What are Hypercerts?

A hypercert is a living digital record of impact. It allows you to track the work you've done — and how others can see, evaluate, and support it.

Think of it like this: you do meaningful work — restoring a forest, maintaining open-source software, running a community program, publishing research. A hypercert captures that work in a structured way that anyone can verify. Over time, other people can add to it: attaching evidence, measurements, and evaluations that make the record richer and more trustworthy.

What goes into a hypercert

At its core, a hypercert answers four questions:

Who did the work?
What did they do?
When did it happen?
Where did it take place?

That's the starting point. From there, the record grows as people add more context:

Evidence — photos, links, documents, or descriptions that show the work happened
Measurements — numbers that make the impact concrete ("142 issues resolved", "50 hectares restored")
Evaluations — independent assessments from people with domain expertise
Contributions — who specifically was involved and what they did
Rights — what rights come with the hypercert (display, transfer, etc.)

A hypercert isn't a static document you file and forget. It's a living record that accumulates evidence and trust over time.

How people use them

If you're doing the work, you create a hypercert to make your contributions visible. Instead of writing reports that sit in a folder, you have a verifiable record that any platform in the ecosystem can display.

If you're evaluating work, you add your assessment to someone else's hypercert. Your evaluation lives on your own data server — it's your reputation on the line, attached to their work.

If you're funding work, you can see the full picture before making a decision: the original claim, the evidence behind it, and what independent evaluators think. No more guessing.

If you're building a platform, you can read and write hypercerts using shared schemas. A funding platform, a project dashboard, and an evaluation tool can all work with the same data.

An example

Say a team runs a coastal reforestation project. They create a hypercert:

Coastal mangrove restoration, 2025
50 hectares restored over 12 months. Satellite imagery confirms canopy coverage. An independent ecologist evaluates the work as "high-quality restoration with strong community engagement."

That's the starting record. Over the following months, the team adds measurement data as new satellite imagery comes in. An independent evaluator reviews the project and attaches their assessment. A funder browsing the ecosystem sees the full picture — the claim, the evidence, and the evaluation — and decides to support the next phase.

Because hypercerts are built on AT Protocol, the record lives on the team's own Personal Data Server — not on a single platform. Any app in the ecosystem can read and display it. To learn more about how this works, see Why ATProto? and The Hypercerts Infrastructure.

Hypercerts aren't just for environmental work. People use them for open-source software, scientific research, journalism, community organizing, digital public goods — any work where impact matters but is hard to make visible. See Common Use Cases for more examples.

Why it's built this way

Hypercerts are built on AT Protocol, a decentralized data layer that also powers Bluesky. This gives hypercerts some important properties:

You own your data. Your hypercerts live on your Personal Data Server, not on someone else's platform.
It's portable. You can move your data to a different server anytime. No lock-in.
It's verifiable. Every record is cryptographically signed. Anyone can check that it hasn't been tampered with.
It works everywhere. Any app that speaks the Hypercerts protocol can read and display your records. Learn more in the Architecture Overview.