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August 29, 2022

Grants Verification Score

Git Trusted Gitcoin Grants Round 14 is coming and that means it’s time to git ready and git trusted!

Git Trusted

Gitcoin Grants Round 14 is coming and that means it’s time to git ready and git trusted!

Why do you need to be trusted?

The trust verification process lets us know how likely it is you’re human and are only using one account. This is important for Gitcoin Grants because we use a mechanism called Quadratic Funding. This mechanism gives more funding to projects with more unique crowdfund contributors. The more trusted each contributor is, the more funding their contributions will be matched with.

As a result, we believe quadratic funding is a more democratic way to distribute funding based on what people want funded and how many people want it funded. However, bad actors can create bots or multiple accounts to artificially drive funding towards the grant they support. We prevent this by checking each account’s “trust score” which measures how likely they are to be a real person with one account.

Your trust score is proportional to how many independent services can verify you. We can’t be sure over the internet if you’re a real person or not but we can raise the cost of making fake accounts. We raise the cost of faking accounts by requiring more information from independent services that help verify if you’re a real person. These are services like Twitter and Google, SMS, and ProofOfHumanity. The higher your trust score, the more your donations will be matched.

In other words: grants that are funded by more real people get more real money. Gitcoin accomplishes this by having a supply of money called a ‘matching fund’ for each funding cycle or grant round. Money from this matching fund is paid to grants by Gitcoin proportional to the number of unique, trusted human contributors of the grant. Quadratic funding is best explained at wtfisqf.com

How do you become trusted?

Visit https://gitcoin.co/profile/trust

You will be presented with a number of options to increase your ‘trust’ score. You can select any number of options and the more you complete, the higher your score rises. The higher your score rises, the more funds will be drawn from the matching fund for each of your grant contributions.

Some of the options are simple and take seconds: such as confirming your phone number with a code or connecting your google, twitter, or facebook accounts.

Some of the options are slightly more complicated and require prior activity in the Ethereum ecosystem: such as connecting your wallet and checking that you have an ENS name or a POAP.

Connecting your wallet lets you:

  • Verify ENS Name: ENS or Ethereum Name Service lets you buy a name to go with your wallet. If you have bought a name then you can connect your wallet to Gitcoin who will check that you have a name. https://ens.domains
  • Verify POAP: Proof of Active Participation applications provides badges or POAPs to those who do something active (usually attend an event). These POAP’s go directly into your wallet when you claim them. If you have any in your wallet, then you can connect to Gitcoin to increase your trust score. https://poap.xyz

Some of the options take more time: such as registering and getting verified with BrightID, ProofOfHumanity, or Idena.

All three of these applications use some version of the same idea ‘web of trust’ which tries to create a graph of people and connections. In order to get verified on these apps and increase your Gitcoin trust score, you will need to make a connection with someone who has already been verified on the app. This helps make sure that the only people who get verified are known to be real and trustworthy.

To Verify on BrightID:

To Verify on ProofOfHumanity:

  • Visit: proofofhumanity.id and connect your ETH Wallet
  • See instructions here: https://kleros.gitbook.io/docs/products/proof-of-humanity/proof-of-humanity-tutorial
  • Register with your name, photo, and a video confirming your identity
    • When registering you will be asked to deposit 0.125 ETH. This ETH will be claimed by PoH if you are challenged by someone and proven to be a bot. Otherwise, it will be returned to you once verified in a few days.
    • You can fully crowdfund this deposit if you know someone will cover it for you
  • Get Vouched (by someone already in PoH). You can do this by sending someone verified on PoH who knows you a link to your profile.
  • NOTE: You can also collect UBI (Universal Basic Income) once verified

To Verify on Idena:

  • Visit: app.idena.io
  • Register for an account and make an Idena Wallet: be sure to save your private encryption key as you will need it later
  • Perform ‘training validation’ which is a sequence of quick captcha-style puzzles to verify you’re not a robot. There are three levels to training validation and the timing of them is very important:
    • Easy: can be taken right away
    • Medium: must be scheduled 1 hour in advance
    • Hard: must be scheduled ~3 days in advance
  • Get Invite Code (from someone already verified within Idena)

Choose your Trust Methods

Note that you do not need to do all of these to be trusted. You can choose which ones to do. Your trust score starts at 50% and can increase to 150%. This number indicates what percent of your grant contributions will be counted in the algorithm which distributes Gitcoin’s matching fund. The more trusted you are, the more impact your funds will have.

You can reach the maximum 150% verification through any combination of trust services. For example:

  • 50% + Twitter(15%) + SMS(15%) + ENS(25%) + BrightID(50%) = 150% (155% but 150 is the max)
  • 50% + ProofOfHumanity(50%) + ENS(25%) + POAP(25%) = 150%

Written by ufkhan97#4345.

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