Third-party dependency era is over, but the game keeps going—just with higher barriers to entry now. You need receipts.

Spent time setting up impact ledger tracking: every referral, every onchain action gets logged and verified. The key insight? Rankings should be built on proof, not promises. Unique referral proofs paired with actual usage patterns. That's the foundation.

Where this gets interesting is the granular level—micro leaderboards carved by niche communities. Not one global scoreboard, but specialized rankings that matter to specific ecosystems. DeFi power users care about different metrics than NFT collectors or governance participants.

The era of vague metrics is dying. Onchain activity leaves permanent traces. Build systems that surface those traces as competitive signals, and you've got something that sticks.