--- title: "Hypercerts (impact certificates)" url: "https://caper.network/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/hypercerts" updated: 2026-08-31 license: CC-BY-4.0 license_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Hypercerts (impact certificates) | | | | --- | --- | | **Topic** | Hypercerts (impact certificates) | | **What it is** | An open token standard for _impact claims_ – a semi-fungible certificate that records who did a piece of work, over what period and scope, so it can be funded (especially [retroactively](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding)) across any mechanism | | **Token standard** | [ERC-1155](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1155) semi-fungible token; claim metadata pinned on [IPFS](https://ipfs.tech/) | | **Origin** | Proposed by David Dalrymple at [Funding the Commons](https://fundingthecommons.io/) (June 2022); framework published by [Protocol Labs](https://pl.xyz/blog/hypercert-new-primitive/) (Aug 2022, author Holke Brammer) | | **Stewarded by** | [Hypercerts Foundation](https://hypercerts.org/) ([open source](https://github.com/hypercerts-org)) | | **Used by** | [Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao), [Celo Public Goods](https://forum.celo.org/t/celopg-h1-progress-report/8126), GreenPill, and other public-goods and [DeSci](/wiki/desci/desci-funding) funders | ## Overview A **hypercert** is an open, on-chain _certificate of impact_: a token that states that a specific piece of work was done, by whom, over what time period, and toward what goal. It is not itself a funding mechanism – it is the shared _accounting layer_ that funding mechanisms point at. The name is a contraction of "hyperstructure certificate," and the pitch is that public-goods work should have a durable, transferable record the same way a company's output has equity. The primitive was introduced by David Dalrymple at the [Funding the Commons](https://fundingthecommons.io/) conference in June 2022 and written up by [Protocol Labs](https://pl.xyz/blog/hypercert-new-primitive/) in August 2022. It sits directly upstream of the [retroactive public goods funding](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding) experiments run by [Optimism](/wiki/daos/networks/optimism-collective) and [Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao): those programmes need a canonical object to reward, and a hypercert is designed to be that object. ## How a hypercert works Each hypercert is an [ERC-1155](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1155) semi-fungible token whose claim data lives as metadata on [IPFS](https://ipfs.tech/). The claim is structured along a fixed set of dimensions, so two hypercerts can be compared, merged, or split without ambiguity. Per the [Protocol Labs specification](https://pl.xyz/blog/hypercert-new-primitive/), a claim records: - **Scope of work** – what was actually done. - **Time of work** – the period over which the work happened. - **Contributors** – the accounts credited for it. - **Scope of impact** and **time of impact** – what the work is claimed to have affected, and when. - **Rights** – what a holder of the certificate is actually entitled to (e.g. the right to claim credit for retroactive funding). Because the token is semi-fungible, a single claim can be **fractionalized** and its fractions sold to, or held by, many funders – and hypercerts can be **split and merged** along those dimensions, so multiple backers can support distinct slices of one project's impact. The design is deliberately mechanism-agnostic: hypercerts are meant to feed "private sales, public auctions, expert panels, and quadratic voting systems" alike, avoiding a new silo for every funding round. ## The retroactive-funding thesis Hypercerts exist to make one idea practical: **it is easier to agree on what was useful than to predict what will be.** Retroactive funding pays for outcomes after they land rather than proposals before they start – the same "results, not promises" logic Vitalik Buterin and others set out in the [original retroactive public goods funding essay](https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c). The catch is a coordination gap: a builder who works now on the expectation of being paid later needs a credible, non-duplicable record that _they_ did the work. As the Protocol Labs write-up puts it, "if you can reasonably expect to get funded retroactively for your work once you produce a positive impact, then you can work now, in expectation of a probabilistic future cash flow." A hypercert is that record. It turns a diffuse "we did some good" into an ownable, auditable claim that a later [retro round](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding) – or a market, or a panel – can price. It also gives the record _persistence_: once minted, an impact claim is not forgotten when the round that might have funded it moves on. ## Where it is used The clearest adopters are the public-goods funders whose whole model depends on rewarding realized impact: - **[Gitcoin](/wiki/daos/public-goods/gitcoin-dao).** Gitcoin ran a [GreenPill hypercerts experiment](https://gitcoin.co/case-studies/greenpill-hypercerts-experiment-impact-certificates-in-practice) to fund chapter activity, and its [Grants 24](https://gitcoin.co/campaigns/gitcoin-grants-24-gg24) round (donations Oct 14–28, 2025) offered "peer-reviewed hypercerts" as one of the round-specific mechanisms allocators could choose, alongside [quadratic funding](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/voting/quadratic-voting-and-funding) and conviction voting. - **[Celo Public Goods](https://forum.celo.org/t/celopg-h1-progress-report/8126).** Celo's public-goods programme uses hypercerts to represent claimed impact in its retroactive rounds, built on the same EasyRetroPGF tooling lineage. - **[DeSci funders](/wiki/desci/desci-funding).** The impact-certificate model is a natural fit for research, where a paper, dataset, or replication is a discrete unit of impact that funders may want to reward after the fact rather than via a grant proposal. The protocol itself is stewarded by the [Hypercerts Foundation](https://hypercerts.org/) and developed in the open at [github.com/hypercerts-org](https://github.com/hypercerts-org). ## Limits and open questions A certificate standardizes the _claim_; it does not settle the hardest part, which is **measuring impact and deciding who judges it**. A hypercert can faithfully record that work happened without establishing that the work mattered, and the valuation step still falls to a market or an evaluator – exactly the load that overwhelmed human reviewers in [Optimism](/wiki/daos/networks/optimism-collective)'s [RetroPGF](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/treasury/retroactive-public-goods-funding) rounds. Fractionalization also invites speculation: if fractions trade freely, the price of a hypercert can drift toward what buyers expect it to be worth to future funders rather than its underlying impact, reintroducing the guess-the-future problem retro funding set out to avoid. Adoption, too, remains concentrated in the crypto public-goods niche rather than broad philanthropy. None of this is fatal – a shared, persistent record is genuinely useful – but a hypercert is best read as _plumbing for_ impact funding, not a verdict on impact. ## How Caper approaches this [Caper](/wiki/foundations/what-is-a-caper) is a DAO protocol, not a grants programme, and it does not issue impact certificates or run retro rounds. But it shares the load-bearing instinct behind hypercerts: **what you actually did, not what you promised or what you hold, should decide your claim.** In a caper, voting mints a non-transferable [proof-of-vote token](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/soulbound-tokens) – a fractional resource that can never be sent, sold, or airdropped between wallets, though it accrues on trades as well as on ballots. Governance weight is then computed on-chain as **(tokens held × your votes) / (vote supply × tokens in circulation)**, and the _same_ figure sets your share of the treasury when you [exit](/wiki/dao-governance/concepts/membership/rage-quit-and-exit-rights). Your participation record and your claim on the money are one number. Where a hypercert is a transferable, tradeable certificate of impact, Caper's is the opposite: an earned, soulbound record that cannot change hands. Both refuse to let a promise or a purchase stand in for a contribution – they just draw the line in different places, and Caper draws it so that the earned half of the product cannot be bought _from the member who earned it_ – anyone may mint their own, at 0.01 `v` per XRD traded or 1 `v` per ballot. (Holdings are still a multiplicative factor, so capital counts; a large bag alone simply cannot capture control.) ## References - [Protocol Labs – "Hypercerts: A new primitive for public goods funding" (Aug 2022)](https://pl.xyz/blog/hypercert-new-primitive/) - [Hypercerts Foundation](https://hypercerts.org/) · [hypercerts-org on GitHub](https://github.com/hypercerts-org) - [Optimism – "Retroactive Public Goods Funding"](https://medium.com/ethereum-optimism/retroactive-public-goods-funding-33c9b7d00f0c) - [Gitcoin – GreenPill hypercerts experiment case study](https://gitcoin.co/case-studies/greenpill-hypercerts-experiment-impact-certificates-in-practice) - [Celo Public Goods – Hypercerts](https://forum.celo.org/t/celopg-h1-progress-report/8126)