Every repo page on HoodScan has a Boost button. It is a free +1 signal: one per repo per day, no wallet, no signup, no token to hold. Pressing it gives the repo a small bump in its HoodScan Score. This post covers how that works and why we built it this way.
What a Boost Is
A Boost is a single community signal attached to a repo. Anyone browsing the leaderboard can add one, limited to one Boost per repo per day. There is nothing to connect and nothing to sign; the button works the same for a first-time visitor as it does for a maintainer.
Boosts feed the HoodScan Score, which combines stars, activity, tier and community boosts into one number. Stars and commits move slowly; Boosts are the fast channel. A project that ships something useful can pick up visible support the same day.
The weighting is deliberately modest. A Boost nudges a score; it does not rewrite the board. Stars and activity still do most of the work.
For scale: HoodScan currently tracks 71 scanned repos, 50 of them indexed, and 26 marked tier-1 because they are built directly for Robinhood Chain. The top repo, robinhood/faust, holds 6,824 stars and a score of 137. A handful of Boosts will not move faust. Lower down the table, where scores sit in the teens, daily community signal genuinely changes ordering.
The daily cap is the anti-abuse layer. One signal per repo per day keeps a motivated community meaningful while making brute-force inflation slow, tedious, and easy to spot.
Why Not Token-Gated Voting
Most crypto leaderboards gate voting behind a wallet or a token balance. We considered it and dropped it. Wallet-gated voting measures who holds a token, not who finds a project useful, and it filters out the people we most want signal from: developers comparing SDKs and readers arriving from GitHub with no wallet in the browser.
Friction is the other cost. Every extra step before a vote cuts participation, and the votes that survive skew toward insiders. A free one-click signal collects input from more people, and the daily cap does the moderation that token weighting was supposed to do. Broad shallow signal beats deep narrow signal.
The tradeoff is honest, and two design choices keep the cheap signal from degrading into pure noise:
- Farmed star-bot repos are filtered out of the index before scoring, so Boosts only land on projects that already passed a basic legitimacy check.
- The allowance resets daily, so sustained support requires sustained attention rather than a one-time raid.
There is also no reward loop for boosting: no points, no leaderboard of boosters, no airdrop to farm. The signal exists to rank repos, nothing else.
What Changes on the Board
The clearest effect shows up in the Recently Listed feed. New arrivals such as labrinyang/lp-terminal, krillintel/krill and itsfriedpotato/potatopad start with few stars and no history. Boosts are how they surface before the usual metrics exist.
Without a community channel, a leaderboard is a lagging indicator of last month. With Boosts in the score, the board reacts to what builders on Robinhood Chain are using this week, across categories from DeFi and Trading Bots to SDKs, RWA and AI agents.
That matters because the chain itself moves fast. The Markets tab tracks live Robinhood Chain DEX pools via GeckoTerminal, refreshed every 60 seconds, with USDG at $106M in 24h volume and CASHCAT at $23M. When on-chain activity rotates, repo attention rotates with it, and Boosts register the shift within a day.
None of this requires an account: open a repo page, press Boost, come back tomorrow.
How to Use Boosts
If you build on or follow Robinhood Chain, three habits make the signal useful.
Boost what you actually use. The score is only as good as its inputs. If an SDK or bot framework saved you real time, the one-click signal is the cheapest way to say so, and it compounds when given daily.
Watch the Recently Listed feed. New repos arrive with no score history, so early Boosts there carry the most leverage. It is the best place to surface tooling before it climbs into the top 50.
Do not game it. Automated boosting looks exactly like what it is, and it gets the same treatment as farmed stars: removal from the index. Organic signal from real users is the only kind that survives review, and the only kind worth keeping on the board.
Boosts will stay free and will stay capped. If heavier community mechanics ever arrive, they will sit alongside the daily +1 rather than replace it. Signal without friction is the point: the leaderboard should reflect the people building on Robinhood Chain, including those who never connect a wallet.
