On March 12, 2025, Ethos changed how its credibility score handled “invitation source credibility,” and anyone who had invited others to Ethos could see their score move as a result, some more than others. On March 28, 2025, a second update reduced or removed several other sources of credibility.

This is a record of how the score worked at the time. The invitation rules below described Ethos in March 2025, not today.

The March 12 change: the invitation bond in real time

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. At the time, part of that score came from the people you had invited.

Ethos explained that it had originally intended the invitation bond to take effect only after a 90-day bond was complete. With the March 12 update, it adapted the algorithm to show the current status of that bond in real time. That is why people who had invited others saw their scores change on that date.

The first explanation: lower scores, negative impact

In the same thread, Ethos wrote that the change meant “inviting new users with lower scores has a direct negative impact on your score.” It called this intentional and by design, meant to encourage people to keep inviting users with high credibility scores.

On March 13, 2025, Ethos shared an “expert mode” breakdown of the math and invited people to ask questions.

The clarification: it’s the change in score that counts

Later on March 13, Ethos added a clarification. Inviting someone with a lower credibility score would have the same kind of impact on your score as inviting someone with a high one, because what was measured was the change in the invited person’s score from day 0 to day 90.

Ethos gave two examples:

• Person A joins at 1200 and reaches 1500: +300
• Person B joins at 1500 and reaches 1600: +100

Both are measured the same way. But because the score looked at the change, Person B, despite starting out more credible, would pull down your “invitation score” if your average invitation score was over 100, while Person A would raise it. As Ethos put it: “Math is hard.”

Should you invite less credible people?

Some users asked whether it still made sense to invite less credible people to Ethos. Ethos’s answer was “absolutely,” because those people had the most upside in score to earn.

Ethos shared an example in which a user invited three people and got less score for inviting a person with a 2200+ score. It also walked through how the earning worked:

• If you invited someone who went from 1000 to 1200, you earned credibility on the score they gained over their first 90 days.
• People with lower scores could gain credibility the most easily.
• In Ethos’s example, that worked out to +200 for a questionable invitee and +100 for a reputable one.

In other words, the system rewarded inviting people who went on to build credibility after joining, not just people who arrived with a high score.

The March 28 change: release v0.1.8

On March 28, 2025, Ethos announced another credibility score change with three parts:

• Upvotes: you could no longer earn credibility by having your reviews or vouches upvoted.
• Account age: Ethereum and X account age was reduced to just +5 possible extra credibility points.
• Inviter credit: credibility earned from the person who invited you was reduced by 75%.

Ethos published full release notes for this change, version 0.1.8, at help.ethos.network.

What the changes added up to

Across about two weeks in March 2025, Ethos adjusted several inputs to the credibility score. Invitation credit moved to real time and was tied to how much an invitee’s score grew in their first 90 days. Upvotes stopped adding credibility, account age counted for much less, and the credit passed down from an inviter was cut by three quarters.

This story first appeared on X.