Edit: Snapshot vote is now ratified!
TLDR: Alpha Round final results are live here! We propose 5 days for discussion and review followed by a 5-day snapshot vote to ratify, before processing final payouts.
Background
First, we’d like to thank the community and the grantees for all of the patience everyone has shown as we fine-tune our “canon” QF implementation for the Allo protocol, passport scoring, and end-of-round analysis. We understand the results (and subsequent payouts) for this round have taken longer than usual and we look forward to accelerating this process in future rounds. Additionally, thanks to @AlexK @nategosselin @umarkhaneth @koday @kyle @M0nkeyFl0wer @zen @baoki and many other amazing contributors in the Gitcoin DAO for all the work that went into making this round successful and getting us to these final results.
The first Gitcoin Program Alpha QF rounds on Allo Protocol ran from January 17th to January 31st and included a subset of established grantees from past rounds. $1 million in matching was available between 3 distinct rounds (and correspondingly 3 smart contracts), with 333,333 DAI pools for the following categories:
- Web3 Open Source Software [Explorer | Contract]
- Ethereum Infrastructure [Explorer | Contract]
- Climate Solutions [Explorer | Contract]
You can learn more about how these rounds were planned and structured here:
Results & Ratification
The full list of final results & payout amounts can be found here. Below we’ll cover how these results were calculated and what decisions were made (given this is the first round integrating Gitcoin Passport and the first large-scale round on Allo, it was a new process and one we’d like to get community feedback and iterate on).
We ask our Community Stewards to ratify the Alpha Round payout amounts as being correct, fair, and abiding by community norms, including the implementation of Passport scoring as well as judgments and sanctions made by the Fraud Detection & Defense workstream.
If stewards and the community approve after this discussion, we would like to suggest voting on Snapshot to run from Monday, March 20th to Friday, March 25th, in advance of payouts being processed the last week of March.
Options to vote on:
1. Ratify the round results
You ratify the results as reported by the Public Goods Funding & Fraud Detection & Defense workstreams and request the keyholders of the community multisig to payout funds according to the Alpha Round final payout amounts.
2. Request further deliberation
You do not ratify the results and request keyholders of the community multi-sig wallet to delay payment until further notice.
Round and Results Calculation Details
To summarize:
- The Gitcoin Program Alpha Round was conducted on the new protocol from January 17-31, 2023
- It consisted of 3 curated rounds with their own matching pool: Web3 Open Source Software, Ethereum Infrastructure, and Climate Solutions
- There were 159 returning grants split between the rounds invited based on funding criteria from GR14 and GR15
- A total of $667k was donated from 30,893 unique wallets
Matching Calculation Approach
The final results shared here stray from the “pure QF” calculations after treatment for supporter eligibility. Our eligibility controls were:
- Sufficient passport score
- Non-arbitrary donation minimum
- Removal of sybil-attackers
- Support amounts totaling to matching cap limit in place per round
Passport scores: Gitcoin Passport ran into some issues that we’re glad to have ironed out - some donors were unable to verify their unique identity for most of the round due to infrastructure instability, and some passport stamps were reset at times. As a result, donors were given 2 extra weeks after the round concluded to reverify their passports and stamps. Given the 2-week grace period, we are happy with the final outcome of verified passports:
Only ~10% of attempted passports failed, and ~10% of donors did not have any passport at all. Only donors with a passport and sufficient score were counted for matching calculations.
You can find more about Passport’s round issues, lessons learned, and future mitigation plans in Erich’s post.
Donation minimum: In past cGrants rounds the donation minimum was $1. For the Alpha Rounds, we instead went with a cutoff of a certain bottom percentile of donations, which all ended up at about $.50, but varied between 30% and 60% of total donations depending on the round:
These lower boundary limits were selected based on examining statistical anomalies across projects in aggregate for each round, along with time-series analysis to identify botted behavior. Whether a cohort of airdrop farmers was found to act as a group of isolated, unique individuals, or as a sybil-network, this limit neutralized the impact of such speculation on the disbursement of matching funds and we found that Passport did a good job of limiting the prevalence of unsophisticated sybil network in our alpha rounds.
Advanced sybil attackers: As with most QF Rounds, we saw some more sophisticated Sybil Attack patterns which were not stopped by Passport (yet!), as well as donations from addresses which were known to be attackers of prior rounds. After on-chain data analysis and a manual sampling process, donations from addresses that were associated with these types of behaviors were excluded for the purposes of matching calculations. Moving forward, more of this analysis process will be automated and executed in near real-time with the help of on-chain data called within Passport.
Matching caps: Matching caps were introduced many rounds ago on cGrants, where there is a maximum percent of the total matching pool any one grant can capture. Once they hit this cap, they will not earn more, and any excess is redistributed to all other grants. Alpha Round caps were:
- 5% for OSS
- 10% for Climate
- 10% for Eth Infra
These amounts were selected based on the number of grants invited/expected to be in each round.
Please note: in an effort to create a transparent minimum viable product of QF formula, simple quadratic voting has been deployed here. In the future, we will offer pairwise matching as an option for possible customizations that will be set and published on-chain at the time of grant program creation.
Prior Estimated Results & Takeaways
Multiple DAO contributors have already shared detailed analyses, statistics, and takeaways from the Alpha Rounds. You can find those governance posts here:
Again, we thank everyone for your patience and participation in the Alpha Rounds. We’re excited for the Beta Program launch the last week of April (details coming soon) as we reignite the Gitcoin Program on the Allo protocol and support many other organizations to host their own programs and rounds.
For questions, comments, or concerns on any of the above, please comment below or join the Gitcoin Discord.
