Amazon.com is the worlds largest web based retail store.
It is also the trojan horse that allowed AWS to grow into the dominant cloud hosting platform in the world in the early 2000s. AWS did $62 billion last year in revenue.
(for the uninitiated AWS is Amazon Web Services - an infrastructure provider that allows for easy cloud hosting + other compute services. It is the #1 cloud hosting provider in the world)
What I think is funny about this story is how AWS looks so obvious in hindsight, but at the time it was seen as a ārisky betā.
Jeff Bezos risky bet in 2000 was basically:
- the market for cloud services is going to be huge
- Amazon could deliver better cloud services than anyone else on the planet (bc of the scale of amazon.com)
- Spend the money to realize the market share.
What does this have to do with us?
I basically think that there is a similar setup going on at GitcoinDAO.
The DAOs primary product, Gitcoin Grants, by way of its network effects has created a treasure trove of user data about Quadratic Funding (which we all know because weāve been following the posts by the FDD relies on sybil resistence :)).
Here is the setup:
I think the bet GitcoinDAO is faced with is:
- the market for a sybil resistence/DeSoc identity money lego is going to be huge
- Gitcoin could deliver better a sybil resistence/plurality money lego than anyone else on the planet (bc of the scale/plurality of Gitcoin Grants)
- The dao could spend the money to realize the market share.
I was very happy to see that the DAO ratified in its essential intents for 2022: Build a widely adopted, modular Pluralism Passport protocol that creates a flourishing ecosystem of network effects around Decentralized Society.
Looks like other people see it too
My prompts to you all:
- Do you have pushback on the market opportunity (or Gitcoinās positioning to make a move) here? Id love to hear it + talk it out.
- What would have to be true to start cranking the network effects of Passport?
- Iām giving a talk at ETHcc about the opportunity of Decentralized Society, Sybil Resistence, and Gitcoin Passport. What would have to be true for this launch to go really well?
- Defi protocols have a KPI called TVL (total value locked). I think for us a similar metric is total cost of forgery what is the total cost of forgery in gitcoin passport ecosystem now? what would have to be true to 1000x it?
- Iām planning on having other tools in the sybil resistence/DID toolchain on the greenpill podcast. I will likely dedicate all of Season 2 to this subject. Who should I have on?
- What are the coolest things we could build if 1h1v was solved? Dream big!
Caveat: Web3 is Pluralistic
One area where the analogy to AWS breaks is that Gitcoin desires to be pluralistic. Gitcoin Passport will lift the tide of all boats in the plurality value chain. It offers
- distribution to our sybil resistence provider friends (like BrightID, Idena, POH, etc) and our DID friends (spruce, disco, ceramic)
- beyond just distribution, hopefully we are good ecosystem neighbors to this grouip too.
- aggregation of a plurality of identities to dApp providers who want sybil resistence
- benefits to users who collect stamps.
Addentum: Is DID/sybil resistence really as big of an opportunity as cloud hosting?
TLDR - I think it is, yes.
Here is what I think this world looks like. Imagine its Q4 2022 and we release a press release like this:
Gitcoin, the market leader in web3 crowdfunding, has released Passport - a core money lego for the next generation of web3.
Gitcoin Passport is a new decentralized identity money lego that enables more democracy in the DAO space. Gitcoin Passport allows DAOs to go from 1 token 1 vote to 1 person 1 vote, reducing plutocracy + enabling more democracy in the DAO ecosystem with just 1 line of code.
With Passport, DAOs can verify the uniqueness of a (1) visitor to their website or (2) executor of a smart contract + and provide unique benefits to those users. Hereās how the technology works: Using Gitcoin Passportās APIs, dApps can input an ETH address for their visitors and receive back a āpersonhood scoreā for that user. That personhood score (PS) is equivalent to the cost of forgery in USD for that users identity. If a user has a PS100, then a DAO can give them up to $100 worth of benefits. If a user has a PS10000, then a DAO can give them up to $10k worth of benefits.
Using Gitcoin Passport, users collect āstampsā that allow them to boost their Personhood Score. As they boost their PS, they gain benefits in Gitcoin Grants + other prominent dApps that provide benefits to users who have high personhood scores.
Gitcoin Passport is backed by Gitcoin Grants. Gitcoin Grants is well known as a crowdfunding platform ā But if you look closer, because Gitcoin Grants requires sybil resistance, Gitcoin Grants is actually a giant red team / blue team exercise for battle testing Digitally Native Sybil Resistance (Sock Puppet) technologies. Gitcoin Grants processes over $6mm/quarter in funding for the web3 space, and the sybil resistance baked into your Grants experience is what backs Personhood Score (PS) - the scoring algorithm behind Passport.
Gitcoin Passport is a Building Block for a Better Internet. Right now, the DAO ecosystem is built around one-token-one-vote or one-cpu-one-vote schemes. With Passport, the ecosystem could move to DAOs built on one-human-one-vote. This unlocks use cases like:
- quadratic funding
- quadratic voting
- Gini coefficient measurements
- UBI
- one-person-one-vote DAOs
- sybil resistant airdrops
- other use cases we havenāt discovered yet!
Passport is
- Open Source - Passport was built Open Source from the start; to create transparency, security, and fork-ability at the foundation of the project.
- Privacy-Preserving - Passport is designed narrowly to allow users to prove their humanity, the rest of your identity does not matter to us. For this reason, Passport only provides information about your Personhood Score (PS). Your Passport does not contain anything personally identifiable about you.
- Programmable - Passport is built on web-standards like ERC-721 and the W3C DID/VC standards (coming soon). Using our JS SDK + Solidity SDK, developers can leverage Passport in their own platforms.
- Consent-driven - it is important that Passports are only generated for ppl when they consent to it.
From now until FUTURE_DATE Gitcoin is running an exclusive Passport alpha developer program to (1) get more developers building on Passport (2) get more stamps integrated into Passport.
There are already 10k users using Gitcoin Passport. If youāre a developer who would like to get access to Passport:
- To join to Gitcoin Passportās alpha partner program, contact passport@gitcoin.co
- If you are a developer, and want to build on Gitcoin Passport, check out LINK_TO_DOCS.