In order to Gitcoin's donation airdrop, retail investors completed a "witch attack."

This article was published on Blockbeats.

At 16:25 Beijing time on March 10, 2021, there were still more than 5 hours until the Gitcoin Grant9 donation event began. Lefteris Karapetsas, former core developer of the Ethereum Lightning Network and founder of Rotkiapp, stated on Twitter:

"Well… I woke up to find that 28 new members have donated to Rotkiapp on Gitcoin. Thank you very much, but this round of activities (Grant9) hasn’t started yet. I think the website update may have misled many people into thinking that Grant9 started last night."

Martin Köppelmann, founder of the Ethereum prediction market Gnosis and the social project CirclesUBI, replied in the tweet:

"I also found similar donation situations in Circles. All these donation amounts are under $1 and come from accounts that look like bots------it seems to me that someone is testing/conducting a Sybil attack."

Subsequently, Martin uploaded a screenshot of one of the accounts (which Lefteris also agreed with) and tagged @Gitcoin.

Usernames have been obscured

The source of all this must be an unavoidable word:

Airdrop

Popular projects like Badger DAO, Stake DAO (now renamed Blackpool Finance), and Mask Network have conducted token airdrops for users who participated in Gitcoin donations. Among them, Badger DAO and Stake DAO airdropped to all users who participated in Gitcoin Grant8, while Mask Network only airdropped to its donors.

Under the potential lure of airdrops, a small number of users adopted a "better to mistakenly kill a thousand than let one go" multi-account, multi-project donation model. Current data shows that on the first day of Gitcoin Grant9, a total of 1,677 people participated, donating a total of $158,000, with an average donation of $94.2 (the nearly $1 average donation mentioned above, which resembles a Sybil attack, was excluded due to timing). The summary data from Gitcoin Grant8 indicated that 5,000 people participated, donating a total of $571,000, with an average donation of $114.2. In comparison, the average donation amount decreased by 17.5%. Meanwhile, from December 22, 2020, to today, Bitcoin and Ethereum have increased by 151% and 183%, respectively.

Before introducing Gitcoin and its mechanisms, here is an overview of the donations for Gitcoin Grant9 for your reference. If you have special circumstances, you can join the Gitcoin Discord grant-help channel for assistance.

1. Log in and register on Gitcoin. https://gitcoin.co

2. Go to the homepage, select Products at the top of the page, and choose Grants from the pop-up window.

3. Select Explore Grants to browse all projects participating in Grants 9.

4. The donation period for Grants 9 is from March 10 to 25, with a matching fund pool of over $500,000, totaling $1 million in prizes.

The matching fund pool will be allocated to projects in the following categories: Infrastructure: $125,000; Community: $125,000; DApp: $125,000; NFT: $50,000; East Asia and Southeast Asia: $50,000. The image below shows the relevant categories, and users can browse and choose their favorite projects to donate to.

5. After selecting a project, click Add to Cart, and then click Checkout in the pop-up window to proceed with the donation settlement.

There are various donation types, including ETH, DAI, USDC, and other ERC-20 tokens.

6. After clicking on payment, select the payment method at the bottom of the pop-up interface.

6.1 Standard settlement based on the Ethereum mainnet.

Click Standard Checkout to proceed with the settlement.

A total of 0.3 ETH was donated to three projects, requiring a payment of 0.02 ETH, approximately $36 in gas fees (since the transfers were made to three projects separately, it can be concluded that each transfer to a project costs about $12).

6.2 Settlement using zkSync

Click Checkout with zkSync to proceed with the settlement. For detailed usage instructions on zkSync, please refer to the article "Layer 2 Usage Tutorial Series One: Teaching You to Use Several Layer 2 Applications".

Still donating 0.3 ETH to three projects, requiring a gas fee of $0.61, with each transfer costing about $0.2.

6.3 Comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the two payment methods

In comparison, using the L2 zkSync is more cost-effective, but it should be noted that, like other L2s, zkSync requires transferring tokens to the L2 layer, which necessitates a high gas fee for the transfer from L1 to L2 (if tokens need to be transferred from L2 to L1, a longer lock-up period and higher gas fee transfer is required). Therefore, a more reasonable approach is to first list the donations needed, transfer the required funds to L2 in one go, and use Checkout with zkSync to complete all payments without transferring the remaining funds out of L2. Notably, based on personal experience, zkSync supports using the transferred tokens as gas fee native tokens. This means that if you choose to pay with USDC or DAI, there is no need to transfer ETH as gas fees. Just prepare a bit more corresponding USDC or DAI.

7. Reminder

Above the donation payment options, Gitcoin has a default option: to donate 5% of the total amount of your current donation to the Gitcoin Grants Developer Fund. It is said that this fund will be used to support Gitcoin core team software developers, product designers, developer relations, etc., to support the development of Gitcoin Grants round 9 and beyond. Users can adjust this proportion themselves. You can also choose to hide your wallet address by selecting Hide wallet.

After introducing the Grants donation process, it’s time to carefully introduce Gitcoin, Grants, and the interesting concepts within.

First of all, Gitcoin is a development incentive platform aimed at open source, where blockchain projects can find developers with certain rewards. As the platform has developed, it has extended into different modules such as crowdfunding, hackathons, social and educational attributes. Supported by ConsenSys, I introduced its various functions in the article "Gitcoin: The 'Arsenal' of the Ethereum Ecosystem." Overall, the continuous \<success-feedback-success> virtuous cycle formed by Gitcoin may be one of the reasons for the thriving development of the Ethereum ecosystem. Originating from Ethereum and not limited to it, Gitcoin is gradually becoming the development incentive platform for the entire blockchain industry.

Various bounty tasks, hackathons, and more are continuously held on Gitcoin, while Grants can be seen as a major event of Gitcoin. Speaking of Grants, one cannot help but mention the secondary voting (secondary fundraising mechanism) and the concept of public goods. In economics, public goods are items that are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, meaning individuals cannot be excluded from using them, and one person's use does not reduce availability for others. Open source projects and free education are representative examples. The secondary fundraising mechanism frequently appears in discussions and articles by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Zoë Hitzig, and Princeton economics PhD Glen Weyl, who works at Microsoft.

Source: Radicalx Change

Glen Weyl: Political economist, principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, visiting scholar in economics and law at Yale University, and faculty member at Princeton University. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton in 2007 with honors, completing all courses for a PhD in economics at Princeton within just one year, earning him the title of "prodigy in the field of economics."

The principle of secondary fundraising is quite complex; in general, it uses funds collected from a matching fund pool to amplify individual donations to different projects. Its specific manifestation is:

• There is a $10,000 matching fund pool provided by matching pool partners, with 3 projects participating in a round of financing.
• Project A received $1,000 from 5 donors (each donating $200);
• Project B also received $1,000, but only from two donors (each donating $500);
• Project C received the same amount of $1,000 from 20 donors (each donating $50).
• After secondary fundraising, the first project received an additional $1,851.85 from the matching fund pool, project B received $740.74, accounting for about 74% of the total donations. Finally, and most remarkably, project C received as much as $7,407.41 in matching funds, which is 740% of the initial donations.

The secondary fundraising mechanism designed for public goods in a profit-driven market is not perfect and, like many mechanisms, has vulnerabilities. The Sybil Attack is its biggest vulnerability, simply put: an attack that mimics multiple identities is a Sybil attack, commonly seen in real life as using multiple IP addresses to inflate numbers or likes. The behavior of multiple accounts voting on Gitcoin also serves as a Sybil tool for projects that have not been voted on.

In response to this situation, Gitcoin has set up Trust Bouns to alleviate the Sybil attack issue. Gitcoin explains that the higher a user's Trust Bouns, the more we can trust that this user is real. It has introduced unique identity verification systems like BrightID, Google, POPA, phone numbers, and Twitter accounts to enhance trustworthiness. Additionally, in light of the influx of many new users for Grants 9, Gitcoin also published an article on March 11 titled "How to Attack and Defend Quadratic Funding" to elaborate on this and categorize the types of attacks.

In any case, more people paying attention to and using Gitcoin donations is beneficial for many public goods projects. For users, the popular Gitcoin Grants donations, as mentioned in the article by DAppChaser, raise the question: if there are no incentives like airdrops, would you still be willing to support this project?