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 OpenData community, dogfooding our tools during gitcoin led rounds, and finding sustainable models for continued defense for Gitcoin UI, Gitcoin Grants Program, & Community Grants Programs.
We will improve our ability to quickly discover and build a modular fraud defense system (consisting of open source âLEGOSâ) that communities and round owners can use to reduce fraud, allocate resources better, and promote learning between ecosystems on the new grants protocol.
In addition,
⌠by talking with round owners, we will find sustainable funding options for continuous fraud defense provided by the OpenData community.
Amount
FDDâs 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 | $172,615 2) |
| Unspent Reserves % 1) | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Treasury Request USD | $281,041 | $362,500 | $409,885 |
| Treasury Request GTC | 267,899 GTC |
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 $1.53 (Nov 22nd 2022), these reserves are worth $172,615. 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 OpenData 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 âHouse of Tasksâ 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 workstreamâs control
S16 Objectives and Key Results
List of S16 OKRs
| Objective Name & EI | Outcome | Likely Key Results & Projects | Cross Workstream Goals |
|---|---|---|---|
| âWhat is it and how does it align with our most important work?â | âWhat impact will it have?â | âWhat might the work look like?â | âWhat other workstreamsâ outcomes does this work support?â |
| Objective Passport Scoring EI Passport Adoption |
Passport readers, round owners and integrators will be able to quickly and easily determine the best algorithms to use for sybil defense for their unique use case. | Customized Sybil defense tools will be available for 3 Round Managers using Passport DIDs / scoring algorithms. Our continuous discovery process will uncover new threats and develop analysis methods to quickly flag sybils. This provides actionable insights for building the modular fraud defense systems (LEGOS). Provide the data quality control for reference data sets needed to drive a flourishing data science community working to solve sybil resistance. |
* Scoring / Registry as Service * In-house scoring innovation across use cases * Enable Passport for Sybil Defense * Enable RO to set programmatic eligibility requirements * Passport stamps and different use cases across different communities * New Donor scoring algo |
| Objective Modular Fraud Defense Systems (LEGOS) EI Grants Program Success |
Round owners will be able to verify and reproduce FDD results and/or run the analysis themselves to defend their rounds from fraud. | We help round owners to protect matching pool funds from fraudulent allocation by building 3 grant legos so they can intervene early in the round. Our grant lego building process draws upon the results from the discovery process and includes refining & fine-tuning of code, containerizing for services, and documenting for lego users. Create an open source package for round owners to use legos to defend their rounds from fraud. Discover round owner needs and build supporting architecture to enable continuous servicing and updating of legos. |
* Scoring / Registry as Service * In-house scoring innovation across use cases * Enable RO to set programmatic eligibility requirements * Enable Passport for Sybil Defense * Data accessibility / community building |
| Objective OpenData Community (ODC) EI Grants Program Success / Protocol Growth |
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 a second open data hackathon to derive insights to drive the viability of the grants protocol by consistently providing crowdsourced insights for sybil defense. Find partners to establish OpenData community standards, improve accessibility, & incubate projects to increase decentralization in the data access points for analysts to validate and reproduce algorithmic policy decisions used for grants program fraud defense. Discovery of a self-sustaining model for on-chain governance via a fair launch using grants protocol. |
* Scoring / Registry as Service * Basic in-round stats on projects * Data accessibility / community building |
| Objective Grant Protocol Research EI Protocol Growth |
FDD increases the rate at which we approach the possibility of optimal capital allocation via a continuous research and development cycle. | Research to reduce manual review time & cost and increase optionality for round owners to provide legitimacy and credible neutrality in grant eligibility decisions. Provide ad-hoc data analysis and research to satisfy internal needs of GitcoinDAO. |
* Enhanced Quadratic customization * In-house scoring innovation across use cases * Direct grants mechanism * Enable v1 Quadratic Voting Mechanism * Data accessibility / community building * Basic in-round stats on projects * Scoring / Registry as Service * Enable RO to set programmatic eligibility requirements * Enable Passport for Sybil Defense * Appeals Process Tooling |
| Objective FDD Strategy EI Financial sustainability / DAO Organization |
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 Continue writing FDD Review governance posts. Share our insights, knowledge and expertise by telling the story of fraud. Continuously seek balance between financial workstream sustainability and great contributor experience. Provide operational systems, practices, data and information to ensure FDDs operations meet our standards in terms of quality and user-centeredness. |
* Data accessibility / community building * GTC utility in core protocol * Protocol business model * Basic in-round stats on projects |
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 (Bella) Data Analyst (Adebola) |
$256,000 |
| Trusted Contributors | FDD Review & Science SME (J-Cook) OpenData 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
Kudoâs to everyone who supported crafting and improving this budget request!
Steward view:his budget is considerably smaller than the other WS budgets.
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