges onchain and mapped to the user's wallet. Users can then use their badges to create or join badge-gated communities, creating high-signal, trusted environments.

What's next:

We are currently experimenting with the integration of onchain trading features. Apps like FOMO or PUMP have proven that there is market demand for social trading. However, we believe that those apps are fundamentally flawed because of their excessive focus on memecoins, which provides an easy playground for insider trading abuse. Research has shown that over 95% of FOMO users lose money. This is not sustainable and does not only harm users but also the credibility of the Web3 industry.

Our thesis is that more users can win in a social trading app if the following criteria are met:

1. Support only trustworthy assets:
   Tokenized stocks, indices, commodities, and major cryptocurrencies. Zero support for memecoins. Effectively eliminating the risk of pump-and-dump schemes. We consider Arbitrum to be the strongest ecosystem for integrating those assets, because it has the highest RWA count.
   

2. Introduction of a trust layer:
   Does a profile belong to a real person and does it have additional context (nationality, age, stock balance, accredited investor status?). The more context, the more trustworthy.
   

3. Privacy protection:
   Use of Zero Knowledge proofs to protect users' personal information.

Anybody should be able to trade trusted assets, follow other trusted traders, or build their own reputation and following. Our mission is to be the world's most trusted social trading app. One where trustworthy assets, verified profiles, and privacy protection are the foundation.

Limitations:

1. After Robinhood Chain stock ownership verification, the badge in the user profile shows as "Stockholder". It does not show which stock or arbitrary values. This is a work in progress, and a future version will support this. For example, users can see in their own or other profiles "10 shares of AAPL," allowing for more granular community filter options such as "Requires at least 10 Apple shares to join".
   

2. A user can verify stock ownership, join a community and later sell the tokens or transfer to a different wallet while still owning the verified badge and being a member of a community. We are working on time-based badge expiry, so users must re-verify after a given timeframe.
   

3. We only support Web3 wallets and tokenized stocks held on Robinhood Chain. In a future version, we will also support proving stock ownership from a Robinhood brokerage account via zkTLS web proofs.

Recognitions:

1. For nationality & age verification we integrated Self Protocol. We were featured in their blog.

2. We initially launched as a miniapp inside World App and were a member of World Build 3 cohort.

Resources:

Homepage: https://www.openbands.xyz/
Web app: https://app.openbands.xyz/
X: https://x.com/openbandsxyz

Shipped during Buildathon:
Summary: https://github.com/Openbandsxyz/Openbandsv2/pull/136
ZK Circuits & contracts: https://github.com/Openbandsxyz/tokenized-stock-ownership-badge