Thank you ââto @Joel_m, @ghostffcode, @gerald, @jeremy, @owocki, @Sov, @M0nkeyFl0wer, and @Connor for getting us to final round results!
Payments have now gone out!
This proposal has passed on snapshot
TL;DR
GG18 matching results are live here! We propose five days for discussion and review followed by a 5-day snapshot vote to ratify before processing final payouts. In GG18, we move to a variant of QF that uses cluster-matching to introduce sybil and collusion resistance natively into the mechanism and reward projects with more diverse and pluralistic communities.
Edit: Results have been updated.
Version 2 detailed
Version 2
Version 1
Round Results
This round saw increased crowdfunded contributions above the previous two rounds on Grants Stack & Allo â making it the biggest ever on the new decentralized tech stack.
- With $680k crowdfunded, we saw a 12% increase from the Beta round
- With 328k contributions, we saw a 65% increase from the Alpha round
This round also saw the Grants Stack team make significant improvements to the product, including Multi Round Checkout, which makes it easy to donate across rounds and chains.
Every core round was also on an L2, including the first round on the new Public Goods Network. This round, fittingly, funded Ethereum Infrastructure. It ended up being the second-largest round of the season by crowdfunding despite having the smallest matching fund and fewest grantees of the four core rounds. This is a testament to the ease of bridging and the focused interests of our community.
Kudos to everyone who worked hard to make this round a success!
Round and Results Calculation Details
The complete list of matching results & payout amounts can be found here. Below, weâll cover how these results were calculated and other decisions.
Post-round analysis had a $300k financial impact. This means $150k was reduced from projects that saw sybil or collusive activity and given to other projects.
Core Rounds:
Round | Matching Pool | Matching Cap |
---|---|---|
Open Source Software | $300,000.00 | 5% |
Ethereum Infrastructure | $200,000.00 or 106.9 ETH | 10% |
Web3 Community & Education | $250,000.00 | 6% |
Climate | $350,000.00 | 10% |
In the climate round grantees were given the option to opt-in to an extra $100k of matching funding from Shell. Over 64% of projects chose to opt-in to this funding.
Next Gen Quadratic Funding
In theory, quadratic funding combines democracy and markets to create an optimal mechanism for communities to fund what matters. Under this mechanism, a project with many different supporters contributing some amount will receive much more funding than another project that gets the same total contribution from a single âwhale.â However, Quadratic Fundingâs optimality relies on assumptions that donât hold in the real world.
It assumes that each donor is entirely different from every other and perfectly rational when deciding what projects will create the most value for them. However, we have users who will produce hundreds or even thousands of fake wallets to support themself. We also know users who will conspire to vote a particular way based on others voting the same way. Further, weâre not all completely distinct; many are members of the same social circles or communities.
Cluster-Match Quadratic Funding takes a step toward solving the sybil and collusion problems by embracing the meaning of our social connections. It was developed by Joel (who joined Gitcoin as part of the QED program), E. Glen Weyl (who co-authored the original QF paper with Vitalik), and our very own Erich (who has been working on pluralism since at least 2019 and most recently on Gitcoin Passport).
Cluster-Match QF takes the projects you vote for as signals of the communities you belong to. It then calculates matching amounts for each supporter and unique community combination. This method provides more significant matching funding to projects that receive support from more diverse communities.
The outcome is clear: sybils and colluders receive fewer matching funds, while grants that create value for the broadest range of communities receive the most. By implementing this method, we reduced the match of the most suspicious projects by up to 70% and redirected those funds to other projects.
For more details about pluralistic QF methods, check out this paper and/or this podcast.
Sybil Detection
The primary anti-sybil mechanism for this round is Gitcoin Passport. Passport aggregates identity signals from across web2 and web3 to understand the likelihood of an individual being a unique human. If an individualâs score is below a set threshold, then theyâre less likely to be a real human because they donât have all the identity signals a real human typically would. Individual donations have previously received multipliers of anywhere from 2 to 25x, and this means our system is a target for bad actors thatâs worth making it hard to get into.
73.2% of wallets that donated reached a score of 20 or higher.
As with most QF Rounds, we saw some sophisticated Sybil attack patterns that still needed to be stopped by Passport (yet!). We can learn from these attack patterns and modify the stamp scoring mechanism to make it impossible for Sybils to get in the same way again.
We were able to detect these sybil attacks through programmatic analysis built specifically for Anti-sybil. We leveraged the new regendata database to build new python-based tools for finding Sybils. These tools can continue to be used and iterated on such that every round sees them get better.
After our on-chain data analysis, donations from addresses associated with these behaviors were excluded from match calculations. This includes the following:
- Enhanced analysis of passport stamps to flag evidence of abuse between different wallets
- ââFlagging known sybil networks/addresses from our 40k address blacklist
- Suspected bot activity based on anomalies detected in transaction patterns
- Suspected bot activity based on anomalies detected in donation patterns
Vote
We ask our Community Stewards to ratify the GG18 payout amounts as being correct, fair, and abiding by community norms, including the implementation of Passport scoring as well as Sybil/Fraud judgments, squelching, and quadratic funding parameters made by the Public Goods Funding workstream.
If stewards and the community approve after this discussion, we suggest voting on Snapshot from Wednesday, September 26th to Sunday, October 1st. If the vote passes, the multisig signers can then approve a transaction to fund the round contracts, the results will be finalized on-chain, and payouts will be processed promptly after
Options to vote on:
1. Ratify the round results
You ratify the results as reported by the Public Goods Funding workstream and request the keyholders of the community multisig to payout funds according to the GG18 final payout amounts.
2. Request further deliberation
You wait to ratify the results and request keyholders of the community multi-sig wallet to delay payment until further notice.
Lastly:
meme credit to @McKennedy