On September 22, 2025, Ethos said its invitation bonds weren’t working the way it wanted, “at all,” and proposed a fix called EIP-10. On October 1, 2025, EIP-10 was implemented and credibility scores were adjusted to match.
This article describes how Ethos worked at the time of those posts. Ethos has changed since: invites are no longer needed to join, XP became Karma, and Ethos Trade replaced the original reputation markets. Read what follows as a record of a 2025 change, not a description of Ethos today.
What invitation bonds were for
Ethos is an onchain reputation network where people review and vouch for each other, and every account gets a credibility score from what others say about it. Invitation bonds tied part of an inviter’s score to the people they brought in. Ethos said they were meant to discourage people from:
- Inviting sybils
- Inviting bad actors
The bond created some risk for the inviter, so that they could lose significant score by inviting someone who was “EV-” to the system, meaning someone with a negative effect on the network. As Ethos put it: “The idea was great, execution was terrible.”
Why the average didn’t work
The original bond was based on the average score of an inviter’s invitees. Ethos pointed out two problems with that:
- No reward for inviting genuinely good users
- No punishment for inviting severe EV- users
An average smooths out the extremes. One excellent invitee or one very harmful invitee gets diluted among everyone else, so the bond didn’t clearly reflect either the best or the worst invitations someone made.
The EIP-10 proposal
EIP-10, proposed on September 22, 2025, replaced the average with a different approach: take the top 2 and bottom 2 invitees instead of the average. Looking at the strongest and weakest invitees directly puts weight on exactly the cases the average had been hiding.
Implementation on October 1, 2025
On October 1, 2025, Ethos announced that EIP-10 had been implemented and that credibility scores had been adjusted. Users were told they would see a change in their “Invitation bond” that day. According to Ethos, the bond now better reflected negatively on an inviter who brought in bad actors, sybils and similar accounts.
Ethos listed four motivations for the change:
- Encourage high quality invitations
- Discourage inviting people who were EV- for Ethos
- Add accountability for slashing
- Add incentive for inviting truly good people
A bigger maximum downside
Alongside the new method, Ethos raised the stakes. The maximum downside of an invitation bond went from -60 to -120 score. Doubling the possible penalty gave the bond more weight as a deterrent, in line with the goal of making inviters accountable for who they brought onto the network.
This story first appeared on X.
