nice â would also love to learn more about how we can verify unique wallets/users!
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Currently using âpaypal verified usersâ as sybil protection, thatâs explained more fully in this post We Donated to Gitcoin Projects with Credit Card! - Review of PayPal Fiat Payments in GG21
Looking for other options (with slightly cheaper fees and perhaps more options than PayPal): Just had a call yesterday with people from Visa who explained next steps to work with Stripe (this has been a looooong process) to get API to verify someoneâs legal name with credit card checkouts and bank transfers
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Also we can use Circle wallets as Circle has MTLs and thatâs available on Arbitrum, not on Celo or OP. So far Iâve called 4 lawyers including the MTL expert Gitcoin recommended and Iâm setting up calls with another several groups who might have MTLs and an API
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@katalunia is the bridge multichain feature on grants stack live?
Would love to try it
Just realized perhaps we can use circle programmable wallets on arbitrum and use bridge feature for rounds on celo and op.
Also i called brale who offered us a better deal than bridge and they have MTLs
hey Noah, yes the bridge feature is live and you can use it by donating to any GG22 project. Let us know when you have another proposal ready! Telegram chats are probably the best way to coordinate.
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Update:
Chatted with @sejalrekhan and @James of fire eyes hearing advice on how to structure pricing.
Suggestions were to make an upfront one time set-up fee.
And also to have a performance bonus paid out in GTC and for it to have a cap.
So 3 parts are:
-One time set up cost
-Ongoing tx fee
-Performance bonus
Performance bonus could be something like x amount of GTC per 1 dollar processed through us up to x amount within the first 1-3 years
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Results from GG 22: 48.08% of GMV volume flowed through fiat in the rounds that worked with us to include that option We are founding a new company to add fiat payments straight to your smart contract: normie.tech
Specific stats: $55669.75 in total donations to the 4 rounds we supported
$26763.78 came through our fiat integration
500 users able to fund public goods on-chain with 0 friction of onboarding to crypto
Meeting with Gitcoin team in Bangkok our team will be staying at the Allo house, will discuss proposal and update! 
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I was a grantee in the Land Regenerators Round, which experimented with disabling Gitcoin Passport and allowed the same match impact for crypto and Paypalâs donations above $5, and will share my perceptions about it.
- Crypto donations are transparent and can use social graphs to flag collusion, while Paypal donations canât. I have been in rounds where a project was flagged because it distributed crypto funds to wallets that then donated back to the project. In Paypal Rounds this is not possible to flag.
- Paypal is a northern company unknown in the global south so its use obviously benefits grantees from Europe, USA, Australia and other Paypal markets. It makes obsolete the saying âI came for the money and stayed for the tech/communityâ, doesnât incentivize learning about web3 tools, financial autonomy or public goods and brings in legacy finance intermediaries culture.
- Not clear to me whats the point of using web3 infrastructure if the round doesnât consider web3 reputation and security. Seems to me like if crowd wisdom was replaced by individual agency in convincing tech able donors. It could be done in a web2 way just using the QF formula, Paypal could fund a matching pool and do it within their network, the Paypal Rounds.
I praise the experimental aspect of a Land Regenerators round, so worth analyising the results to prevent unwanted outcomes in the future. We participated in joy and are very grateful for the dedication of operators, grantees and donors. Will use our funds carefully over the next six months. They represent ~0.8% of a matching pool of 200k distributed among 30 grantees.
In our end, thanks to the support we had in past rounds we built a small treasure and will continue stewarding food forests irl and onboarding people to web3 public goods, and will start managing the funds in a multisig with local team newbies. Resilience in practice.
I understand and respect if this is the intention of @metahands the Land Regenerators Round, but truly hope that @jon-spark-eco, Coreen, the CCN and Gitcoin consider these aspects in community before accepting fiat in future rounds.
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Hey Diogo! Great feedback.
- Super intriguing point. Iâm curious @umarkhaneth thoughts on this
- Great point. Though PayPal is available in most all countries, by far most existing users are western countries. Iâm wondering if we can get bank account transfers through Stripe and Visa card payments instead (weâre trying to get API access that lets us check peopleâs legal names for sybil defense.) Do you think that would have the same issue or be an improvement?
- My thought process towards this is that web3 users can still choose to rely on more privacy preserving on-chain sybil defense while also allowing anyone to participate. I love the ideal of democratization in web3, but if we build platforms that my mom canât use then what are we democratizing?
Definitely agree that these points should be considered
i think the biggest problem with PayPal isnât related to the flow between ViaPrize, Grants Stack, Sybil Defense and the âuserâ, what Diogo explains is something that could be âexploitedâ big time if the Red Team figures out a way to join the Round as a Grantee but also Attack the Round via PayPal & Fiat donations unless some other security measures are implemented after the donation is made via FIAT.
If no verification is made on the payment because it came from a âverified PayPal addressâ, then this is a choke point for Red Team to exploit due to how cheap it is to get Verified PayPal Accounts out there.
If you get this API to verify people legal names, this doesnât mean this is not an attack unless you KYC every transaction beyond the âverifiedâ status coming from PayPal.
Bank Account transfers via Stripe wonât clear instantly and kinda defies the purpose; for the Cards via Stripe scenario, I would say this one is way more secure as long as 3D Security is enabled via SMS to verify cardholder actually is making the transaction, if Visa/Mastercard 3D security is done via Email or Pin Codes then it has a higher degree of a malicious transaction.
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Hi Noah, thanks for the reply.
- Also looking forward to hear other toughts, @wasabi Wassabi was on the spot in his comment
- Here is a table showing the inequality involved in using these northern intermediaries:
. India and Brazil really underperform. CC to @thedevanshmehta
Source PayPal use by country 2024 | Statista - The best way to onboard newbies imo is through purpose and usecase. If in your example your mother didnât learn how to have autocustody and participate in the rounds itâs because there are not enough incentives for her to go through the trouble of learning. This is why every Gitcoin grantee is incentivized to concentrate their efforts in onboarding community. Gitcoin community is aligned with this democratic Purpose. We have to cultivate this commons soil, spread the news and more users will join. Fair funding allocation already creates a lot of network effects, believe me. Weâve been onboarding unliterate rural brazilians because they believe in our purpose, and if we can learn than Iâm sure anyone can. Remember, banks and large companies are not democratic, unbanked people canât use them. Your mother however can use web3 platforms because they are indeed democratic, but maybe she just havenât seen the Purpose yet.
So I think this is a question about the strength of the sybil resistance.
Youâre wondering if it is easier to make many verified PayPal accounts than it is to make many wallets that have enough on-chain history to get matching?
Weâve tested it out and talked with the Gitcoin team and found it to be Sybil resistant. Iâd encourage you to try it as well and see how well it works then share the results
Thank you for sharing the stats! >40% in all those countries is actually a lot more than I was expecting.
Definitely agree that work you do onboarding people to web3 who donât have access to tradfi and bank accounts is AWESOME and exactly the sort of work that crypto ecosystem should be doing that provides value by letting everyone access these systems.
I also think adding in fiat doesnât affect any of that, it just adds an additional payment method thatâs easier so that way more people participate in these blockchain systems, the ecosystem grows, thereâs more alloGMV and easier partnerships for Gitcoin as they appeal to wider groups, etc.
Iâm not wondering, I know it is easier to âMake, Buy or Hackâ PayPal verified accounts than to make wallets with enough on-chain history that doesnât look like a Bot to pass the COCM & Passport Model Based Defense.
This is why if your Sybil Defense is âPayPal said this is a verified userâ then you have a problem as the introduction of PayPal and other FIAT Methods it is just introducing new attack vectors for; custodian of Fiat, Round Operator, Matching Pool, Grants Stack and Gitcoin as a whole, because those attacks will be âAllow listedâ and its weight would count for matching.
Again, if your sybil resistance relies on the data that is coming from paypal then this may be flawed due to how easy is to do âshady stuffâ on PayPal.
If you decide to implement other forms of verification that the donation actually came the real customer then yes it becomes way more resistant, PayPal alone wonât cut it unless you introduce âfrictionâ that makes the process safer.
I am not a round operator yet, but if i venture into trying to bring FIAT to my QF Round, i wonât rely solely on what PayPal said as by default PayPal transactions arenât final and you could get a chargeback even 180 days down the line.
Easy way to improve the actual flow? Do extras verifications on each transaction no matter the amount; you could leverage a Blockchain-native KYC Provider and this could be a Trojan Horse to âOnboardâ that person into Web3.
@noahchonlee My perception is that you basically made it so easy that you brought in every mother, aunt, brothers. sisters, cousins, entire families and friends⌠but overwhelmingly from the North⌠am I wrong?
as a personal opinion you would be a lot more democratic for the world if you could take regional QFs to Paypal for folks in these Paypal markets , and regular no Paypal rounds for the global community.
It would be nice if for compensation all the Paypals operators joined a Global South Round
Ah my apologies. What tests did you already do and what were the results that led to this conclusion?
The table I showed previously shows how Paypal use is skewed to a few northern countries what is very undemocratic, I hope that @thedevanshmehta can join this forum, once he was the one who suggested adding paypal after the round was approved by the community. I also hope that other round opperators also join this discussion, like @MontyMerlin and @LuukDAO from Regen Coordination and BioFi, and the operator of the Youth in Need Round.
Please be aware that my concern is with the integrity of the Gitcoin Community that voted for rounds aligned with their democratic and safety measures, Itâs easy to judge that I am here trying to get some crumbs, but it is not the case. I am very found and thankful for the relationships I have built with all of you over these years.
We havenât been presented the round results yet, but in the roundâs Signal group @metahands ran simultations without the Paypal donations, which shows clearly that from the 4th to the 15th places there would be significant changes in the results:
If you can show us a decent collusion protection and democratic use of fiat donations, I would support Viaprize. But this opaque and inequal functioning only raises concerns about the reliability of the tool, and thereâs a chance that the Gitcoin Community wouldnât approve giving 20k for allegedly âdemocraticâ rounds. I reinforce that this happened not because of operators will but simply because of demographics of Paypal users and lack of transparency of fiat tx.
Tests about what in specific? Because if you refer to my statement about PayPal and Fiat Payments Security, this is public information, and you can verify it with a simple google search.
Whoever receives PayPal and give $USDC in exchange is at risk of many legacy issues, I donât need to run a test to know that because it is public domain already and plenty of research about it.
If you ask me specific questions about my previous messages then i can go deeper into it.
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I would like to note this chart is taken out of its original context. It was a simple simulation to show what round results might have looked like if verified PayPal transactions didnât receive quadratic funding, though itâs not a fully accurate counterfactual since presumably some portion of those donors would have still contributed via crypto instead. In other words, please do not rely on this chart for empirical data.
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Would be interesting to have the demographic data of the paypal donations or banks used for their validation, it could give an idea of the countries that they came from. That data could easily end the debate on Paypalâs demographic inequality.