[Proposal] GR14 Round Structure & Grants Eligibility Update

📜 Proposals
61

I think you missed my point. The point I’m making is that in the original paper, the curation function was supposed to be handled by the individual donations from the community. That was the mechanism that was meant to curate “good” projects from “bad.”

There was an acknowledgement in that paper that there was a Sybil problem, but there was no mention of a gatekeeper (that I remember). I’m talking about the gatekeeping function.

There are well-established methods to do gatekeeping in a non-smart-contract (i.e. human-in-the-loop) world. Those methods are called KYC.

62

This is exactly why I think building a decentralized grant curation infrastructure is so important. This is the outcome we will get from a combination of grants 2.0 components and FDD research.

First, by connecting Ethelo to scale our grant reviews we are NOT trying to say Ethelo is the future tool. To date, we have spent $4k on the integration which Ethelo has spent more $$$ and time in building for us. What it does do is allow us to open up reviews to be done by anyone. However, we choose how to weight those reviews. For GR14, we will only consider the trusted reviewers for production use, and we will verify the results with the previous method.

At the same time, we want to know how we could make the criteria validation decentralized and permissionless. Gitcoin Passport will allow us to give review stamps and model a use case that is outside of simply sybil defense (but also is an AMAZINGLY HIGH QUALITY sybil signal!)

That is why this work was done last season: GIA Rewards OKR Report

This season as we gather data from the live Ethelo experiment, we will run the data through the simulations built off the research above. You can see the simulation software here: https://github.com/dRewardsSystem/Rewards

This will allow us to find mathematic proofs and kill assumptions/falsify hypothesis about the system. Then through a proper research, hypothesis, experiment, development cycle, we would hope to be able to provide decentralized and permission-less grant reviewing that uses inter-subjective consensus to ANY community that wants to use it with the launch of Grants 2.0.

If we don’t fund building this and simply use delegated authority ourselves, the odds of another ecosystem building this are slim to none, but the work is almost done!

The benefit is analgous to a distributed ledger over a database. It is triple entry accounting that fundamentally changes the game theory. Because users get incentivized to review one grant against one criteria that is randomly selected at a time, and that criteria and grant is filtered to the total set of criteria for any community-curated ecosystem, it makes the optimal strategy provide trusted outcomes. It also is much cheaper to defend than to attack.

Another really cool benefit that helps push the legitimacy flywheel is that anyone who has a Gitcoin Passport could then participate and get paid for doing reviews, which then incentivizes passport adoption.

The output of the grants 2.0 project registry flyweel and the output of the anti-sybil flywheel have a positive feedback loop supporting each other via utility use cases for GTC! This is an exponential form of the Jet Engine effect @owocki has talked about.

5 Likes
63

Ah, I see what you mean, my apologies for the misunderstanding. Yeah, I do agree in an ideal world, no manual curation would be needed at all, and the QF mechanism itself would naturally provide the curation. This community curation is part of the appeal for protocols to run ecosystem rounds, instead of or in addition to their traditional grant programs (even with the manual curation, it’s much more community-oriented).

In practice though I don’t think it’s realistic, at least right now.

One example of why: it’s not uncommon to find 100% fraudulent grants that are impersonating a legit project, but created by someone totally unrelated to that project. It’s tough for the community to verify (much less get every individual to do their due diligence), and often the project’s real owners don’t find out about the fake grant until much later.

Another example is quid pro quo. Any project could open a grant and tell their community “hey all donors will get an airdrop” or “we’re raising our seed token round via Gitcoin Grants” and incentivize tons of donations that way. Sure, a lot of the community might protest and raise concerns, but if the only curation method is donations, that grant will still take home a huge undeserved portion of the matching funds.

And at the end of the day, we probably can’t have a truly open QF protocol curated only via donations until there is a real decentralized identity system widely adopted that is rock solid (and that could take 5? 10? 20+ years?). Plus much better decentralized arbitration systems.

I definitely agree with the spirit of your opinion on this, and would like to see us move progressively towards that vision, but realistically it’s a long way out

4 Likes
64

On the topic of decentralized curation and arbitration, has there been discussion of using Kleros or Kleros Curate as a solution? Kleros has been used for the approval of bounties and grants for years now, and can be a very viable solution for decentralizing the gatekeeping of eligibility for grant pools (an important feature to have as mentioned by @lefterisjp).
Kleros also has the ability to be incredibly generate purpose and comprehensive in the things that should be checked for, utilizing the judgment of a decentralized jury to complement the current usage of decentralized ID systems like Proof-of-Humanity (@connor) to prevent malicious projects from draining the pools.

1 Like
65

Totally understand. Thanks for responding. I think what you say above is true. I guess I’m saying, “Let’s get started…”

It’s all good though. Cheers.

2 Likes