Temp check for work-stream

🌱 Gitcoin Grants
1

Summary

This proposal seeks to develop an unbiased, transparent workstream that increases the amount of funding distributed each Grant round by empowering creators of quality, valuable and impactful projects in the web3 ecosystem.

The proposed system is designed to ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability of projects participating in each Grant Round. From a holistic approach that encompasses the entire round from pre-entry through disbursement of funds.

This approach will maintain and promote a positive reputation for the Gitcoin Brand itself, while also driving funding towards things that matter and facilitating growth of impactful projects.

Abstract

Think of a vegetable garden. According to science direct in order for optimal growth, it is important to inhibit growth of and eliminate weeds as they compete with desirable plants for resources such as water, nutrients, and sunlight.

Apply that school of thinking towards grants rounds (the garden) projects (the vegetables) and fraudulent projects (weeds).

By limiting the number of fraudulent participants that gain entry to a grants round, the amount of funds distributed to meaningful impactful projects increases.

Motivation

Previous efforts focused on verifying identity and reputation based on specific “good” activities that a wallet did. While this is a good way to show participation, it doesn’t offer a true overall picture of individuals and projects participating in grants rounds.

Other previous efforts focused on citizens to participate and identify potential sybil attacks. While in theory, this could potentially solve the problem of quadratic funding sybil attacks, are multiple areas in the foundational operations that are under addressed.

  1. The FDD workstream is centralized. The roll tag “citizen” is given in the discord server:
  • Without exact qualifying criteria necessary.
  • Given out (one or a few people)
  • Based on their subjective opinions
  • Where questions are not “officially” answered and often go unanswered or responded to.
  • Where you can be kicked out of if you @tag someone looking for an answer.
  1. Recently, the initial barrier to fraud was left open as there are no steps that legitimize projects entering each round.

  • Out of 10 projects sampled in the beta grants round

    • This project claims transparent treasury on their grants page, but there is not one.
    • This projects website is a single blogpost and does not give any background on the problem it is looking to solve or what it will be doing with the funds received.

  • This project doesn’t list any links other than a Twitter account with automatic looking tweets. From there, they list a website. The link to discord does not link anywhere.

  • This project is a repo that is just fork of open AI’s chat GPT bot

  1. There is no transparency, many Notion pages have no access.

  2. There are no clear definitions of what constitutes the elimination of a project, leaving many participants unsure if/what they did wrong.

Specification

The proposed workstream will:

  • Vet projects prior to gaining entry to each round.
  • Vet each project participants

Doing this will:

  • Eliminate/decrease the number of fraudulent participants that gain entry to a grants rounds
  • Ensure that individuals and organizations are legitimate and have genuine projects that align with the goals of the grant.

This will be done

  • transparently - in the open with all information able to be viewed and verified by anyone at any time.

  • asynchronously - can be worked on by anyone at any time.

  • simply - no complicated formulas no connections, no apps

  • 3 red = project can’t participate in the round.

  1. The first stage will involve a thorough background check
  • verifying applicable credentials of the potential grant recipient to ensure that they are genuine people and projects. (Links to websites, information provided via the links)
  • to ensure that the applicant is not engaging in any fraudulent activities or impersonation.
  1. The second stage will involve verifying wallet transfer history:
  • Project
  • Participants
  1. The third stage is monitoring for potential sybil attacks:

Benefits

The proposed work-stream will ensure transparency, fairness, and accountability of projects participating in each Grant Round.

That will encompass the entire grant rounds from pre-entry through disbursement of funds.

This approach will maintain and promote a positive reputation for the Gitcoin Brand itself, while also driving funding towards things that matter and facilitating growth of impactful projects.

Drawbacks

This would not be appealing to those looking to extract value and capital from Gitcoin