This is the draft budget proposal for FDD requesting funding for Season 16 (1 November 2022 through 31 January 2023).
TL;DR
In Season 16, FDD will focus on building open source fraud defense tools to support the DAOs overall transition to the protocol. It will be done by building on our season 15 hackathon success of starting an engaged open data community, dogfooding our tools during gitcoin-led rounds, and finding sustainable models for continued defense for Gitcoin UI, Gitcoin Grants Program, and Community Grants Programs.
We will improve our ability to quickly build modular and composable business intelligence tools which communities can use to reduce fraud, allocate resources better, and promote learning between ecosystems on the new protocol.
In addition,
… by talking with round owners, we will find sustainable funding options for continuous fraud defense provided by the open data community.
Amount
FDD’s total Budget Request for S16 is $349,500.
This budget does not include the additional 60 days of reserves per season. A breakdown of the budget can be found at the end.
| Gitcoin Season | Season 14 | Season 15 | Season 16 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Season Budget | $330,000 | $349,500 | $349,500 |
| Season Reserves | $220,000 | $233,000 | $198,349 2) |
| Unspent Reserves % 1) | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Treasury Request | $281,041 | $362,500 | $384,151 |
1) The amount of GTC requested and the value of the reserves will be adjusted based on the current market value at the time this proposal is moved to Tally using the lower of the current price or the 20 day moving average, whichever is lower.
*2) FDD received $220,000 in reserves at a GTC price of $1.95 in S14. With the GTC price of $1.66, these reserves are worth $198,349. The full amount (100%) will be rolled over to the Season 16 budget request.
Milestone Report for the past season
For S15 the total value of prevented fraud and therefore saved capital is > $785,000
| Initiative/Dept |     Objectives Past Season |
Value Delivered - Total Fraud Prevention > $785k |
|---|---|---|
| Objective Name Grant Eligibility EI Grants Program Success |
Gitcoin community can reliably expect that the platform is free of fraudulent grants and that main round eligibility approvals, disputes and appeals are consistently and fairly executed in a reasonable time frame. |
Saved > $500k via investigation & disputes * $250k from one sybil ring 98% of Appeals settled in under 48 hours Reviewed over 1150 grants for platform & main round * 70 disputes & 32 appeals Increased decentralization efforts and conducted experiment with over 100 permissionless reviewers on Ethelo to analyze for trust signals |
| Objective Name Contributor Fraud EI Grants Program Success |
The Gitcoin community will have confidence that matching funds are not misallocated because of sybil accounts during GR15. |
Mitigated $285k Fraud Tax * 23% of contributors * 33.5% of contributions * 17.5% of $s contributed Designed scalable Sybil Scoring Legos Created first known Sybil & Non-sybil data sets Ensured that data-sets adhere to high quality standards Over 10 new detection analysis used Discovered new attack vulnerability Conducted deep dive investigations of suspicious grants Presented internal Fraud Analysis |
| Objective Name Data Empowerment EI Protocol Adoption |
FDD will empower the community by enabling the crowdsourcing of raw & anonymized data and approaches to data analysis, increasing the insight discovery rate, and resulting in a plurality of Sybil detection mechanisms |
Hosted open data hackathon during October * 167 applications * 30+ submissions received including new approaches to sybil detection, dashboarding and human incentivisation. * 3 Twitter spaces so far - Over 1,000 listens (thank you to MMM for helping on our 1st one!) Provided data sets on time for round defense Conducted discovery of decentralized observability Reflections and learnings include: * As always - more clarity and transparency helps a community grow. In this case we could have been even more clear on the judging criteria up front. * Forum posts on Sybil detection and presentations on Sybil resistence by GitCoin team proved very useful. * Pushing back on DMs from participants and asking them to ask in public worked well. Basic devrel stuff but still worth a reminder. Brainstormed ideas of a future Open Data Community & started initial collaboration with community members. |
| Objective Name Protocol Research EI Protocol Adoption |
Insights from processes, analysis, algorithmic research, & mechanism design research provided by FDD will aid in the acceleration of development and adoption of Grant & identity protocols. |
Provided Passport with APU scoring model * Consulted on trust bonus UX decisions Consulted on hypothesis generation for identity staking * Data collection and presentation Post round fraud report & identity analysis Deep research on Cost of Forgery modeling Documented Research OS & experimentation flow Created documentation for all algorithms |
| Objective Name FDD OS EI DAO Organization & Financial Stability |
FDD will seamlessly interface with Gitcoin OS in a way that increases cross workstream collaboration, executes on deliverables, and provides a rewarding contributor experience. |
Regularly posted FDD Review articles Successful experimentation with 4/5 SME Built FDD “House of Tasks” and weekly rituals around it to improve project management flow Tracking of initiative/task velocity (metrics) started Conducted two FDD Happiness Pulse surveys to contrast intrintic (well-being based on Positive Psychology) and extrinsic (compensation) factors Unfortunately had to announce two departures of FDD core contributors Core Contributors went through the Peer Review Improved the usability and data quality FDD Contributor Management Databases in Notion |
Legend
Success
Incomplete, will hit goal or priority change
Incomplete, will not hit goal
Canceled - out of workstream’s control
S16 Objectives and Key Results
List of S16 OKRs
| Objective Name & EI | Objective | Outcome Description | Likely Key Results/Projects/Initiatives |
|---|---|---|---|
| “What is it and how does it align with our most important work?” | “What will be done” | “What impact will it have?” | “What might the work look like?” |
| Objective Name Identity Scoring EI Passport Adoption/ Protocol Growth / Community Led Programs |
Continuous analysis & validation of passport scores made available for round owners & technical users in partnership with the Passport team. | Round owners and technical users will be able to access FDD scores and easily be able to understand how they can use FDD provided scoring to create customized sybil prevention, detection, and mitigation algorithms. | Data analysis to better empower 1p1v in web 3 Creating a best possible cross-community sybil gating/weighting algorithm based on Passport in collaboration with Passport team Creating continuous analysis & custom scoring in collaboration with design partners and technical users forking passport Creating documentation for round owners to customize scoring based on insights about their targeted donor personas Maintain a best in class sybil detection model based on wallet addresses |
| Objective Name Modular Fraud Defense Systems (LEGOS) EI Protocol Growth / Community Programs |
Building & making accessible reliable composable, open source software tools for round owners to prevent fraud. | A well documented, functional and scalable pipeline for quickly testing, validating, and containerizing new legos will be open for use by round owners to feel confident in being able to run a fairly allocated funding round. | Build & maintain oss packages for legos such that round owners could run their own sybil defense Creating “how to build & use legos” documentation Create actionable analysis to maintain accuracy and thresholds for sybil scoring legos First trial run of grant fraud legos being used for dynamic intervention Containerization for round owners to call analysis Interviews with round owners on preferences |
| Objective Name Open Data Community (ODC) EI Protocol Growth / Community Programs / Financial Stability |
Start a regen Open Data Community in order to decentralize the creation of insights to improve the operations & protection of Grants Rounds while also helping to protect web3 from recentralization and capture at the data layer. | A vibrant, useful, and sustainable OpenData community. Vibrant: as measured by growth in Gitcoin & non Gitcoin contributions and achievements. Useful: as measured by the extent to which Grant Round owners and others protecting and scaling web3 rely on the community for analysis, schemas, tools, and data. Sustainable: as measured both by progress towards decentralized governance and mechanism design and by sources of funding and utility. |
Conduct second ODC hackathon and achieve superior outcomes to the first hackathon in collaboration with MMM workstream. Create a viable governance model which incentivizes non-Gitcoin participation. Dogfood protocol by running a protocol based grant round (most likely beta-version or earlier?) supporting the open data community. Deliver pipeline for upcoming Grant Rounds to accelerate analysis while increasing transparency. Enable community led curation of data sources for quality and usefulness. Collaboratively author landscape of useful tools and guides for Open Data Community. Established Open data community standards are an unofficial quality requirement of the analyst community. Catalyze & lead creation of a platform to host the open data community including collaboration about tools,data sources and methodologies. Secure other founding partners for the community. Become the most preferred community for anti-Sybil defenders across web3 in collaboration with MMM and others. |
| Objective Name Grant Protocol Research EI Gitcoin Grants Program / Passport Adoption / Protocol Growth / Community Programs |
Prioritize and conduct research and experimentation to increase the potential of the grants protocol to empower fair resource distribution | FDD increases the rate at which we approach the possibility of optimal capital allocation via a continuous research and development cycle. | Maintain relationship to GPC grants protocol product owners & to support the execution & success of the product development roadmap Identify and model sustainability mechanisms where supply and demand exists in grants rounds to create experiments leading to sustainability Conduct research to better understand optimal capital allocation Spearhead innovation research ie. Cost of Forgery, Identity Staking, DeSoc Pairwise Design Run a V2 of Ethelo Deep Data Experiment to lower Round owners review costs & time Discovery: Pluralistic Review Layer (Projecthood) Provide easily digested data on sybil/fraud occurrence and mitigation for all grants rounds Creating a run-book for round owners to DIY including * Checklists * How-to’s and educational material * FAQs * Links and instructions for reporting bugs and requesting features * Contact details & Support |
| Objective Name FDD Strategy EI Financial sustainability / DAO Organization |
Find a sustainable strategy to engage FDD contributors to service decentralized grants rounds & maintain quality processes. | Funding options will be available for FDD service to decentralized grant rounds in addition to a sustainable model for maintaining OSS products. | Research governance models, revenue sources and pricing models, and value creation for FDD self sustainability Explore and apply for grants outside of Gitcoin to find partners in creating a sybil free web 3 Continue FDD Review communications (technical writing) and explain what we are doing better Utilize & expand metrics of FDD OS Prepare data visualizations for better communication of FDD needs and results Create pricing levels and service-level agreements for professional fraud defense services including * Grant fraud checks before round begins * Custom algorithm recommendations * Dynamic recommendations for grant fraud * Grant and contributor fraud investigations * Procuring data sets for investigations * Dispute & appeal settlement * Squelching & post round Fraud Reports * Access to Support Team |
Budget Breakdown
| Budget Category | Description | Amount USD |
|---|---|---|
| Core Contributors | WS Leads Product / Strategy (Joe) Operations (Tigress) Full Time Contributors Research / Product (Kish) Data Science (Omni) Sr. Fraud Detection Analyst (Alex) Data/DevOps Engineer (Zen) Data Analyst (hired, to be announced) Data Analyst (Adebola) |
$256,000 |
| Trusted Contributors | FDD Review & Science SME (J-Cook) Open Data Community (EPowell) Analyst (Sorana) SWE (Eric & Yogeesh) SME Data Infra (Takuya) |
$73,500 |
| Bounties, Hackathon | Open Data Hackathon | $15,000 |
| SaaS, Fees, Travel, etc. | $5,000 | |
| Total | $349,500 |
Thank you
Kudo’s to everyone who supported crafting this budget request directly or indirectly!
We are looking forward to your feedback to make it even better!
is Sybil resistance one of the most important things for Gitcoin to work on? Yes.
can I close my eyes and defend why allocating $350k to FDD is excellent value-for-money? Not yet.