In an increasingly agentic and AI-powered world, trust is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. Without it, coordination breaks down. Protocols are gamed. Capital sits idle. And identities become meaningless in a sea of bots and synthetic actors.

That’s why we built Zeru, establishing a new standard for onchain trust with an immutable, verifiable, and universal reputation system. And today, we’re proud to announce that the Eigen Foundation has awarded Zeru a strategic grant to accelerate our roadmap, strengthen economic alignment, and expand adoption across the crypto and institutional stack.

Reputation is the missing layer across AI, DeFi, and the broader digital economy. Airdrops are botted. Lending is overcollateralized. DAOs are dominated by whales and Sybil attackers. Meanwhile, AI agents — designed to act on behalf of humans — can’t distinguish a high-signal contributor from a farmed wallet.

At Zeru, we’ve set out to fix this. By combining behavior-centric neural networks with offchain credential verification via zkProofs, we’re building a reputation layer that’s composable, cross-protocol, and privacy-preserving.

This grant from the Eigen Foundation is more than validation — it’s fuel to scale the core infrastructure of trust.

As one of the first AVSes (Autonomous Verified Services) live on mainnet, Zeru is deeply aligned with the EigenCloud ecosystem. This grant supports:

• Economic alignment: We are committing 4% of the total $ZERU supply to EigenCloud operators, ensuring the network's security providers are directly invested in our success.

• AI & data development: The funds will expand our engineering team to enhance our AI models and fast-track zScore API integrations across the ecosystem.

• Adoption & operations: Funding outreach to protocols, apps, and agents that can integrate zScore APIs — our plug-and-play solution for programmable trust.

Zeru brings utility to the EigenCloud ecosystem by anchoring behavioral trust in the protocol layer — a foundational requirement for agentic coordination and modular security.

Since mainnet launch in February 2025, we’ve:

• Generated 3 million unique reputation scores across DeFi, NFT, DAO, and staking interactions

• Secured $2.5B in economic security via EigenLayer restaking commitments

• Established integrations and partnerships with leaders like Ungate, Predicate, Lagrange, and Reclaim Protocol

• Built a community of 20K+ contributors and builders, with 12.5%+ engagement across channels

But this is just the beginning.

This grant enables us to deepen our core thesis: reputation is the protocol of trust for both Web3 and Web2 applications.

• zScore API integrations: Our API suite is live — now onboarding protocols for use cases like:

  • Sybil-resistant airdrops

  • Risk-adjusted lending and capital-efficient markets

  • DAO voting weighted by onchain behavior

  • Filtering real users from bots in AI and agentic ecosystems

• zkTLS + Reclaim Protocol flows: Launching user-friendly experiences for proving offchain credentials — from GitHub and LinkedIn to identity docs — without ever exposing sensitive data

• Institutional-ready infrastructure: We’re building toward employment verification, credit-based identity layers, and onchain KYC alternatives — not for speculation, but for long-term adoption across fintech, HR, and insurance.

Reputation is not an overlay on blockchain.

It is infrastructure. A new coordination layer for the age of autonomous agents. A way to filter signal from noise. To prove who’s real, and who contributes.

With support from EigenCloud and our partners, Zeru is building the trust layer the new economy demands.

If you're building apps, agents, or institutions that depend on verifiable users, real actions, and programmable trust — reach out today.

The future is trust-enabled. Let’s build it together.