Bumicerts on ATProto
Three components of a verifiable claim
Read a Bumicert with your own eyes — and notice what each of its three components costs the community to produce.
Reading
The first practical question after the framework is operational: how does a community make its impact legible to outsiders without letting outsiders rewrite it? GainForest’s answer is the Bumicert — an ecological impact certificate built on the ATProto lexicon and published from the community’s own Personal Data Server.
A Bumicert has only three structured components: identity (a DID the community controls), claims (one or more impact statements about what was done, where, when), and evidence (links to the data, photos, recordings, or signed attestations that back the claim). That’s it. The simplicity is the point — three slots that an evaluator anywhere in the world can read the same way, and that an automated system can index without re-inventing a schema for every project.
What changes on ATProto compared to the previous Ethereum-based Hypercerts? Portability. The certificate isn’t locked to a single platform’s database or to a chain a community might leave. The signed record lives on the community’s PDS, replicated by indexers, and can move across hosting providers without losing its identity. This is the soil framing in protocol form: the record stays with the people who made it.
A Bumicert without its boundary context is still extractive. The point of Lessons 03 and 04 was that attribution and agency travel with the data. Bumicerts carry that travel as a feature — consent terms, withdrawal pathways, and the named reviewer all attach to the claim and move with it.
“Ecological hypercerts are blockchain-based impact certificates that enforce a structured data standard through three key components: identity (who made the impact), formalized claims (what impact was achieved), and provided evidence (proof of impact).”
Handouts for this lesson
Practise
Exercise
Read one Bumicert, then draft one
- 01Open the live Bumicerts feed (linked from the [GainForest landing](https://gainforest.app)) and pick one certificate at random.
- 02Identify the three components in your chosen Bumicert: WHO (the identity / DID), WHAT (the impact claim), HOW we know (the evidence list). Write them down in three lines.
- 03For each component, answer one question: who paid the cost of producing it? Identity is cheap, claims are written, evidence is collected — each costs different effort and different people typically bear that cost.
- 04Now draft your own: pick a piece of work your community has done (a restoration, a teaching, a survey, a season of stewardship) and write a three-line Bumicert for it. Use the handout below as the template.
Knowledge check
A Bumicert is made of which three components?
Why does it matter that Bumicerts are built on ATProto rather than a closed platform database?
Lesson 03 taught the five-field boundary statement. Where in a Bumicert do those boundaries live?