jmc

Right now grants are reviewed by a small set of highly trusted individuals within Gitcoin who have built knowledge and mutual trust through experience and discussion. This optimizes for accuracy but at the cost of centralization, high cost, low resilience to reviewers getting hit by buses and a low limit on the number of individuals meeting some trust threshold is a blocker on this model scaling to large numbers of grants. The challenge is to build a protocol that allows grant reviewing at sc...

It seems like almost every non DeFi project, from DAOs to gaming and from airdrops to the support for public goods provided by Gitcoin and others, rely on some notion of identity in their decision making. And yet - all too often such systems are attacked by actors seeking to amplify their votes, game the games, farm the airdrops, and even divert public goods funding to their own projects. Such attacks that rely on the impersonation of thousands of seemingly independent identities that are act...

Gitcoin aims to optimize capital allocation within a grants round (GR), primarily by preventing capital capture by Sybils. There are currently two independent systems in place for this that run in parallel. First, a multiplier ("Trust Score") is assigned to an individual's donation depending on their non-Sybil traits - the more likely they are to be a real human the more their donation is multiplied in the matching pool. This Trust Score is derived from evidence of personhood that a user...

The Ropsten merge is a significant milestone in Ethereum’s progress towards moving to proof-of-stake. It is the first pre-existing public testnet to be merged, making it an important test-case for merging Mainnet. It has already been entertaining because a naughty miner deployed a lot of hashpower to the network and brought the merge date suddenly much closer - so close that the merge data passed before a Ropsten Beacon Chain even existed. The client teams quickly posted fixes that pushed the...

SybilsQuadratic funding - the mechanism that currently determines the value of Gitcoin grant funding -is inherently vulnerable to Sybil attacks. Sybil attacks are individual humans dividing themselves into multiple “virtual humans” in order to gain additional voting weight. In traditional banking and voting systems, Sybil resistance comes from “KYC” (know-your-customer) which links personal identifying information to some action. In Web3, “KYC” is generaly minimized because it undermines the ...

Across 13 rounds, Gitcoin has given almost $60 million to public goods. Projects that demonstrably create positive externalities bid for portions of the total funding pool. Like any substantial pool of money, Gitcoin grants attract diverse attacks from bad actors aiming to divert a portion of that money away from public goods and into their own wallets. The role of Gitcoin's Fraud Detection and Defense (FDD) squad is to protect the Gitcoin community - a diverse group that includes users,...

Ethereum is a notoriously adversarial environment. Ethereum has even been compared to a “dark forest” - acknowledging the terrifying game-theoretic concept from the Three body Problem that being visible to other entities in the universe is an unavoidable precursor to being destroyed by them. This reputation mostly comes from weaknesses in the application layer (insecure smart contracts) or the social layer (users being manipulated to give up their private keys or unwittingly sign transactions...

People make or break DAOs so onboarding good people is critical. However, it is also notoriously difficult to get onboarding right, and not only for DAOs - onboarding challenges cost businesses millions every year and there is a growing recognition that organizations with strong onboarding protocols outperform those with a "sink or swim" approach. Onboarding is where organizations and contributors make their first impressions on each other, set expectations and establish the tone of their new...

After eight years of proof-of-work mining, Ethereum finally became green on 15th September 2022. It did so by swapping out proof-of-work mining for a new proof-of-stake based consensus mechanism, using ETH instead of energy to secure the network. Ethereum's proof-of-stake mechanism now uses just ~0.0026 TWh/yr across the entire global network. The energy consumption estimate for Ethereum comes from a CCRI (Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute)(opens in a new tab)↗ study. They generated bottom...

This article was one of 7 winners of the Gitcoin Public Goods RFP October 21: https://gitcoin.co/blog/seeking-a-new-kind-of-public-good-closing-the-loop/ Science is the process of discovery. It powers technological advancement and enables us to navigate and manipulate our environment. Strong economic, ethical and pragmatic arguments can be made in favour of scientific knowledge being a public good. This is especially true now that damaging disinformation is especially rife yet novel discoveri...

This is a detailed accompaniment to an introductory article I wrote at ethereum.org Ethereum has multiple interoperable clients developed and maintained in different languages by independent teams. This is a major achievement and can provide resilience to the network by limiting the effects of a bug or attack to only the portion of the network running the affected client. However, this strength is only realized if users distribute roughly evenly across the available clients. At present, the v...