On June 12, 2025, Ethos proposed EIP-4, a change that would bring trust data from Ethos Markets into the Ethos score. Six days later, on June 18, 2025, Ethos announced that EIP-4 had been implemented and was live.

This article records how Ethos worked at the time. The proposal still matters as a record of how one Ethos product was folded into the credibility score.

What Ethos Markets was

Ethos Markets was Ethos’s second product. It let users speculatively trade the reputation of individuals who had opted in to having a market. Until EIP-4, it was a standalone product. What happened in a person’s market had no bearing on their Ethos score.

How the markets priced reputation

Ethos Markets ran on a double-sided bonding curve. As Ethos described it in June 2025:

• When a user created their market, it started at 50/50.
• Other users could buy and sell votes of trust and distrust.
• As those votes were bought and sold, the price changed.

Ethos called the result a reputation market: a place where users could speculate on how much trust or distrust others placed in a person.

The EIP-4 proposal

EIP-4 proposed integrating that market activity into the Ethos score, so that trust and distrust expressed through a market would count toward a person’s credibility, rather than sitting in a separate product.

The proposal was put to a vote on Snapshot. Discussion took place on Ethos itself, in a thread on the Ethos app, and in the Ethos Discord. The posts don’t record the vote tally.

EIP-4 went live on June 18, 2025

On June 18, 2025, Ethos announced that EIP-4 had been implemented. From that point, users who had opted in to Ethos Markets:

• Instantly earned +25 credibility for having opted in
• Could earn and lose credibility based on their market score
• Could gain up to +400 or lose up to -400 score, depending on the size of their reputation market

Ethos also noted that buys and sells of trust and distrust instantly affected the score. A change in a person’s market showed up in their credibility right away rather than at some later point.

Why the change mattered

Before EIP-4, Ethos Markets was standalone, and market sentiment lived on its own. EIP-4 connected the two. Trust and distrust expressed through a market became one more input into how credible an account appeared on Ethos, with the size of the market setting how far that input could move the score in either direction.

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