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Building on Hypercerts

The Hypercerts Protocol is designed for third-party platforms, tools, and services to build on.

Who This Is For#

This guide is for:

  • Funding platform developers building crowdfunding, retroactive funding, or milestone-based payout systems
  • Evaluation service providers creating tools for domain experts to assess impact
  • Dashboard and explorer builders aggregating and visualizing hypercert data across the ecosystem
  • Impact portfolio managers tracking funded contributions and their outcomes
  • AI and automation developers building agents that create measurements, flag inconsistencies, or assist evaluators

What You Can Build#

Funding Platforms#

Create platforms that use hypercerts to structure contributions and distribute funding. Examples include:

  • Retroactive funding rounds where evaluators assess completed work
  • Milestone-based grant systems that release funds as work progresses
  • Crowdfunding campaigns that connect project information, partner review, and funding receipts
  • Quadratic funding mechanisms that allocate matching pools based on community support

Evaluation Tools#

Build services that help domain experts create structured, verifiable evaluations:

  • Peer review systems for scientific contributions
  • Impact assessment frameworks for climate projects
  • Code quality analysis for open source software
  • Educational outcome measurement for learning programs

Dashboards & Explorers#

Aggregate and display hypercerts across the ecosystem:

  • Portfolio views showing all claims by a contributor
  • Leaderboards ranking projects by evaluation scores
  • Impact maps visualizing geographic distribution of work
  • Timeline views tracking contribution history

Read-only integrations can fetch known source records without an authenticated PDS session. Cross-repository search and backlinks normally require an indexer, whose coverage and API contract must be evaluated separately.

Impact Portfolios#

Help funders track their contributions:

  • Aggregate all hypercerts a funder has supported
  • Monitor evaluation updates for funded work
  • Calculate portfolio-level impact metrics
  • Generate reports for stakeholders

Automated Agents#

Build AI systems that participate in the ecosystem:

  • Measurement bots that extract metrics from attachments
  • Consistency checkers that flag suspicious claims
  • Evaluation assistants that help experts assess work
  • Discovery agents that match funders with relevant projects

Running an Indexer#

To query hypercerts efficiently, run your own indexer:

  1. Choose a relay or repository ingestion scope for the Hypercerts and Certified record collections you support
  2. Parse and validate incoming records against lexicon schemas
  3. Store in a queryable database (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc.)
  4. Expose an API for your application to query

For relay subscription details, see the ATProto documentation.

Interoperability Principles#

The ecosystem works because platforms follow shared conventions:

Use Standard Lexicons#

Use the standard org.hypercerts.* and app.certified.* Lexicons for data that fits them. This gives other applications a public shape to implement, but discovery still depends on relay and indexer coverage. If you need data outside the standard schemas, create a sidecar record in your own namespace and reference the standard subject with the relationship form appropriate to its lifecycle. Indexers must explicitly choose to ingest application-specific namespaces.

You're also free to create new lexicons for use cases that don't fit the original schemas — ATProto is designed for this.

Use the declared relationship shape#

Use a strong reference when the field requires an AT-URI and CID for one content version. Use DID fields for accounts and URI-only record subjects where the Lexicon deliberately models a relationship that survives updates. Do not substitute one reference form for another.

See Records That Change Over Time and Building on Shared Records before publishing an extension.

Next Steps#

  • Read the Lexicons reference to understand the data model
  • Read Why AT Protocol? to see how accounts, relays, indexers, and apps fit together
  • Follow the evolving Client Integration path for supported SDK and XRPC guidance
  • Join the community to discuss your integration plans