Post TLDR
- there is 1000x more sybil resistance available from POAP than the Gitcoin Passport is currently consuming.
- there is a data intelligence problem of âhow much is each POAP worth?â.
- there may be decentralized ways to solve the problem.
Post Body
Gitcoin Passport uses (among other things) POAP for sybil resistance. This is what the stamp looks like:
As you can see, you get the POAP stamp if you âConnect an account to a PoAP owned for over 15 days.â
I was having a conversation with Patricio Worthalter about the stamp at Devcon, and we both agreed there was 1000x more sybil resistance that could be gotten out of POAP than what Passport currently does.
Iâve actually had this same conversation with a few different Gitcoiners over the last several months, and so Iâm writing up this post to detail it.
The objective of this post is to detail the diversity of POAPs and to talk about how the sybil resistance from that diversity of POAPs might be tapped.
There are 10000s of different POAPs out there. This screencap from https://poap.delivery/ shows the diversity of the POAPS out there.
Each of these POAPs can have between 0 and 1000s of collectors.
Each of these POAPs can be a sybil resistance signal on Passport, though some may be stronger than others. For example a publicly available POAP likely only creates a sybil resistance of about $0.01 (because the cost of forgery is low), whereas a âI met owocki.eth at Devcon 2022â POAP is likely worth much more in terms of sybil resistance (because the cost of forgery is high).
What would have to be true for Passport to process the diversity and plurality of POAPs out there + to reward sybil resistance of each of these POAPs, instead of just one small criteria of âowned a POAP for more than 15 daysâ?
GitcoinDAO would need to categorize the POAPS + figure out the sybil resistance each POAP confers, and then find a way of loading all of that sybil resistance into the passport. This is a huge data + governance challenge (and perhaps a UI challenge too) .
A naive way of solving this problem might be to hire someone to catalogue all of the POAPs + reward them with sybil resistance scores. But that person would surely have a very large backlog to work through, and there would be a non-negligible cost to keeping that person on staff. And one person only has a limited vantage point on the problem.
A more decentralized and scalable way of solving this problem might be to push the problem out to the edges of the network. What if there was a dapp that allowed people to do conviction voting on the POAPs. eg when someone stakes GTC on a POAP, then that increases the sybil resistence that that POAP grants to the system. Then this problem of âhow does the DAO categorize the POAPs?â becomes a giant collective intelligence problem which the market can solve.
Thanks for reading to the end. If you made it this far, you now see see that
- there is 1000x more sybil resistance available from POAP than the Gitcoin Passport is currently consuming.
- there is a data intelligence problem of âhow much is each POAP worth?â.
- there may be decentralized ways to solve the problem.
Thanks for reading this knowledge transfer post.